Why local food is important and local food supply chain reading list

Locally grown food is a very small deal in proportion to the entire food network. I have read claims that it is less than three-tenths of one percent (0.03%). Think about it: that is virtually nothing. Since we are on the producing end of this statistic, I think that it may be close to accurate.

In broad sweeps, our food network has grown out of the cattle drives from Texas to Chicago that became significant then necessary after the American Civil War. Trains brought the next big change, along with more cost-effective canning technologies in 1880s. In the late 1940s and well into the 1950s, mobile electric refrigeration for trains and trucks made shipping fresh fruits and vegetables over thousands of miles possible. This immediately harmed the canning industry, but was a huge benefit to trucking companies that became part of the grocery chains. Finally in the 1960s and 1970s came refrigerated cargo containers that could be quickly transferred from ships to trains to trucks. I have yet to see and explanation of how air transit works in this economically. This is the history of the large bones of the skeleton of our food supply chain.

The importance of local food

What happens if/when our food supply chain fails as have significant parts of our financial system, which in turn brought down the auto industry? What happens if the food chain equivalent of Merrill Lynch, AIG, or General Motors fails? First off, people starve to death. There will be food riots just as there have been in other parts of the world.

Some would like to say that our food supply chain is too large to fail, a statement that has been bandied about concerning the banks and stockbrokers. That is just wishful thinking. Perhaps these systems are too large to survive. It is likely that they became unsustainable due to their size. We can adjust to less money and credit, fewer cars, even fewer jobs, but we cannot adjust to significantly less food.

We may be fat because we eat 500 or more calories a day in excess of what we should, but those calories are not usually from the basic life-giving food; usually they are excess fat calories. However, that is immaterial when one considers that a 50% failure of our food chain system would result in too little food to produce adequate calories to keep most all of our population from starvation, and one-third to one-half from starving to death. If you think this is trivial, consider yourself and your two closest relatives or friends, and consider a life where only two of you survive, at best. This is why local food in significant amounts is important.

Not so light reading on building a local food supply chain

There are many articles on how to produce local food. Here is a list of a "small" selection. Just this list will give you an appreciation of how far we have to go. When you read some of these articles, you will learn what you can do to become part of the local food chain. This is provided by the USDA from the online source the Alternative Farming Systems Information Center National Agricultural Library, USDA, ARS

The battle against CSAs, Farmers Markets, and wholesome food

I hope that you will click on this story and read it. It is horrifying, but if you don't know what the enemy doing, you will be defeated.

Goodbye farmers markets, CSAs, and roadside stands

It is an ongoing battle. This is a real threat. Tacoma tried to stop people from selling food from their homes because residences are not businesses. Totally in conflict with the right to farm. Yes we have a right to farm. I suggest that everyone write to any congress person they know to help stop what the article your friend sent is writing about... Read More. There is only ONE farmer in the Senate, Jon Tester (D) of Montana. He is an organic farmer. Read the www.whitehouse.gov website and read the Agenda/Rural link. If you like locally grown, organic or naturally grown food, you have to protest this. These companies are evil.

Hold manufacturers responsible for their supply chain

The New York Times article on the spread of salmonella-tainted peanut butter Peanut Case Shows Holes in Safety Net lists dozens of health violations that could have been obvious to anyone walking into the plant. So this begs the question “Why were the companies that bought these peanut products not visiting the plant?” Had any of the companies buying from Peanut Corporation of America, including ConAgra, sent a trained inspector or even someone from the word processing department to look at the plant, Peanut Corporation of America could have been out of business in days. All its customers needed to do was to stop buying their products until the place was cleaned up. That provides the best reason to improve standards and product quality. That is money talking at its best.

We need to demand that the companies we buy food and other products from assume some responsibility and inspect before buying, instead of demanding another agency, a Department of Food. At this point I am not for against such an idea, although I think the USDA could do the job if they had the budget for inspectors.

Inspection of parts and other ingredients is part of verifying the quality of their supply chain. Companies have become lax in this basic part of doing business. The only thing that will make them start this practice is an upwelling of customer demand for it.

Liars, Cheats, and Thieves Hurting Us Again

Business runs on trust. TRUST. Period. However over the past several years the trust that the customer needs to have in the products she/he buy has been sorely tried.

It did not start with the tainted dog and cat food from China, but that brought it to the attention of the American public. Since then we have had tainted baby food from China; tainted milk and chocolate bars from China. These were cheats that the Chinese do to their own people, and from what I read, the people who do them seem to have a hard time understanding that what they did was wrong. Luckily many more millions of Chinese think this is wrong, and are trying to fight back. This, however, is by no means a Chinese problem.

