Eating Liberally

Forget about science fiction; WALL-E is séance fiction—it channels the soul of our land-loving founding father, Thomas Jefferson. Now that a handful of loose wingnuts is denouncing WALL-E as a piece of pro-planet propaganda, I’d like to note, for the record, that Jefferson would have absolutely loved WALL-E.

Normally, I wouldn’t presume to speak for the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, but given Jefferson’s reverence for our most precious resource, i.e., the soil, he surely would have appreciated the underlying message of Pixar’s latest animated opus—that it’s our civic duty to be good stewards of the land.

Yeah, yeah, I know that WALL-E’s creator, Andrew Stanton, is insisting that WALL-E is first and foremost a love story, but the whole plot hinges on another relationship: the one between us and the dirt beneath our feet. Jefferson was an early advocate of maintaining soil fertility through such practices as crop rotation, and would doubtless be horrified by the pollution and depletion of our topsoil that’s become standard operating procedure since the advent of industrial agriculture.

(Of course, he’d also be appalled that the Fourth of July has turned into a giant meat-fest; Jefferson was an unabashed lover of fruits and veggies who maintained that produce should dominate our diet and meat should be used sparingly, as a “seasoning” or “condiment.”)

Set in the year 2815, 700 years after the Earth’s been trashed by mindless consumers and a monolithic corporation named Buy n Large, WALL-E depicts a nation whose excesses have launched it into perpetual astro-exile on a fleet of super-duper Buy n Large-sponsored spaceships. Its morbidly obese, infantalized citizens, too fat to stand upright, zip around aimlessly on their hovercraft-style loungers sipping sodas, playing video games, and awaiting the day the Earth will have detoxed enough to be “recolonized.”

Some folks are eager to dismiss this cautionary tale of a corpulent corporatocracy as a far-fetched scenario aimed at advancing some eco-extremist agenda, but it’s an eerie echo of the warnings from Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer-Prize winning UCLA professor of geography and author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In a precursor to Collapse that Diamond wrote for Harper’s back in 2003, he challenged the conventional wisdom that we have to weigh environmental concerns against economic considerations, citing the popular misconception that:

In WALL-E’s world, mankind has failed to recognize this inexorable link, forcing a mass exodus into outer space and leaving behind a barren landscape littered with post-consumer crap and unable to support any vegetation.

Watching WALL-E trundle through this lifeless landscape on his daily rounds, compacting garbage and salvaging such manmade marvels as a spork and a Rubik’s cube, you realize that it’s not about saving the earth. The planet will, in all likelihood, be able to withstand whatever drastic alterations to its ecosystem we’ve unwittingly unleashed. It’s ourselves we have to save.

Will we figure this out in time to avert the kind of catastrophic future portrayed in WALL-E? As Diamond notes in Collapse:

If only we had a clue about what to discard and what to replace. After leaving a matinee of WALL-E last weekend, I stopped into the Chelsea Home Depot, which, in a rare concession to place, is housed in an elegant turn-of-the-century cast-iron building. On my way to the garden department to buy mulch for my windowboxes, I passed a display of cheap kitchen faucets with a sign reading, “Why Fix It When You Can Replace It?”

No wonder we’re the trashiest people on the planet. If the Great Pacific Garbage Patch grows any bigger, we’ll have to colonize it and declare it the 51st state. The signs that our habitat’s under siege are everywhere, but our “Drive All You Want, We’ll Drill More” culture motors on, oblivious. With the cost of a barrel of oil setting new records each day, more and more Americans reportedly support the idea of offshore drilling, despite the fact that it can’t possibly solve the underlying problem that demand is increasingly going to outstrip supply as China and India follow in our tire tracks.

Sadly, WALL-E’s anti-consumer, anti-corporate message is undermined by the regrettable array of cheap, mass-produced WALL-E tchotchkes destined for the garbage heap. It’s a shame that Pixar couldn’t pass on the obligatory merchandise tie-ins, but that doesn’t diminish the importance of the film’s S.O.S: Save Our Soil. It’s a message that this nation of babies, big and small, needs to heed. Colony collapse disorder—it’s not just for bees!

Last December, the White House simply refused to open an e-mail from the Environmental Protection Agency because it contained the unwelcome conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to public health and therefore need to be regulated. The EPA finding was a response "to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment," the New York Times reported last Wednesday.

Faced with the proverbial inconvenient truth, the White House not only refused to open the e-mail, they ordered Jason Burnett, the EPA official who sent the document, to "recall it," according to the Washington Post.

Burnett, who has, not coincidentally, since resigned, told the Post:

"In early December, I sent an e-mail with the formal finding that action must be taken to address the risk of climate change...The White House made it clear they did not want to address the ramifications of that finding and have decided to leave the challenge to the next administration. Some [at the White House] thought that EPA had mistakenly concluded that climate change endangers the public. It was no mistake."

I'd accuse the administration of foot-dragging, but that implies some kind of forward movement, however glacial (now, there's a word that's headed for extinction, thanks to climate change.) The dinosaurs who've been dictating our energy policy in this country are as encased in asphalt as the fossils at the La Brea Tarpits, and just as unlikely to budge.

Jon Stewart highlighted this new low point from the Petro-Pusher-In-Chief on the Daily Show last Wednesday with a segment called "Be Patient - This Gets Amazing":

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KAT: NYC's real food fanatics are gearing up for a gala event this Sunday down at Lower Manhattan's legendary Seaport. Guest blogger Leslie Hatfield from the Eat Well Guide's Green Fork blog tells why:

“Old New York…was once New Amsterdam…”

Back then, a widely diverse population of city dwellers bought their food at the market, not at the Quizno’s.

If you are in New York on Sunday, come join thousands of other foodies, farmers and activists at the New Amsterdam Market. This is the third New Amsterdam gathering so far–the last event got hit by a snow storm but 5,000 people still showed up, so this weekend’s market is expected to be major. We’re excited about the implications of a market in the Seaport area, as is Robert LaValva, the Director of the New Amsterdam Market Association:

“The participants we have gathered for New Amsterdam Market on June 29th represent a shift in thinking. With its four century legacy as a market district, the Seaport and its empty public market halls offer New Yorkers an unprecedented opportunity to anchor the food system now emerging from this change.”

And the lineup of vendors looks amazing. I’m especially intrigued by Wild Foods (cattail hearts?!), and I hear there will even be sustainably-produced popsicles. Don’t forget your re-usable bags–you’re going to want to bring some food home.

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Most folks are assuming that the catastrophic floods in Iowa are a natural disaster, caused simply by too much rainfall. But, leaving aside the question of whether climate change is partly to blame for all that rain, a growing number of environmental experts suspects that the flooding may have been caused in part by agricultural practices that have severely impaired the landscape’s ability to absorb excess rainwater.

As the Washington Post reported last Thursday, “Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed,” and added that “Between 2007 and 2008, farmers took 106,000 acres of Iowa land out of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep farmland uncultivated…That land, if left untouched, probably would have been covered with perennial grasses with deep roots that help absorb water.”

So now that we’re looking at some four million acres of washed out crops, the New York Times reports that Senator Charles Grassley (R, Iowa) is calling on the USDA “to release tens of thousands of farmers from contracts under which they had promised to set aside huge tracts as natural habitat,” so that they can plant more corn.

This sounds like a really bad idea if the loss of water-absorbing habitat is what made the floods so severe in the first place. But what do I know? I’m not an Iowa farmer. Happily, though, I know someone who is—Denise O’Brien, the organic farmer who ran for Secretary of Agriculture in Iowa in 2006 and nearly won, with 49% of the vote. So I asked Denise for her thoughts on what role industrial agriculture might have played in this disaster.

As luck would have it, Denise just had a letter to the editor published in Sunday’s Des Moines Register addressing this very subject, so she forwarded it to me and I’m reprinting it here, in the hopes that more people will consider the possibility that these floods were as much an act of man as an act of God:

You know how those amps in the 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap had a dial that went all the way to eleven? Twenty-four years later, we've become a nation of Nigel Tufnels, twiddling with the earth's thermostat and pushing it past its natural limits. This time, it's not so funny.

We're so busy worrying about $4-a-gallon gas--or the prospect of $140-a-barrel oil--that we've lost sight of a much more fundamental number: the amount of carbon dioxide, aka CO2, that's building up in our atmosphere. Right now, we're at about 385 parts per million, or ppm.

If we keep letting the C02 build up, we're heading for a Titanic catastrophe--except that there won't be any 'iceberg, right ahead!' There won't be any icebergs left at all.

Yeah, yeah, you've heard it all before, all this clucking from the Chicken Little/Cassandra contingent. Except that you haven't. There's something new. Our foremost experts on global warming, faced with mounting evidence that our climate is changing much faster than anticipated, have recently concluded that the European Union's goal of capping our CO2 levels at 550 ppm is insufficient, assuming we want to preserve life as we know it.

