food – R&R – Reachout and Rebuild

Trending in 2022: Meet the Climatarians

David Posnett — Wed, 29 Dec 2021 20:45:02 +0000

Who Dine with the Earth in Mind

I’ve been meeting some Climatarians lately. It’s a lifestyle that is starting to trend, especially with millennials.

“What Is a Climatarian?” the NY Times headlined, describing this new climate-centered lifestyle. I think of it as “dining with the Earth in mind.” Wikipedia says the Climatarian diet has no strict rules so much as “mindfulness about food production, where food comes from, and where it goes.” I like that. A big part of being a Climatarian is being mindful of where your food goes — do you use it all? Give excess away or feed animals? Any leftover scraps — do they end up as compost, enriching soil, not in the landfill releasing the potent GHG methane?

Self-described Climatarians are giving Tedtalks. One of my favorites is Australian Mark Pershin’s Reclaim our Future with the Climatarian Diet whose dark eyes flash talking about his love of shashlik, a shish-kabob from his native Russia. He defines Climatarian as healthy for both humans and earth, eating more traditional cuisines, not the unhealthy “meat-heavy Western diet” pushed by industrialized “concentrated animal feedlot operations, CAFOs.” Then he smiles, suggesting we try kangaroo. With a 97% smaller footprint “they don’t burp methane, and you don’t need to cut down trees for them to graze.” Mark’s ending salvo: they are native, adapted to our dry climate, are lean and versatile and when he substitutes kangaroo for beef in dishes, friends say it’s delicious. (Think venison!)

Meet Amanda and Taylor

Amanda_the_climatarian I met earlier this summer. Living in western MA, 30-year-old wildlife biologist Amanda and her husband dine on mushrooms (they are members of a South Deerfield CSA) and frequent farmers markets for all the wonderfully-ripe in-season produce. Amanda says her cooking is richly plant-based. A favorite dish is mushroom pizza with truffle oil and homemade tofu “ricotta.” Other specialties a la mansion are mushroom tacos and “king oyster mushroom ‘scallops’ with pasta.” Do they compost? You bet. “I have an outdoor, dual compartment barrel composter. I love it!”

“Eating with a climatarian ethos” Amanda told me “means consuming intentionally with the planet in mind.” She puts locally grown food first, then considers how it’s grown — are resources being conserved, especially water. “Each meal we eat in a day is an opportunity to vote with our dollars for more regenerative food systems. I think anyone who does the best they can–within the limits of their own abilities, access, and resources–to choose more climate-friendly foods can be a Climatarian.”

Brooklynite Taylor loves oysters, so when she visits her parents in Orient, she has plenty of oyster stands to choose from. As for eating out “I always order the local Long Island options, to try more varieties.” Alot of her friends are “flexitarian” which she says is really a health choice. One friend likes to add seafood to her basically vegetable cuisine, another stays with vegetarian “unless they know the fish or meat is coming from a humane and sustainable source.”

“I’m absolutely drawn to the aspect of reducing food waste,” says newly-minted Climatarian Taylor.” There are so many points of the food consumption process that generate waste, and any waste we can reduce is important. We should consider the packaging and transport, how much we purchase at a time, how much we cook at a time, how we save leftovers, what we do with scraps, everything.”

In the backyard at her parent’s place Taylor is planning a compost. Meanwhile she puts eggshells and tea leaves in the garden and freezes veggie scraps to take to Deep Roots farm in Southold “for the chickens.” In Brooklyn Taylor took part in the municipal food scrap program which she explained paused during the pandemic but now “the city is starting composting pick up again this fall which I am very excited about.” It’s a wonderful resource, she says, “you can compost nearly anything–including bones, proteins, greasy food, and soiled paper.” For now she delivers her Brooklyn scraps to the nearby farmers market.

Meet More Climatarians at the January Drawdown Festival

“Join the Regeneration” says acclaimed Australian filmmaker ( 2040 ) keynote speaker and festival partner for the 2022 Drawdown Festival – Tools For Regeneration: Forums! Fun! Films! coming again to the Southampton Arts Center, Friday- Sunday, January 21-23, 2022, with talks, workshops and films, scheduled all weekend (in person and virtual). Registration is free, hosted by Southampton Arts Center, who is also accepting donations to cover costs.