Here in the US and Canada, most of the tainted problems stemmed more from system contamination rather than malicious cheating. Escherica (E.) coli 0157:H7 in spinach, then in lettuce from all over. Then there were the E. coli infected tomatoes, but wait it wasn't the tomatoes it was the peppers, but wait it was none of those things. (I have read so much on this I think there never was an E. coli 0157:H7 problem, but I simply do not know.) The regulators made a hash of their testing and product recalls, wasting millions of tons of produce in the process, in a world filled with hunger. So we loose confidence it everything, which creates a major problem.

Now we have a major manufacturer of organic fertilizer using a prohibited substance to improve their "certified organic" fertilizer. California Liquid Fertilizer illegally cheated certified organic farms and their customers by tainting their fertilizers with ammonium sulfate, one of the worst of the synthetic fertilizers rightfully prohibited from from organic gardens. You can read here the story from the Sacramento Bee, Organic farms unknowingly used a synthetic fertilizer. This is a story that dovetails with our financial crisis: where were the regulators? This tainting of the fertilizer by California Liquid Fertilizer went on for seven (7) years! OMG! But it gets worse: The article says:

According to documents obtained by The Bee through a Public Records Act request, California Department of Food and Agriculture officials were notified of the problem in June 2004 but didn't complete their investigation and order the company to remove its product from the organic market until January 2007.

This is an organic grower's nightmare. Being told that something is organic, because we have to trust our suppliers to tell us the truth because we do not have a chemistry lab with a spectrometer to test the products with the OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute), WSDA (Washington State Department of Agriculture), which we stick to, or Oregon Tilth, or CCOF (California Certified Organic Farmers),or other organic certification.

This is not the first time (or the second or third) that organic farmers who are doing their darnedest to keep their food organic are screwed by big business. In the late 1990's, Monsanto decided to these GMO wheat that was Roundup Ready (Roundup is something you do not want to use around food, it is super poisonous), and it crossed with organic wheat. These were field tests, out in the wind and weather. What did Monsanto expect? This was a major disaster that was also a cross between a fiasco and a tragedy. You can start reading about it in this report by the Canadian Organic Consumers Association Organic Consumers Association. An Update On The GMO Controversy from November 2001. However, it was Monsanto's response to the problem that is so egregious: I read that they sued the organic farmers over using their GMO, patented seed. The organic farms were decertified and had to go back to being transitional organic farms for several years. Here is a link to the sins of Monsanto Millions Against Monsanto. Read it and be amazed, or one of those other "A" words.

We work very hard to keep our food pure. So do the farmers who used California Liquid Fertilizer. One of the agricultural companies lied to, cheated on, and thieved from was Earthbound Organics. They are probably still the biggest supplier of organic produce, and millions of people depend on their organic vegetables. In the winter, when we have no vegetables, we buy them in the store like non-farmers, and we buy from Earthbound among others. Everyone throughout the organic food/value chain was betrayed.

The purposeful tainting of a product crosses all boundaries of decency: it is illegal, immoral, and unethical. It endangers people's lives. This cavalier attitude by those companies that perpetrate these cheats is so disrespectful of all of us. As a customer I do think about these problems as I stand in the grocery store or over the sink preparing dinner. As a farmer I fear this type of thing happening to our farm. As a business woman, I want to rip these liars, cheats, and thieves limb from limb. The ancient punishment of drawing and quartering seems about right for those who do this. No bailout bonuses for those guys. Do you think I'm angry? Oh yes.

CULTIVATE THE SOIL: RESOURCES FOR BEGINNING AND SMALL-SCALE FARMERS AND RANCHERS IN WASHINGTON STATE

Mary Embleton of Cascade Harvest and Puget Sound Fresh sent this information out today. This is a new publication.

CULTIVATE THE SOIL:
RESOURCES FOR BEGINNING AND SMALL-SCALE FARMERS AND RANCHERS IN WASHINGTON STATE
Megan McPhaden
Washington State Housing Finance Commission
Beginning Farmer/Rancher Loan Program
Fall 2008

You don't need The Ponderosa to farm. Your backyard, the top of your garage, containers on your lanai, a bowl of greens on your kitchen counter all produce food. This downloadable PDF file provides you with good information, live links to resources that give you a wide range of information.

Mary wrote:
Produced by the Washington State Housing Finance Commission's
Beginning Farmer/Rancher Loan Program,
this resource is now online [Beginning Farmer/Rancher Loan Program]: www.wshfc.org/FarmRanch/resources.pdf.

