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Change brewing in organic wine labeling
When organic standards went mainstream under the USDA, many of those who are most passionate about organic farming were outraged. The USDA isn't known for making flexible rules or for concerning itself with sustainability.
To wit: Because preservatives were verboten in most organic foods, the USDA also forbade the addition of sulfites to any wines earning the organic label.
The choice preempted the development of any serious organic wine industry. It's really, really hard to make good wine without sulfites, which stop fermentation at the desired point and keep fruit flavors bright.
California winemakers — many of whom are very serious about sustainability — have adapted in a number of ways. Some label their wine as "made with organic grapes," but find that label lackluster.
Others have gone with more woo-woo philosophies, such as biodynamics, that gave birth to the organic movement in the first place. The California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance has developed its own seal, which embraces a variety of approaches. (Find a list of wines earning that seal here.)
The result of the multi-pronged approach, however, is a confused consumer.
But some green vintners — including Paul Dolan, pictured, a pioneer of organic grape growing — are now pushing the USDA to allow sulfites in wine labeled organic.
I've heard from people who've worked with wine that sulfites are, in fact, nasty stuff, but only a tiny amount is used per gallon of wine. Nor are they the source of most wine allergies — and, as their advocates point out, allergies are not part of the organic criteria.
What do you think? