I know Hellfood has been very inactive, but there is a good reason, and I will be bringing this site back I promise. This story was too good not to post though:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080505/sc_livescience/howtofightglobalwarmingatdinner

When the Bush’s administrations EPA funds a study that says eating beef and dairy is bad for the environment, you know it’s pretty bad. I wish they had looked into the poultry and fish farming in more depth, but this is a step in the right direction.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Sustainable Table - info [at] sustainabletable.org
Date: Nov 14, 2006 12:58 PM
Subject: Sustainable Table and Eat Well Guide Re-Launch Today!

Sustainable Table (www.sustainabletable.org), a leading resource designed to celebrate the sustainable food movement, re-launched our website today, offering enhanced navigation of the site — making it easy to get involved and keep up-to-date with the latest sustainability news, resources, educational tools, and award-winning advocacy films.

New to the website is:

• An updated and expanded Issues section, highlighting easy-to-understand information about industrial and sustainable agriculture

• A new Get Involved section, making it simple for everyone to find out how to make their lives and communities more sustainable

• A growing focus on personal stories. Through the blog, forum, features, and new Stories section, the updated Sustainable Table site will focus on the people behind the sustainable movement, as well as the consumers involved in it.

The Eat Well Guide (www.eatwellguide.org), Sustainable Table’s free online directory of farms, stores, restaurants, and other outlets that offer sustainably raised meat, poultry, dairy, and egg products also re-launched today with enhanced features. In addition to providing consumers an easy-to-use tool to search by zip or postal code, product, growing method, or region to find the nearest wholesome food, the Eat Well Guide (www.eatwellguide.org) now offers:

• More than 7,500 entries

• Consumer reviews of outlets in the Guide

• Expanded “My Notebook” functions where registered users can save their favorite listings and keep notes to refer to in the future

Sustainable Table also has The Meatrix and The Meatrix II: Revolting, our award-winning Flash animation films, in a new digital format, downloadable to handheld media players, video phones, and iPods — free of charge. In addition, we recently released The Meatrix II 1/2, the latest installment of the award winning Meatrix series. Produced by Sustainable Table and Free Range Studios for Participant Productions, The Meatrix II 1/2 was launched to educate consumers about problems at processing facilities and to help promote the social action campaign surrounding the Fast Food Nation movie being released by Participant Productions and Fox Searchlight on November 17th. For more information, visit www.themeatrix.com.

Read the press release about our re-launch, or visit the Sustainable Table media lounge!

Sincerely,

The Sustainable Table Team

The Sierra Club’s Mr. Green shares his top 10 tips for eating well.

Shorter Mr. Green: buy organic, buy local, buy unprocessed/unpackaged, and buy veg; and, when possible, grow and make your own. And always recycle!

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Sep 25, 2006 8:11 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: NY Times editorial condemns pig industry consolidation 9/23/06

The Saturday, September 23, New York Times, included an editorial (the paper’s official editorial opinion) headed “The Ultimate Agricultural Efficiency.”

It opens:

“Any American history of pork — the meat, that is — shows a steady concentration of more and more hogs in the hands of fewer and fewer producers. That is what modern agricultural “efficiency” looks like. It’s good for the bottom line of the big industrial players, but bad for farmers, hogs, the environment and, ultimately, consumers. That history took another step in the wrong direction when Smithfield Foods — the biggest pork packer — agreed to buy the second biggest pork packer, Premium Standard Farms.”

The piece explains that as pig farming operations are increasingly consolidated, small farms are dying out, and pig farmers are becoming “janitors in confinement barns across rural America where the packers’ huge herds of pigs are crammed in stalls to live out their short lives.”

The reference to pigs being crammed into stalls points to the cruelty of factory farming, but the piece doesn’t focus on it, which is why letters to the editor can help. Since it was photographs of pigs living in individual in stalls so small that they cannot even turn around that first piqued my interest in animal rights, I urge anybody who has not seen those photos to check out the photo gallery at http://www.FactoryFarming.com .

You can read Saturday’s New York Times editorial on line at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/23/opinion/23sat3.html.

You can send a letter to the editor describing the cruelty of modern farming or singing the praises of Fakin Bacon. (Not literally — in your own words please.)