If you would like to receive a copy of "Cultivate the Soil" in the mail, please contact Viet Tran at 206.287.4482 or viet.tran@wshfc.org

For questions concerning the Beginning Farmer/Rancher Loan Program, please contact
Tia Peycheff at 206.287.4416, tia.peycheff@wshfc.org or
Dan Schilling at 206.287.4415, dan.schilling@wshfc.org

Please distribute this to anyone you think may be interested!

Estimating Your Total Food Market Size

The U.S. Food Market Estimator from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University popped into my inbox today. It is a tool to estimate the gross consumption of food required in any state. For example, I found that in Washington State the population required the production of 18,326,421 pounds of garlic annual. Fascinating!

For small farmers, it puts our production capabilities into perspective. The market is huge, and we are small niche providers of specialty products. It can be easy to lose sight of this when we go into a huge grocery store and see as much produce a we may produce in a month or even a season on the shelves. It goes a long way to showing how there is room for us in the fresh food market.

This is a well-developed tool and the website provides supporting information, with links to the following topics:
• What is the U.S. Food Market Estimator?
• How does this tool work?
• Does this tool show actual consumption?
• What are the limitations of this tool?
• What food products are included?
• How are units of measure determined?
• Who might use this tool?
• Who developed the U.S. Food Market Estimator?

I encourage everyone to bookmark this tool and use it.

Food Prices Expected to Keep Going Up

The New York Times reports that Food Prices Expected to Keep Going Up. While the price of some grains, mainly wheat, corn, and rice, have dropped, that may be caused by speculators hording grain releasing it to pay margin calls in our distressed economic. Even if the hoarding does not start again, the growing season problems caused by bad weather and climate change will continue to adversely effect the food supply. The economic laws of supply and demand will rule. The same thing is happening with petroleum prices, and there will be new price manipulations and demands.

So where does that put producers like Abundantly Green? We are trying to balance higher costs with keeping our prices down for our customers. The price per CSA share will rise on New Year's Day by about 10%. We want to keep the share sizes abundant.

Our 2009 shares for 2008 prices is good through December 31, 2008. Go to our sign up page and claim your share.

Melamine in US infant formula: it just goes on and on

This is simply a heads up to those of you who need to know. Melamine was found in baby formula from China, of course. Impure food, purposefully made impure to cheat on the protein tests: that's why there would be melamine in food.

You can read all about it on FDA finds traces of melamine in US infant formula. (This is an AP story, so it will be unavailable in about one month. Oh, well, it just goes towards our collective amnesia.)

Tainted Milk: Why Sustainable Agricultural Practices are Needed

Sustainable agricultural practices feed the soil with the nutrients it needs to grow healthy crops to feed you. Dying, chemically fed soil produces grains, vegetables, and other plants that are low in protein. Processing practices can also lower the nutrient value. Foods are tested for protein levels under certain situations. Food grown in poor soil simply lacking nutrients, and food processing managers who want to pass the tests without providing the nutrients have found a cheap cheat in Melamine, a chemical that shows higher levels of protein than really exists.

Melamine, a plastic that is poisonous to humans and animals (tainted dog and cat food in 2007), was found in the milk given to babies in Chinese hospitals in Beijing. The result, so far, is 6,200 sickened and 3 dead.

An article published on Huntington Post reports the following.

More than 6,200 babies have been sickened by tainted milk formula and dozens of infants are suffering from acute kidney failure, China's health minister said Wednesday as the death toll rose to three children.

The article went on to discuss the situation,closing the article with this:

Suppliers to the dairy companies are believed to have added the banned chemical, normally used in plastics, to watered-down milk to make it appear higher in protein. Inspectors will now start testing for melamine in all dairy products, Li said.

The chemical additive was at the center of a major pet food scandal in the United States in 2007. An estimated 1,500 dogs and cats died after ingesting a pet food ingredient manufactured in China that was laced with melamine.

This sad story is going to be repeated again and again all over the world as our food chain is centralized, processing leeches out the nutrients, and the soil our food is grown in is weakened and killed by herbicides and pesticides.

By buying organically grown and naturally grown food, you are telling farmers that you value this type of food. The message that "conventional" farmers are being bombarded with is if they farm without these additives (poisons) they will fail. The simple act of buying organic food shows conventional farmers that this is a lie, and they can make a living farming the healthy way.

My prayers and best wishes for full recoveries go out to the sick children and their parents. I send my condolences to the parents and families of the children who died.

Kitsap Community & Agricultural Alliance (KCAA)

We, Abundantly Green and you, our CSA family members, and Poulsbo Farmers Market customers, and readers of Amicus Agraria are active in the local food movement just by what we do. Several years ago, I became active in moving a community-based agriculture promotion group forward. That group became the Kitsap Community & Agricultural Alliance (KCAA). The KCAA depends on people like you, community members, to join and work with it to promote and support local agriculture of all types in the Kitsap Peninsula.