James Hansen, NASA's chief climatologist, put it in his stark but scholarly way:

Hansen's been trying to get us to pay attention to this stuff for decades, along with a few other folks I can think of. Neil Young's been warning us for THIRTY EIGHT YEARS, going back to "After The Goldrush," when he sang, "look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies." Now, he's amended it to "look at Mother Nature on the run in the 21st century."

And Marvin Gaye, were he only alive, could do a remake of his 1971 hit, "Mercy Mercy Me (the Ecology)" without changing a word:

How much, indeed? In 1989, Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, the first book about global warming for us non-wonks. McKibben warned us that we were changing the planet irrevocably and would have to make some fundamental changes in the way we live if we want life as we know it to continue.

OK, so here we are, a couple decades later, and I am pleading with you all, will you for once please just LISTEN to this guy? He wants to have a word with you. Or rather, a number. The number is 350. As in, 350 parts per million. That is the number that James Hansen and his climate change colleagues have established as the CO2 level we need to aim for if we hope to avoid six irreversible tipping points, including a massive rise in sea levels and huge changes in rainfall patterns (hello, Cedar Rapids.)

So McKibben's launching a new campaign, 350.org, with the help of a wonderful, wordless video from the folks at Free Range Studios, who gave us The Story of Stuff and The Meatrix. 350.org: Because The World Needs To Know is a universal call to arms--or to legs, actually, as in, go ride a bike! Can we pedal our way to a CO2 level of 350 ppm? I don't know, but one thing's for sure: James Hansen's checked the coordinates, and this is one destination we can't get to by car.

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: Japan recently passed a law requiring companies and local governments to measure the waistlines of Japanese people between the ages of 40 and 74 as part of their annual checkups. Those who exceed the government's limits--33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women-will be given three months to lose weight, and if that doesn't do the trick, "those people will be steered toward further re-education after six more months," according to the Times, which adds that "the government will impose financial penalties on companies and local governments that fail to meet specific targets."

Obviously, this would never fly in the U.S., but do you think it's a good idea?

Dr. Nestle: I'm stunned by the proposal and hardly know where to begin. Talk about a cross-cultural experience! In Japan, we have one of the healthiest and long living populations in the world on the verge of putting on weight and developing heart disease and diabetes just like our society. But unlike ours, the Japanese government is taking the situation head on. The plan is so not American in this level of social engineering. We don't do things quite like this.

One striking similarity is the focus on personal responsibility. Where is the social responsibility? Not a word about that. What is the Japanese government planning to offer in the way of advice to eat less, control portion sizes, and move more? And does it plan to address changes in the food environment needed to promote healthier choices by individuals? Has the government thought about encouraging food companies to offer smaller portions, make healthier foods the default, promote traditional Japanese diets instead of fast food, and take other such actions?

Evidently, the Japanese government is serious about keeping its citizens healthy, and that's great. But is it serious enough to tackle the environmental as well as the personal determinants of overweight? Or, alas, is this another government that views weight gain strictly as a matter of individual responsibility without asking food companies, employers, and legislators to take some responsibility too. If so, maybe the Japanese are more like us than we think. I, for one, will be watching what happens there with great interest.

My dad’s a true conservative, which is to say that he actually conserves—i.e., uses things sparingly. This leaves him utterly at odds with our rampant consumer culture, but strangely in sync with his lefty-blogger-daughter, despite our obvious political differences.

My dad’s always been ahead of his time in some ways; he was a computer geek, complete with pocket protector, way before it was cool. He’s an early adopter--he owned one of the first personal computers, the long-since obsolete Osborne—but you could call him a late discarder, too. I think he only just got rid of his dot-matrix printer about a year ago.

He hates to throw things out, or buy things he doesn’t really need, and he can’t stand wasting anything, whether it’s water, or electricity. When we were officially in a drought in California (as the Central valley is again, now), he dutifully saved our bathwater and used it to water the yard or flush the toilet. My parents’ car of choice was a used Toyota, and they planned their trips carefully to save gas, even when it was cheap. At Christmas, we exchanged simple, inexpensive gifts; material things have never held any allure for my dad, with the possible exception of a faster Mac.

All of which makes him kind of a crackpot by current conservative standards. Our whole economy’s based on getting us to run out and buy stuff whether we need it or not—not to mention whether we can afford it, or how much it’s screwing up the environment. From the perspective of low-flush-toilet-hating harpy Ann Coulter, it’s downright un-American to tell folks to conserve:

Where does she get her monstrous vision of our relationship to the earth—the King Kong edition of the bible? This, from the woman who calls liberals “godless.”

