Uniform, flawless produce requires a heartbreaking amount of food waste. (Photo by rick via Flickr)

This post is part of Blog Action Day's discussion on food.

If we're to feed the world delicious, nutritious food and halt climate change, we have to kill the supermarket.

There are many reasons why I suggest this enormous beast be culled. It thrives on the unsustainable industrial agriculture model of large-scale, monocrop food production, where food is not grown for taste or nutrition. It's then shipped long distances, so you can eat lettuce in Vancouver in January. Even if garlic is grown in your region, you're served up the garlic from China instead.

The produce section is a sterile place devoid of scent (the first sense to get us salivating), where the fruits and vegetables are uniform, barely ripe (if at all) and virtually flawless. It's no wonder children don't know their food grows in the ground or on a vine: the produce is so unnatural, it hardly seems a product of nature. Its sprawling, dizzying vastness is a maze that encourages overconsumption and takes up excess land to, among other things, allow for extra-wide shopping carts. It makes buying junk food more appealing than buying produce through a combination of store positioning, packaging and price, and this leads to disease.

I could go on; the reason I'm going to focus on here, however, is its massive — and one could suggest criminal — contribution to food waste.

Update March 9: Today's ethical deal is 50% off two Vancouver Farmers Markets memberships!

Following several mentions at this past weekend's Greenest City camp of how food prices have risen in the wake of higher oil prices, I was reminded again by The National's coverage tonight. They examined which commodities have spiked most, how our food spending compares to other nations and how to save money.

The prices for grains, dairy and sugar — the latter of which is non-essential — have risen by 10% to 30%, reaching in some cases historical highs. When comparing food spending — Canadians put 11% of their income toward it, whereas the Chinese spend 36% and in Yemen 80% — it's important to realise that while our food spending has trended downward, our health costs have increased dramatically. This relationship between food and health spending has much to do with the quality of our food. So while the CBC's reporter suggests 11% is a good number, I disagree.

Rising oil prices, a trend that will inevitably continue as supplies dwindle and economies recover, are a reminder of just how much energy goes into agriculture from the field to the plate. For Americans, the combined cost of transportation and energy accounts for more than 10% of the cost of US-produced food, with the majority of each dollar going to marketing. Factor in how much of our food comes from other continents — bananas, cocoa, sugar, seafood, rice — and watch that energy cost go up.

These days, we expect everything of significance to be recorded and made available on on the Internet, so I'm thankful for GOOD Magazine food editor Nicola Twilley's written recap of an event I assumed I'd find online. (Maybe later it'll turn up.) My favourite author, Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food), and Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser had a fascinating conversation with Evan Kleiman (host of KCRW's Good Food) that managed to shock and inform me despite all the knowledge I've accumulated about food issues. What stood out most for me was this:

When Evan Kleiman asked whether a sustainable food system could feed the world, Pollan was quick to point out that "we're not feeding the world with the system we currently have." Schlosser added that the problem is not one of production, but rather distribution: "We live in a world where a billion people are hungry and another billion are obese, and only between 12 and 14 percent of the food we grow is actually eaten by people." (75 percent is fed to livestock, and of the remaining 25 percent, roughly half is wasted along the way, he elaborated.)

Wow. Pollan's blunt remark spelling out what should be an obvious truth pulls the rug out from under our system's fundamental theory. Schlosser's statistics are at the same time utterly tragic and darkly ironic.

And this revelation from Pollan reminded me of The 100-Mile Diet's account of the time spent on gathering and preparing food now versus 50 or 1000 years ago: "Over the past decade, we've somehow found 2 extra hours each day to be online, but we say we don't have time to cook." Indeed. (Zing.)

Read the rest of it at GOOD with links to further recaps.

This daily green blog challenge is in celebration of David Suzuki's 75th birthday, supporting the David Suzuki Foundation. Please help me out by sponsoring me online now.
Note: I am writing solely on my own behalf, and do not claim to represent the David Suzuki Foundation or its views here.