The group is headed by our dear friend Nikki Johanson of Pheasant Fields Farm. She is joined by many people. There is a monthly meeting the first Tuesday of the month, 7:00 pm at the Norm Dicks Government Center in Bremerton.

The KCAA was a primary sponsor of Joe Salatin coming to Kitsap county in June where he spoke to a sold-out audience at Olympic College on June 4. Mr. Salatin was profiled as one of the most influential independent organic farmers in the country in the book The Omnivores Dilemma.
Jim Freeman, a KCAA member volunteer, created an amazing blog for the KCAA called Buy Local Food in Kitsap, The Blog changes several times a week, featuring a farm, market, or source for local food.

The KCAA Blog features many topics that you might not realize were important to local food in Kitsap. One topic I recommend is “How to Support Local Farmers.” You might think, “I buy locally, I belong to a CSA,” and while essential, it is just one of many things that needs to happen to keep farms like ours farming. The blog is a good way to meet and befriend others who share your love of local, wholesome, farm fresh food, like ours. The blog, Buy Local Food in Kitsap, links to others, including our web page and Amicus Agraria. You can also go to it through the Abundantly Green website. You are invited to join in and comment and blog at both.

You do not have to be a resident of the Kitsap Peninsula to support and join the KCAA. The membership information follows:
• Individual Membership at $20 for a 1 year membership
• Family Membership (one contact) for $35 for a 1 year membership
• send a check to Kitsap Community & Agricultural Alliance, P. O. Box 11, Keyport, WA 98345
• Or fill out the form from the website
• phone number is 360-779-6523
• email is kcaa4u@yahoo.com

Compromising the Elixer of Life

Water is really the life-giving elixir. Water is not only what you drink, it is what the plants and animals drink. Freshwater systems occupy only 0.8 percent of Earth's surface.

The Worldwatch Institute reports that our renewable water supply amounts to approx 0.3 percent of the world's total freshwater, which is less that is presently being used. Sandra Postel, a Senior Fellow of The Worldwatch Institute, and expert in global water problems, states that "Most irrigation-based civilizations fail." Wow, that is a stark and scary statement. Her compelling facts back up her statement, leaving me with a sense of urgency about figuring out how can we avoid this path of failure. How can we?

The Why Files water map and linked articles provide detailed information from The World Health Organization -- WHO. "Of a population of roughly 6.1 billion, more than 1 billion lack access to potable water. The World Health Organization says that at any time, up to half of humanity has one of the six main diseases -- diarrhea, schistosomiasis, or trachoma, or infestation with ascaris, guinea worm, or hookworm -- associated with poor drinking water and inadequate sanitation."

Since most of us eat more plants than animals, and plants do not effectively process or filter the water the take up (up-take), the quality of the water that they are water with is very important. However, what about polluted water? What about our "water footprint?"

Discover Magazine has been doing a series of articles on water. Better Planet: Everything You Know About Water Conservation Is Wrong Forget short showers. Worry about the 6,340 gallons of "virtual water" in your leather bag. by Thomas M. Kostigen, published online May 28, 2008. I will leave you with two very shocking statements as teasers to encourage you to pop over there and read the whole article.

"...if each of us avoided wasting just one cupful of coffee a day, we could save enough water over the course of a year to provide two gallons to every one of the more than 1.1 billion people who don’t have access to freshwater at all.

That is a stark statistic, when as many as 5 million people die unnecessarily each year because of lack of water and water-related illnesses; one-third are under age 5."

Farther along in the article he writes: "Right now we lose 30 to 50 percent of the food we grow—and all the virtual water in it—by the time it is ready for consumption, says Daniel Zimmer, executive director of the World Water Council (WWC) in Marseille, France."

Discover Magazine has earned worldwide respect among the learned community they report on, and provides a wealth of information.

The Dallas-Fort Worth Star Telegram online news has a section devoted to clean water issues called Plant DFW: Drinking Water from a series of articles that they did in May 2008. The issues they address are underground chemical plumes affecting their water system (what do we have here on the Kitsap Peninsula?), Airline water, and more. They provide plenty of links, too. Discover Magazine is linked there as is National Geographic's The Green Guide.

The Associated Press (AP) investigated our water supplies in twenty-four major cities at the end of last year. They found what many of us have known for a while: the drugs that we take pass through our digestive systems and into the sewage stream. The extent of this pollution of our water was profiled in article written by Jeff Donn, Martha Mendoza and Justin Pritchard, published by the AP, March 10, 2008. Sex Hormones, Mood Stabilizers Found In Drinking Water Of 41 M Americans

Here is a taste of a this long and thoughtful piece.