Thankfully, there’s a growing number of folks on the right who reject the views of Coulter and her fellow climate-change-naysaying wingnut, Rush Limbaugh. Whether it’s eco-evangelicals worried about global warming, or NRA members alarmed by the loss of wildlife habitat, some conservatives are finally daring to buck the party line and embrace the notion of treading more lightly on the planet.

All over the country, today, fathers will be receiving gifts of one sort or another, whether it’s another useless tie or an electric shaver or a copy of Tim Russert’s Big Russ And Me: Father And Son—Lessons of Life, which has leapt to the top of the bestseller list since Russert died so unexpectedly last Friday.

I didn’t buy anything for my dad, because he honestly doesn’t want anything, except maybe a little appreciation. So here it is, Dad—thanks for teaching me that, contrary to the current conservative orthodoxy, there is virtue in thrift, and we don’t need a lot of stuff to make us happy. Hey, Dad, are you sure you’re not a closet liberal?

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: We've known for ages that the FDA is so grossly underfunded that it can't even begin to assure the safety of our food supply. Now, all of a sudden, in the wake of the tomato salmonella scare, the Bush administration's asked Congress to allocate an additional $275 million to the FDA in next year's budget. What gives? Why now? Are salmonella-tainted tomatoes more of a hot potato than E. coli-contaminated spinach?

Dr. Nestle: No, tomatoes are not a worse political problem than spinach. What's happening is that we are at the end of an administration, not the middle. In the last year, several major reports have exposed the way Congress has weakened the FDA by giving it tons more to do with no money to do it with. As incident after incident has occurred--spinach, green onions, pet food, peanut butter, and now tomatoes--the FDA's situation has become increasingly embarrassing. But $275 million? A pittance.

What's really needed is a major overhaul of the entire food safety system, from the bottom up. We need a food safety system that goes from farm to table, and preferably under a single food safety agency that unites and rationalizes the functions of the FDA and USDA. Until we have that, expect these incidents at regular intervals. Next administration, anyone?

Eating Liberally Food For Thought
by Kerry Trueman

If Lou Dobbs could wave a magic wand and make all those pesky undocumented workers disappear, he'd do it in a heartbeat. And while that might be a triumph for law and order, it would also be kind of a hollow victory--pretty soon our empty stomachs would begin rumbling, and we'd be grumbling:

Who's going to pick our produce?

Who's going to pluck our poultry?

Who's going to chop up and stir-fry our chicken and broccoli?

Who's going to deliver it to our door?

Millions of illegal immigrants make enormous sacrifices-leaving behind loved ones and paying smugglers a fortune--to come to the U.S. and work long hours for low pay doing lousy jobs. You probably don't give that a whole lot of thought when you dial the Chinese restaurant down the block to order your won ton soup and lo mein.

Filmmakers Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou are out to change that with Take Out, a day-in-the-life saga about one of those guys you grab your bag of food from and hand a dollar to before you shut the door and forget his face. The film opened last Friday at the Quad Cinema in New York City, where Take Out takes place, and illuminates the lives of an ignored but integral segment of our population.

Take Out stars Charles Jang as Ming Ding, an illegal Chinese deliveryman who pedals his way through a drizzly day made more dismal still by ruthless loan sharks. Ming's morning starts with a bruising wake-up call from his debtors, who barge in to the cramped apartment he shares with umpteen other immigrants and demand that he come up with $800 in interest on the massive debt he owes his smugglers by the end of the day.

Ming borrows much of the money from friends but has to double his usual take in tips to make the difference. His scramble to cram as many deliveries as he can into his day takes him-and us-from the hallways of housing projects to opulent lobbies and every class of New York City dwelling in between. His customers run the gamut, too, from kind to curt to cruel, or just surly and obnoxious. Not content to provide a sampler of New York stereotypes, Take Out gives us flashes of humanity behind those front doors--and inhumanity, too.

The repetitiveness of Ming's day, the seemingly endless series of hallways and elevators and apartment doors and customers thrusting dollars, makes for a movie that's monotonous in a mesmerizing kind of way. The filmmakers opted for a neo-realist approach that made a virtue out of their bare bones ($3,000) budget, forcing them to film the movie in a real Chinese restaurant while it remained open for business. The end result blurs the line between documentary and drama, but yields a sharply drawn portrait of a life most of us couldn't imagine and would prefer not to think about.

The film is perfectly cast and its cinema verité approach makes its message all the more compelling. While the Broken Borders brigade is fixated on erecting barriers, Take Out asks us to step outside of our individual fortresses, just for an hour and a half, and see the view from the other side of our front doors. It's a powerful ploy; as Nathan Lee wrote in his review of Take Out in last Friday's New York Times, "I'll tip more, I promise!"