Will the Climatarian trend make a difference?

Consider this. Today’s food system has become the single greatest cause of global warming (34% GHG emissions) and soil loss, chemical poisoning, rainforest destruction, dying oceans. Our current system of “Big Ag” chemical farming and food waste can be changed to a regenerative system. (Regeneration by Paul Hawken)

“Halve food waste, halve emissions” says the UN Environment Program (SDG 12.3 Food waste index | ThinkEatSave)

The #1 Solution for the US calculated in Project Drawdown’s Table of Solutions is to Reduce Food Waste. Here 40% of food grown is wasted with a whopping 70% generated at the household level. I calculate, based on Drawdown’s math, that if we can

1) bring our food waste down by 60% (think soups, pasta sauce, and, this is critical, no food to the landfill),
2) make a healthy habit of once-a-week-red meat (or source beef and chicken from regenerative farmers, not those cruel CAFOs), and
3) buy local first, we can shift our wasteful food system to use-everything regenerative, with compost enriching our soils and sequestering tons and tons of carbon.

Sounds do-able, dollar-saving, and delicious. Try it! Check out the #Climatarian trend happening @Climatarian.Cafe.

Reprinted from the East End Beacon

How to Handle Food and Groceries Coming in to Your Home

David Posnett — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 20:42:55 +0000

Watch a doctor demonstrate how to safely bring groceries home during the coronavirus crisis. This is very useful! Specially the latter half starting at 5:00 min.

Poison Papers: EPA in bed with Industry

David Posnett — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 20:42:26 +0000

Transcript From Secret Meeting Illustrates EPA Collusion With the Chemical Industry

Friday, July 28, 2017 By Rebekah Wilce, The Center for Media and Democracy

(Photo: fotografixx / iStock / Getty Images Plus)

The world of independent chemical testing has a shiny veneer. The public is reassured that chemicals they’re exposed to on a daily basis are certified by technicians in spotless white lab coats who carefully conduct scientific studies, including on animals in neat rows of cages.

But a federal grand jury investigation that ended with convictions in the early 1980s discovered that Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories (IBT), the largest such lab in the United States, conducted trials with mice that regularly drowned in their feeding troughs. The dead animals would decompose so quickly that “their bodies oozed through wire cage bottoms and lay in purple puddles on the dropping trays.” IBT even invented an acronym “TBD/TDA” for its raw safety data, later discovered to mean “too badly decomposed.”

That was just one of a host of problems uncovered at IBT which conducted an estimated 35 to 40 percent of all the toxicology tests performed in the United States including for FDA regulated products and EPA regulated pesticides and chemicals. Scientists at the FDA were the first to spot the fraud and misconduct and blew the whistle on IBT in Senate hearings in the late 1970s. Soon after, the EPA was forced to deal with the issue and estimated behind the scenes that some 80 percent of the data provided to them for chemical registration from IBT was nonexistent, fraudulent, or invalid.

The IBT scandal presented the EPA with a potentially immense crisis. Knowing that almost every IBT test it had looked at was seriously flawed and presumptively fraudulent, it could order retests and withdraw its approval from every IBT-tested chemical. This course of action would have been fully warranted, scientifically. But it would have had drastic effects on the chemical industry, on public confidence, and on the newly-formed EPA itself.

What the EPA did instead is revealed in a transcript of a meeting that took place at the Howard Johnson Inn in Arlington, Virginia on October 3rd, 1978. This secret meeting was between senior figures at EPA, Canada’s Health Protection Branch, and executives of the chemical industry, and was intended to solve the IBT “problem.”

This transcript is part of more than 20,000 documents, weighing over three tons, just released by the Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), on the “Poison Papers.” website. Most of the Poison Papers were collected by author and activist Carol Van Strum, who used documents obtained through public interest lawsuits and open records requests to investigate chemical pollution, and digitized by journalist Peter von Stackelberg. Van Strum’s remarkable story was detailed this week in the Intercept.