“People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The waste water is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.

Sewage treatment plants are not set up to handle these chemicals, so now our birth control pills, antibiotics, pain relievers are in our drinking water. I first became aware of this problem when I read an article several years ago about the feminising of fish, amphibians, and mollusks species that can change gender. This is a serious problem for our food supply.

This is a really important issue for farming. How can our food supply be pure if our water is polluted? The title of the story is a link to the AP site. I have quoted few paragraphs so that you can see why this investigation is important.

A vast array of pharmaceuticals -- including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones -- have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose.
Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs _ and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen _ in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

I encourage you to read the entire story. I have not found a follow up to this story. If you know of additional or follow up information, please share the links to it.

If, like me, you don't know about these drugs, and their effects on the human being, read this chapter from a text book for psychiatrists. Mood Stableizers are discussed in this online book from the Australia New Zealand Association of Psychiatrists in Training.

This is described as: Chapter 18: Mood stabilizers Saturday, 27 August 2005, Last modified: April 28, 2006, This chapter is not exciting. It provides more detail than medical students need. There is little controversy attached to mood stabilizers.

Why is this important and the blue planet: the water planet? What are we to do when freshwater systems occupy only 0.8 percent of Earth's surface and less that 3% of all the earth's water is potable, fresh water: that means able to be used by people, plants or animals. Without water, there is no life.

Demand for local food at an all time high

What a modern headline: “Demand for local food at an all time high.” A person born in 1908 probably would not be able to understand it, yet today the issue of locally grown versus imported food may be essential to our continued well-being. The locally grown food issue is, ironically, worldwide.

For all the industrialized nations the food chain has become a complex system based on global corporations that separate producers and consumers are through a chain of processors, value-added manufacturers, shippers and haulers, and retailers. This food chain is so convoluted it is almost impossible to understand. For example, If you shop at Costco and many other grocery stores, you are familiar with the Earthbound Farm Organic Foods, which is a subsidiary brand of Natural Selection Foods, which is a subsidiary of Tanimura and Antle.

The Certified Organic Associations of BC (Canada) has a chart of the global corporations that own some of the organic (but not local) brands you can find on your grocery store shelves. Who Owns What in the Organic food industry, by Phil Howard, an assistant professor at Michigan State University's Department of Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies is surprising. If after reading the chart, you feel like you are in a modern version of Abbott and Costello’s “Who's on First,” you are not alone.

The global organic food industry is threatened by the movement to buy from local farmers, who actually provide less than 2% of all food consumed in the United States, and probably the industrialized world, as well, although I have no statistics on this. The globalization of food, which took away the issue of seasonality, so you could have tomatoes, cherries, broccoli, and more year-round, proved to be a highly disruptive situation to both food distribution and agriculture. Food distributors who did not provide out of season food found themselves out of business. Farmers planted one or two crops to meet the huge demand that nationwide and worldwide distribution created.

The local food movement may be as disruptive in reverse. If you enter the phrase “demand for locally grown food” into Yahoo Search, you will get 9,870,000 articles returned.

LOCAL FOOD DISTRIBUTION

Local Kitsap Peninsula food is actually difficult to find. All of the local CSA (community supported agriculture) farms were sold out weeks in advance. Local farmers markets report an increase in customers of double or more over last year. Even our miserable weather and resulting slow season does not deter CSA members and farmers market customers.

However, not everyone can join a CSA or go to a farmers market. To help people who want to enjoy locally grown food, Bainbridge Islander Carlee Ashen started Farm Courier to bring local produce to Bainbridge Island doorsteps. She is at the forefront of local food distribution. Farm Courier enjoys an unique place in the local food distribution system, but Ashen’s success is going to inspire others to copy her business model and join her in providing fresh, locally grown food on the Kitsap Peninsula.Farm Courier and Carlee Ashen were recently featured in this Bainbridge Island Review article Cyber market links Bainbridge growers to residents hungry for local food.

Crossposted with http://www.buylocalfoodinkitsap.org/

Calories -- Oh Sob

The convenience of fast food is marvelous. You can drive up to a window, hand over money and someone will hand you food. Wow. That’s actually really cool. Except that the food they hand you is not necessarily good for you. It contains higher than normal amounts of salt and fat, highly processed bread, and lots of calories. If you work in a sedentary job, your body does not burn the calories. Plus there is the bio-ethics and safety issues of eating feed-lot beef and industrial chicken, and other centralized processing-plant foods.