The Times takes letters at letters [at] nytimes.com

Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Shorter letters are more likely to be published.

Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi
You are encouraged to forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts but please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

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(Crossposted at easyVegan.info.)

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Aug 16, 2006 7:40 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: LA Times lead ‘Food’ article on books about ethical eating 8/16/06

The Food section of the Wednesday, August 16, Los Angeles Times has a cover story (Pg F1) on the rush of books about ethical eating, headed, “Voting with their forks.”

It opens:

“In the last couple of months a choir of disparate voices has been sending the same message through books, magazines and the Internet that advocates of farmers markets and eating locally have been preaching for years: The cost of industrialized food is too high, both literally and environmentally. And the thought is sinking in.

“At least four ambitious books connecting the dots between what we eat and how it affects the world have been published recently, and the most insightful of them, Michael Pollan’s ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma,’ has been a bestseller…. The reasons behind this sudden consciousness-raising are myriad, but Pollan summarizes them most succinctly. In an e-mail, he says Americans are starting to understand ‘just how important the food issue is — how it is linked to energy and global warming (17% of our fossil fuel use goes to feeding ourselves); to environmental pollution (farming is the single biggest source of water pollution); health (obesity and diabetes turned attention to the way we produce food); world trade, the federal budget and the welfare of animals.’”

There are other good quotes from Pollan such as:

“My hunch is that, at a time when world problems seem so dire and intractable, food represents one area where people feel they can actually make a difference, here and now. As I tell audiences, if you feel your tax dollars are going to support practices you find deplorable, you can’t withdraw your support for those practices without going to jail. But if you feel that your food dollars are supporting morally or ethically objectionable practices — brutal factory farms or environmental pollution — you can withhold your support, and vote with your fork for a better alternative.”

The article comments on the shift of consciousness into the mainstream:

“Unlike the last revolution in food, in the ’70s, the movement toward change is not coming from the fringe and cannot be easily written off as the pipe dreams of a bunch of vegetarian hippies. The right stuff is no longer segregated in health food stores and co-ops; it’s gone mainstream.

“And that may explain one more sea change in the Summer of Food: Priorities have shifted. Americans concerned about how their food is raised now know they can make a difference. Hence the ’scandale’ over lobsters (Whole Foods promised to stop selling them live to give them a finer quality of life) and the growing movement to outlaw foie gras on the grounds that it represents cruelty to ducks.”

The article ends with recommendations of five books on the topic. Though the author favors “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” those particularly interested in animal issues should pick up another of the five, “The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter,” by Peter Singer and Jim Mason. (You’ll find information about that book and some reviews at http://tinyurl.com/qdmds where you can also purchase it.)

You’ll find the whole Los Angeles Times article on line here OR at http://tinyurl.com/qbsfj

It does not concentrate on animal cruelty issues but provides a great opportunity for letters that do. www.FactoryFarming.com is a good source of information.

The Los Angeles Times takes letters at letters [at] latimes.com.

Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Shorter letters are more likely to be published.

Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi
You are encouraged to forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts but please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

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(Crossposted at easyVegan.info.)

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Aug 14, 2006 5:00 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: “Meat Eaters Without The Guilt” in Washington Post 8/14/06

The Monday, August 14, Washington Post has a thoughtful piece by Tamar Haspel headed, “Meat Eaters Without The Guilt.” (Pg A13)

It opens:

“It’s almost a movement. Sustainable agriculture — David to factory farming’s Goliath — is capturing the eating public’s imagination with its contented cows, bucolic landscape and its practice of leaving the environment intact.

“With an assist from some recent books describing the miserable lives of animals under big agriculture, the small farmer’s message that we should care about the lives of our livestock is getting traction. As it does, it gives those of us with a concern for animals, but also a fondness for pork chops, a place to hang our hats.

“Until relatively recently, when grass-fed beef and free-roaming pork began arriving in stores, consumers had to be one of three things: carnivore, vegetarian or hypocrite. If you didn’t care about your pork chop’s quality of life, you could be a carnivore. If you did, you could either renounce it and be a vegetarian or eat it anyway and, well . . .