A Conversation About Collusion

The Poison Papers represent a vast trove of rediscovered chemical industry and regulatory agency documents and correspondence stretching back to the 1920s. Collectively they shed light on what was known about chemical toxicity, when, and by whom, in the often-incriminating words of the participants themselves.

The Howard Johnson’s transcript is a prime example of the materials in the trove. It allows us to “listen in” on a conversation that took place decades ago, but still has implication for us today.

The transcript “exemplifies as well as any other single document among the Papers the history of everyday regulatory failures and agency complicity that is the unknown story of the EPA and its enduring collusion with the chemical industry, and whose result is a systemic failure to protect the American public from chemical hazards,” says Dr. Jonathan Latham, Director of the Bioscience Resource Project.

“Not One” IBT Study Free of Errors

The Howard Johnson’s meeting was called to discuss the IBT scandal and plan a way forward. No consumer groups, environmental groups or members of the public were present that day in Arlington under HoJo’s cheerful orange roof when the topic of how to deal with the dead animals, the fraudulent, and the corrupt data was discussed.

Near the outset of the meeting, the EPA’s Fred Arnold, Acting Branch Chief of Regulatory Analysis & Lab Audits, assured the chemical company representatives present that no chemicals would be removed from the market, even though the studies supposedly showing their safety had been proven fraudulent:

“We determined that [i]t was neither in EPA’s interest or the public interest or the registrants’ interest [to replace all IBT data] because a large number of studies, which were performed at IBT, were performed satisfactorily,” Arnold said (p. 6).

Yet Arnold’s contention that some of the studies were “satisfactory” was contradicted multiple times in the same meeting. It was later stated, for example, that not one IBT study was free of errors (p. 16). Dr. Arthur Pallotta, Consultant to the Special Pesticide Review Division in the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, stated that “there were few [IBT] studies that did not have discrepancies, errors and omissions” (p. 27). Elsewhere in the transcript, EPA accepted that over 80 percent of the test results from IBT were invalid (p. 123).

But Arnold’s assertion that it wasn’t in anyone’s interest to demand new studies had striking ramifications. It was the grounds for not removing any chemicals from the market, for reassuring the public, and for kicking the IBT mess down the road. By 1983, EPA had determined that over 90 percent of IBT’s studies submitted to them had serious, invalidating problems.

A “Salvage Operation”: Ignoring Scientific Controls

Early in the meeting, EPA made a list of IBT errors that it planned to ignore to make the task of “validating” IBT’s studies manageable.

It planned to ignore whenever animals were missing from (or added to) studies. No statistic existed then – nor does it now – to compensate for such measurement irregularities, but this difficulty was glossed over by the EPA.

Just as bad, many IBT studies appeared to be shorter in time than protocols called for. As David Clegg of Canada’s Health Protection Branch explained to the meeting:

“Now, we have come across the 90-day study where the study started on, let’s say, the 1st of June. The invoice for shipment of the test material from the firm was the 9th of June, and the diet preparation sheets are for the 12th of June.

“In other words, by the time the diet was prepared, according to the raw data, the study has been underway for 12 days for a 90-day study.

“This does not necessarily invalidate the study, of course. You can still get some information from it, but the whole base line, which you are working from, has to be altered to deal with an 88-day [sic] study or whatever length it is and conclusions have to be drawn on this sort of basis” (pp. 34-35).

EPA also noted that IBT had major problems with its controls. It had run a system known as “common controls.” These controls were often in different rooms or carried out at different times, presumably with rats from different batches. EPA proposed cobbling such experiments together and thus making use of these controls. Clegg’s tone was apologetic:

“I can’t say that I am very happy about this on scientific grounds, but we are trying to run this as a salvage operation and, if we can come up with something which gives us a reasonable base line for controls which may be applicable to a number of studies, then, when controls are not available, we’ll compare them against those controls,” he said (p. 41).

EPA Adopts Unsigned Studies

EPA’s Arnold also admitted at the meeting what appeared to be EPA’s own historical fraud. In revisiting original data sent to them by IBT, manufacturers might find that, in the past, EPA had itself examined the tissue samples and determined there to be “no significant finding” when in fact “the truth of the matter is the organ was never examined” (Arnold, p. 102).