When you cook at home and prepare easy low-calorie dishes, you will find that they range from about no calories to 200 calories. For every pat of butter you top you food with, you add about 100 calories. Even so, the food you prepare yourself probably has half as many or fewer calories than the favorite fast food meals. If you do not believe me, go to one of them and read the contents and calorie count. McDs puts the nutrition and calories on every box they hand out.

Consider the BK Chicken Whooper: it has 750 calories, and it is not even that filling. A McD’s 10 piece Chicken Selects Premium Breast Strips is 1270 calories, the Big Breakfast is 730 calories, and the Deluxe Breakfast is 1220 calories according to the Washington-post.com Fast Food Calorie Chart. My McD’s favorite is the Double Cheese Burger (comes without that third layer of bun). The box it comes in says that it contains 730 calories and 40 grams of fat. My, oh my! Now add in fries (large portion has 520 calories), soda pop (classic Coke large has 310 calories), and milk shakes (Chocolate shake 12 oz has 440 calories and the 32 oz has 1160 calories) on top of that. Lunch at McD’s could be easily contain 1500 to 2000 calories or more. This is an important figure for me and my health, which I will get back to in the last paragraph.

The Energy Allowance or how much you should eat.The energy allowance describes in general terms how we calculate the amount of energy we need each day to make our bodies go (walking, breathing, etc.). Vincent Iannelli, M.D., on www.About.com provides this energy allowance information for children and young adults. Children need a lot more calories than adults do because they are growing. Many adults continue to grow rotund because we eat like we are fifteen years old. (We can all sing the chorus of 'unfair, unfair, unfair.') Equally annoying for women is the general fact that boys burn more calories than girls, even when they do the same activities.

For boys: from 2000 calories for a 7-10 year old, 2500 calories for an 11-14 year old, and 3000 calories for a 15-18 year old.

For girls: 2000 calories for a 7-10 year old, and 2200 calories for an 11-18 year old. These are only estimates and some children need more (fast metabolism) or less (slow metabolism) of an energy allowance for daily activities.

Also on About.Com, is Wendy Bumgardner, a guide on walking. She provides a very helpful page on diet portions. I used her calorie calculator to estimate how much I should eat.

You can do your own calculations at Calories Per Day Calculator. When you are at this page, you can easily link to Wendy Bumgardner’s other posts.

According to her calculator, if I want to maintain my current weight I should eat 1932 calories a day. If I want to weigh what I am told I should weigh, I should limit my calorie intake to 1577 calories a day. Remember those calorie counts for one fast food meal. If I eat one full meal with a "goodie", I have eaten (or over eaten) for two days! I will have to change my order to the Caesar Salad with Grilled Chicken that has 200 calories and 6 grams of fat. I do eat mostly at home, and that's another story. Did I mention I am a good cook?

"Whiskey's for drinking. Water's for fighting."

What is water worth? One major American investor, T. Boone Pickens betting $100 million that water is the new oil. You can read Business Week's Cover Story for June 12, 2008,
There Will Be Water. (It is not on permalink, so it may disappear after a few weeks.)

Currently, water is desperately needed in the sub-Saharan areas, India, and China. I have been saying for some time that water is the new oil, and that some wars today are being fought over water, such as the war centered in sub-Saharan Darfur.

Pickens is staying at home, and this interesting article talks about trying to sell water in the USA. We are not there yet, but as people loose their water rights, and water is wasted by being used as a waste/sewage disposal system, or dumped back into salt water, water could become as precious as Pickens thinks it will.

There's a saying in Texas: "Whiskey's for drinking. Water's for fighting." Pickens decided to fight. In 1999 he created a company called Mesa Water and began to accumulate water rights so he could strike a deal with another city altogether. The hell with Amarillo. Pickens was confident he could sell his water: The population of Texas was expected to jump 40% by 2020, mostly in urban areas one dry season away from drought.

Ironically, it may be the flooding that boosts Pickens' investment, since the flooding is polluting the water with the damaged oil tanks, refineries, waste treatment plants, and so on. Flood and drought may radically change the cost of water and food.

Water Rights Ruling Favorable to Farmers

This is just a quick note about something that is highly controversial: water rights. You can read the article in our local paper King County Judge Strikes Down Key Parts of Water Law.

The biggest problem with government taking water rights from farmers is that the farmers can't get the water back for their crops. It has happened over and over. In the past many years, I have spoken to many elected officials who seem to believe that food magically appears on the grocery store shelves. In 1979, a study of US cities (the citation is long lost) including Seattle, had, at most, three (3) days of food. That was before Just In Time (JIT) ordering and storage. After the Katrina debacle in New Orleans, I read that cities have about 20 to 36 hours of food stored. Both storage numbers assume that the food stored including food on the grocery store shelves would feed the population, eating normally, for that many hours.