“Vegetarians had a good claim to the ethical and environmental high ground. Factory farms abuse animals and devastate the environment, and a world where we all eat plants is clearly better than that. When you put the vegetarian vision up against a system of small, sustainable farms, though, the equation changes.

“Ecologically, vegetarians focus on efficiency. If humans eat animals that eat plants, it takes much more land to feed us than if humans just eat the plants. That seems like a quaint concern, though, in this era of abundance. Besides, what would we put on freed-up farmland? Gated communities? Wal-Mart?”

Haspel mentions a farm where the animals are well treated (until they are killed) and the manure from the animals makes growing the vegetables possible, but then writes:

“None of this would matter if the livestock suffered. Sustainability couldn’t excuse keeping pigs in such close confinement that they chewed each other’s tails off. But the beauty of the sustainable farm is that the pigs root, roam and wallow. Of course, you still have to kill them, and there are people who find that unacceptable under any circumstances.”

“But there’s a strong case that giving a farm animal a happy life making a constructive environmental contribution and slaughtering it humanely to feed people is ethical. Even animal rights hard-liner Peter Singer, in ‘The Way We Eat’ (co-authored with Jim Mason), can’t condemn ‘the view that it is ethical to eat animals who have lived good lives and would not have existed at all.’ He concludes that it’s ‘more appropriate to praise’ this relatively enlightened view than to criticize it for not being the veganism he prefers.”

Haspel then mentions that “vegetarians are undoubtedly healthier than meat eaters,” but she writes, “no study has compared a wholly vegetarian diet to a largely vegetarian diet that includes some grass-fed beef, free-rooting pork or cageless poultry.”

She suggests that by supporting sustainable farms, we “might be able to change the nature of American agriculture.”

You can read the whole piece on line at http://tinyurl.com/o5p3a.

Haspel clearly has a concern for animal welfare that should be commended. However those tempted to believe that raising animals on sustainable farms, where they are well treated, negates the problem of cruelty should read another article from the Washington Post, (April 10, 2001, front page) titled “They Die Piece by Piece.” It is available on line at http://tinyurl.com/d2mtm.

It describes undercover footage taken from a slaughterhouse that shows cows, improperly stunned, moooing, kicking and blinking as they make their way down the slaughter line being hacked to pieces.

Today’s article presents a great opportunity for letters that sing the praises of plant-based diets. The Washington Post takes letters at letters [at] washpost.com and advises, “Please do not send attachments; they will not be read. Letters must be exclusive to The Washington Post, and must include the writer’s home address and home and business telephone numbers.”

Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi
You are encouraged to forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts but please do so unedited — and please leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

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Wow! It seems as though food, particularly the ethical/environmental aspects of organics, meat, etc., has been in the headlines quite a bit in the past month or so. Here’s another DawnWatch alert on the subject.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Jul 19, 2006 2:10 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: Washington Post on ethical eating 7/19/06

The Wednesday, July 19, Washington Post includes an article, by Candy Sagon, on the cover of the food section, headed, “Is There Anything Left That We Can Eat?; With All the Conflicting Headlines, No Wonder We Can’t Decide What to Buy.”

Sagon opens:

“I can’t decide what to eat. I don’t mean which recipe to make, or what restaurant to go to. I mean when I go grocery shopping, I’m paralyzed with indecision. Everything, it seems, is either ethically, nutritionally or environmentally incorrect. Guilt is ruining my appetite.

“Take the other day when I went to buy eggs. Sounds easy, but this is the dialogue that played in my head as I stared at six shelves of egg cartons:

“‘Should I buy the omega-3 eggs that are supposedly good for my heart? But wait, they’re not organic. Maybe I should spring for the $3.50 organic eggs from Horizon, even though I read that the company has gotten so huge, it’s driving out the smaller organic farmers. Perhaps I should get the cage-free eggs from a small farm in Pennsylvania? Or the brown eggs from vegetarian-fed, free-roaming hens?

“‘Oh, never mind. I need to save money. So what if the hens are living a miserable existence in the poultry version of the state pen. The eggs are only 79 cents. I have bills to pay.’