Photo by StevenW. via Flickr

Last night I watched a shocking episode of CBC Marketplace about superbugs in supermarket chicken. I knew about the routine use of antibiotics in factory farm animals — which account for most of our meat production, the most popular of which is chicken — but the degree to which antibiotic-resistant bacteria (aka superbugs) have developed is a disturbing new revelation. Daily use of antibiotics, often the same ones administered to sick humans, are being given to healthy and ill chickens alike. If chickens, cows, pigs and so forth had a natural diet and weren't kept in such cramped conditions, the incidence of disease would be extremely low. Antibiotics wouldn't be necessary, preventative or otherwise. Disease outbreaks would also be uncommon.

The human health threat posed by the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria — found on two-thirds of the 100 chicken packages sampled — has the potential to return us to pre-1930s conditions, says the study. Is the public health risk really worth cheaper chicken prices?

Antibiotics also kill the helpful bacteria in our gut, so I can only imagine how sick the patients profiled in this episode are from multiple attempts to cure their antibiotic-resistant infections.

This is just another reason among many — animal ethics, environment and others — to return to sustainable farming methods.

This daily green blog challenge is in celebration of David Suzuki's 75th birthday, supporting the David Suzuki Foundation. Please help me out by sponsoring me online now.
Note: I am writing solely on my own behalf, and do not claim to represent the David Suzuki Foundation or its views here.

Fragrances lurk in all sorts of consumer products. They can be a toxic chemical soup of ingredients manufacturers aren't required to disclose. (Photo by Karin Bultje via Flickr)

Yesterday on transit, a woman began applying a hand lotion that, unbeknownst to her, triggered an allergic reaction in the passenger seated next to her. As the doors opened every few minutes, ushering in "fresh" air, I gasped for it, a brief relief from the fragrance from which I could otherwise not escape except by moving elsewhere. It wasn't that the odour was unpleasant. This isn't usually my problem. It's that the chemicals in the fragrance irritate my nose — or brain, rather — in various ways, the worst of which is actually pain. I met a bus driver with the same issue: she spends her workday with a scarf covering her face.

So you can imagine when I walk into a department store where the perfumes invade the doorway that I hold my breath and scamper through as quickly as possible. I've done that years, but my reaction has developed in the last year and a half. While it's unpleasant, it's probably a good thing because it's made me aware of the health problems associated with fragrance, also known as parfum, and helps me avoid it. But it's pretty hard to avoid the scent left on my hands after using a public washroom.

Will Allen harvesting (Photo credit: Growing Power)

Back-to-back films on agriculture at the World Community Film Festival this afternoon left me uplifted and feeling like change is on the horizon. Dirt! The Movie, Fresh and A Thousand Suns reminded me how many people there are who think like me — including those attending the event — and what amazing impacts these people are making around the world.

One farmer in the US took it upon himself to build a wind farm on his farm as security for survival. (Actually, I think that was part of Dirty Business, a film about coal and energy which followed. I saw four films in 6 hours, so please forgive me if I confuse them.) Will Allen, a former basketball player, returned to his family's farming roots and started Growing Power, where compost is everything. Joel Salatin is a farming hero, Michael Pollan speaks the truth in terms people can understand, schools are tearing up asphalt for gardens, and rehabilitation programs for inmates are reconnecting people with the land.

Update: The Tyee blog The Hook reports GMO bill struck down in Ottawa.

It took me almost four years to find out that in 2007 the US Department of Agriculture approved commercial production of the first genetically modified food crop containing human genes, a "laboratory-created rice [that] produces some of the human proteins found in breast milk and saliva." In my head, my reaction to this was incredible disgust mingled with angry expletives and a little bit of fear. From what I've learned about genetically modified organisms, this paves the way for the seeds to be patented — in other words, effectively patenting human genes. Patenting pig genes was bad enough.

I'm extremely skeptical that the "good intentions" of treating "children with diarrhoea, a major killer in the Third World", are actually valid. Genetic modification has a history of being touted as a way to solve food shortages, but they wind up leaving GM farmers poor, and organic farmers sued when seeds contaminate their crops. As for these children, attempting to treat them with GM products — any negative consequences of which may be unknown — is akin to us focusing the bulk of our efforts on curing cancer and diabetes and almost completely ignoring prevention. We should be ensuring access to healthy food, clean water, and education. Whatever Monsanto and other GE agribusinesses say about solving developing nations' problems with their products is complete bullshit.