The truth is, few public officials ever buy or prepare their own food. My cynical self says that local officials are as reliable as their last bribe, and what they say is tuned to whom they are speaking. You Tube has proven many times.

Water rights for farmers, read YOUR local farmers, is part of YOUR food security.

On that cheery note, it is 52F and should go up to 63F (sorry, I cannot find a way to insert a degree sign).

The three basics for human life

The three basics for human life are food, water, and shelter. Why, in the 21st Century, have these gotten so out of balance in so many parts of the world will be the continuing question until food is available to all.

Africa used to be the food basket of the western world. It is where most all of the grains and produce crops for the Roman Empire were grown. As the polar ice caps melted, the Mediterranean Sea rose, the Sahara Desert grew, and Europe warmed the bread basket for Europe moved north into what is now Germany, France, Spain, and Southern regions of Eastern Europe. However, as the article below says, Africa could feed itself, expect when food distribution networks were disrupted by war, for example, the Biafra famine was man-made.

Here is a link to a rather wonky but highly informative article on the food crisis in Africa Destroying African Agriculture by Walden Bello in the June 3, 2008 issue of Foreign Policy In Focus.

This article is important not because it discusses famine in Africa, but because it describes how our areas of the world could become dominated by famine.

Weather, the Jet Stream, and trees

The weather is back to overcast rainy days. At least the temperature is over 60 degrees F. We had our two or three days of summer last week. Temperatures jumped 25 degrees F overnight. At least the plants were happy.

We had to move the start of our 20 week CSA back two full weeks (did this three weeks ago) because of the cold weather. There was frost on the ground May 3. This is unusual in Kitsap County because we have a maritime climate, that while about 10 degrees F cooler than Seattle, is fairly warm. By mid-April we should have had consistent temperatures in the high 60's during the day, and in the mid-40's at night. From March on we should have been in the high 50's to low 60's in the day and low-40's at night.

This all may be due to the Jet Stream moving northward and weakening. MSNBC had an article on this April 21, 2008 Jet stream moving north, weather shifts likely. There have been several articles on this topic. If you have more information on this, please leave the links in the comment section.

I have no idea if global climate change is a natural phenomena or man-made, but it is probably due to a combination of the two.

People wanting to change the man-made problems are trying a number of remedies. In Pellston, Michigan, scientists have begun what will be a decades long test concerning tree varieties and the atmosphere. Scientists starve aspen trees in global warming experiment. This one is both curious and compelling. Trying to offset man-made change may be the fastest answer.

We sold out of our CSA shares two weeks before we originally intended to start. The demand for local food is increasing.

"Deadly Greed" Makes the Food Crisis Worse

The German magazine Der Spiegel is available in English at Spiegel Online International. A wonderful magazine, it offers a very different world view of from that we commonly see in US papers. The Thursday, April 24, 2008 issue appeared Wednesday evening, my time, and while not what I was looking for as after dinner reading (I feel guilty and overfed), I am glad I found its five thoughtful, in-depth, and provocative articles on food, hunger, and greed. In addition, there are three articles from last week, several more from that past six months on food shortage topics and the environment. All the articles lead to more through a seemingly endless cascade of links to other related articles. For example, there is an interesting article on BMW's opposition to ecological laws being proposed in Germany. When you click on the links that in the titles below, you will move to Spiegel and all of these articles.

Beat Balzli and Frank Hornig expose the seamy side of hunger, the food futures speculators who bid the price of food in warehouses up to the point that the hungry cannot afford it. They have two articles discussing this activity.

DEADLY GREED: The Role of Speculators in the Global Food Crisis

DEADLY GREED: The Role of Speculators in the Global Food Crisis: Part 2: 'Passive and –Profit Oriented'

Philip Bethge explores the claims of those who see genetically modified food as the saviour of the poor, and the difficult reality of the situation in the following two articles. In the second article, the weakness of genetic modification driven, and perhaps profit driven farming is revealed.

“Using the tools of genetic engineering to increase crop yields is so complicated that most genetic researchers have not even tried it yet."

Does this mean that designer plants are incapable of satisfying expectations altogether? Some companies are now touting conventional cultivation methods again.”

Too complicated or too dangerous to grow, is that what they mean? Yes, actually. In cases such as this, complicated and dangerous means that the test plant has a likelihood of adversely affecting other plants or crops in the wind affected area around the test site. Those effects could be mutation of all plants, mutation of a "weed" so that it encroaches on other plants and crops, something else. These mutations could cause otherwise healthy plants to cease to grow or produce food. South Africa stopped tests of the Super Sorghum.