“(Note to PETA: Don’t worry. I couldn’t live with the guilt. I ended up buying the brown eggs from free-roaming happy hens, so don’t write to me.) ”

“The point is, choosing what to eat and drink has become hard work. It’s not simply a case of taste or price. Now we have to ask ourselves: Is this good for my health? Have animals suffered? Is it local? Organic? Bad for the planet? Harvested by child workers? ”

Sagon discusses wild caught vs farm-raised salmon, the treatment of both workers and animals in slaughterhouses, and also issues of human health and environmental impact.

You can read the whole article on line here OR http://tinyurl.com/jdqjo

It presents the perfect opportunity for letters to the editor on the horrors of factory farming and/or singing the praises of a plant-based diet.

Send letters to letters [at] washpost.com. The paper advises, “Please do not send attachments; they will not be read. Letters must be exclusive to The Washington Post, and must include the writer’s home address and home and business telephone numbers.”

Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi
You are encouraged to forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts but please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

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…Grist Magazine’s interview with Bryant Terry:

As founder of a group promoting healthy eating among NYC youth and a chef in his own right, Bryant Terry has plenty of food for thought. Organically grown, sustainably harvested, locally sourced food for thought, that is. As InterActivist this week, Terry chews over questions from readers about soul food, Wal-Mart’s organic offerings, South Central Farm, his love of okra, and more.

Check it here. Lots of discussion of organics and sustainable agriculture.

There’s a fun profile of - and interview with - “diet scold” Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating and Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health in Salon.com. Fans of Morgan Spurlock might recognize Nestle from Super Size Me: “She’s the only person in the movie who is able to offer a coherent definition of a calorie.”

Here are a few excerpts:

In “What to Eat,” Nestle demystifies the American foodscape, exposing the ways that nutritional advice is tainted by food marketers and the diet industry. Readers will find there’s much to be learned by taking a 611-page extended shopping trip with her. For starters, many foods with healthy reputations — most yogurt and fruit drinks and many cereals, even those promoted as high-fiber or high-protein — are loaded with sugars, and should be treated as dessert, not breakfast. Junk food is fortified and packaged to make it sound healthier than it is: As Nestle writes, “Vitamin-enriched sodas are still sodas. Organic gummi bears are still candy. Trans fat-free snack foods are still salty and full of rapidly absorbable carbohydrates.” And, sorry, raw cookie-dough eaters; today’s eggs are more likely to be contaminated with salmonella than they were just a few decades ago.

The Q & A on organics is the most interesting exchange, I think:

You’re enthusiastic about organic food. Why should people choose organic?

One reason absolutely overrides all others. There are no pesticides or chemical fertilizers used in the process, which means it’s much less harmful for the environment and for farmworkers. Certainly organic farms can be about as productive, and the food is at least as nutritious, and quite possibly more nutritious than conventional or industrially grown products.

There’s been a lot of controversy about the organic standard. What makes you trust it?

I talked to a lot of people who are in the organic business — farmers, producers, product developers, inspectors — and they all think it’s legit. Everybody involved with it seems to feel that it is a process with a lot of integrity. For one reason: they all watch each other. And really, the only thing that they have going for them is the credibility of the process, and if that process isn’t credible, it’s going to hurt everybody.

That said, there is tremendous pressure on organic farmers to cut corners, and those pressures come not only from the USDA, but also from Congress and the industrial food industry. To the extent that politics can weaken the organic standards, the industry does stand to lose the credibility that they’re now holding onto with their fingernails.

Do conventional food producers want us to think that the organic certification process is corrupt?

Of course they do. They want you to think that organic production is dirtier, because it uses natural fertilizer. They want you to think it’s not as productive. They want you to think that it’s less nutritious.

Go check out the whole thing here.

Last month I crossposted a DawnWatch alert about Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, who was appearing on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

This month Grist Magazine scored an interview with the omnivore:

Ever wonder where the food on your plate came from? Writer Michael Pollan wondered, and has spent some 15 years finding out, tracing edibles back to their sources and uncovering a stomach-turning web of industrialization, government subsidies, and ignorant, unhealthy eaters. With his writing for The New York Times Magazine and a quartet of books — the latest is The Omnivore’s Dilemma — Pollan has become a celeb among foodies. He dropped by Grist’s office to chat with David Roberts about industrial organic, ubiquitous corn, and the cult of convenience.

You can read the whole Q&A here.