By the time the FDA and EPA had taken a strong interest in the testing lab, IBT had begun a “policy not to sign” its own reports, according to the transcript, indicating that staff were unwilling to stand behind the findings.

As Fred Arnold told the attendees, “A number of scientists, who may have been involved in the early states of a test, are no longer there and nobody can state, categorically, that everything reflected in the report, in fact, is borne out by the raw data” (pp. 63-64).

Arnold admitted that EPA had in the past sometimes accepted unsigned studies. So he stated that its remedy to the new signature problem would be to adopt such unsigned studies in order not “to create a double standard now” (p. 64), effectively adopting IBT’s unprecedented practices as its own.

It was later uncovered in court proceedings that IBT also forged signatures.

The Howard Johnson Take-Home

Three IBT officials went to prison, closing a chapter on a massive scientific fraud, but the book was never closed.

“As the Howard Johnson transcript reveals, a majority of the IBT studies were never intended to be redone, and still underlie the U.S. chemical regulatory system,” said Latham.

Author Carol Van Strum commented on the significance of the transcript for CMD:

“The 1978 Howard Johnson transcript records a crucial meeting of EPA, Canadian, and pesticide industry officials to discuss EPA’s response to massive fraud in the safety tests for pesticide registrations. At the meeting, Fred T. Arnold, chief of EPA Regulatory Analysis and Lab Audits, assured industry that EPA’s discovery of fraudulent, invalid, or nonexistent safety tests would ‘not interfere with the ability to control pests and market pesticides.’ This document was the linchpin of my book, A Bitter Fog: Herbicides and Human Rights, documenting the government’s acceptance of phony industry studies while dismissing reports of human illness, death, involuntary abortions, birth defects, and other effects of pesticide exposure.”

Mary Bottari contributed to this article. The Poison Papers website and document trove is a project of the Bioscience Resource Project of Ithaca, New York, and the Center for Media and Democracy of Madison, Wisconsin. You can explore the Poison Papers documents at PoisonPapers.org. You can read the illuminating Howard Johnson’s manuscript here.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source. Permission for R&R to reproduce was obtained from PoisonPapers.org

Rebekah Wilce is a beginning farmer with a degree in writing from the University of Arizona. She researches and reports for the Center for Media and Democracy, publisher of PRWatch.org, ALECexposed.org, and SourceWatch.org, in between milking cows at a local farm and reporting at Madison’s community radio station, WORT 89.9FM.

Trump Wants to Charge Retailers to Accept SNAP Benefits (Food Stamps)

David Posnett — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 17:37:44 +0000

When is the GOP’s cruel assault on the most vulnerable going to end?

From Modern Farmer

By Andrew Amelinckx on June 9, 2017

You’ve probably heard about the White House’s proposed overhaul of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program, formerly known as food stamps—the program would see deep cuts if President Donald Trump’s budget goes forward. But you may not be familiar with another proposal that could also affect the 43 million Americans who rely on SNAP, as well as the grocers who accept these benefits from their customers.

Trump wants to charge grocery stores and other retailers a fee for accepting SNAP benefits to the tune of more than $2 billion over 10 years, with businesses from corner stores to Walmart bearing the cost. Currently, retailers don’t pay a fee to get authorized to accept SNAP benefits, but they are required to register with the Department of Agriculture, the agency responsible for overseeing the program.

As outlined in the White House’s Major Savings and Reforms—which makes up the budget plan and also A New Foundation for American Greatness—the fees would be on a sliding scale, and would be charged when a retailer first signs up to participate and again when they renew their application every five years. Small businesses, like convenience stores, would pay somewhere in the range of $250 while large supermarket chains would have to shell out as much as $20,000. It’s unclear what type of fee farmers markets and CSAs—many of which now accept SNAP benefits–would be responsible for under the proposal.

According to The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is responsible for producing the president’s budget plan, the current system “fails to recognize the Federal costs of application processing and oversight of retailers, and the significant portion of a retailer’s revenue that SNAP can represent.”

Also: Check out what Food & Wine has to say: http://www.foodandwine.com/news/trump-charges-stores-for-accepting-food-stamps