“The South African authorities have already prohibited a first greenhouse trial with Wambugu's super sorghum, arguing that it would be too dangerous for the environment.”

SUPER SORGHUM FOR THE POOR: Can Genetic Crops Stop the Food Crisis?

SUPER SORGHUM FOR THE POOR: Can Genetic Crops Stop the Food Crisis? Part 2: Can Designer Plants even Work?

Kenya, a country that until a few weeks ago had been politically stable and peaceful, has been going though a horrible time of civil unrest, almost civil war, over a contested election. Food prices, health care, and most other aspects of a stable life have become scarce. Horand Knaup profiles one family in Nairobi in the article:

OATMEAL AND WATER: Nairobi Living, in a Season of Expensive Food

The food crisis is not only one of shortages, it is one of price,. How it is affecting Egypt is reported by Ulrike Putz in Cairo and Mahalla, Egypt. In this food crisis it is not always a shortage:

“If you want to learn how global food shortages are affecting the poor, a good place to go is the street market in Cairo's impoverished Boulek al-Dakur district in the early afternoon.

Market stands might be piled high with cucumbers and tomatoes, flat bread stacked high on trays which bakers have pushed out of bakeries to cool -- but that is precisely the problem. While traders used to sell their perishable goods by midday, now they cannot get rid of them.”

CRISIS IN EGYPT: The Daily Struggle for Food

Could the experience in Egypt happen here? Of course it could. My parents talked about the food lines of hungry people in Seattle and Chicago during the 1930's. In any American urban, suburban, and perhaps rural areas there is less than three days of food stored. How food gets from the farm to the store to your kitchen or restaurant is quite complex. Any rift in the process could cause a food crisis.
The problem could be political, as it is in Keyna, economic as in Egypt, or it could be a natural disaster like an earth quake. One lesson of New Orleans is that we are vulnerable.

The conflict between food and fuel was discussed in January, 2008, in this article.

OUR HUNGRY PLANET: The Choice between Food and Fuel

Two articles on biofuels and how they are hurting the world’s food supply are also linked.

'A TOTAL DISASTER': Critique Mounts against Biofuels

The second of these articles focuses on German politics, rather a relief to read about someone else’s problems except that their problems are our problems, too.

GERMANY VERSUS THE EU: Merkel Caught between Industry and the Climate

Each of these articles has many more links to interesting and worthwhile articles.

If I may add my opinion, reading Spiegel is such a change from reading most American newspapers and articles. The quality of the thought is far greater than what I read in the US papers. If you like shallow, poorly thought out articles do not bother to read any of these, because all of these articles, while fairly short, have great quality.

Locally Grown Food Will Keep Food On Your Table

Links to relevant articles are at the bottom of these observations.

Climate change is not same world wide: in some areas it is warming; in other areas it is cooling. In the Pacific Northwest, where we have our farm in Kitsap County's maritime climate of Puget Sound and Hood Canal, the weather is colder. For the third consecutive year, April is about ten degrees cooler than the norm. At night, it is very cold, down into the mid-30’s and up to the low-40’s. The soil cools off, and even the seeds of the early crops rot in the ground. This means that early crops come in later, and that we have to use season extenders such a row cover, hoop houses, and greenhouses to make sure we have vegetables for our CSA customers.

In other parts of the world, like in one of Australia’s grain baskets in its Southeast, high temperatures and no rain have caused the total failure of the rice crop.

Most of the grains and vegetables we humans rely on grow in a very narrow window of temperature: 60 degrees Fahrenheit to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. They will survive a few days of high temperatures up to about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with water, but not for more than a few days.

Hunger has always been a problem; however it usually has been caused or exacerbated by very human political circumstances: war, transportation breakdown, and greed.

For those of us in the United States and Canada, the preservation of local farms is a buffer to these failures. We need to take ourselves out of the world food market, so that we can continue to put food on the table.

In addition, sustainable farming techniques – tending the soil as nature intended, as it was tended for millennium – will help increase production and preserve fertility of the land.

Local food is not a fad. It will be a necessity, and unless farms are preserved, they will be gone. It takes years to put farmland back into production. Even backyard gardens help preserve knowledge, a skill-base, and arable land.
Below are links to articles about these problems.

A Drought in Australia, a Global Shortage of Rice
Food Boom Brings Unpalatable Truths
Michael Pollan NYT blog: Food From a Farm Near You
Switch to Organic Crops Could Help Poor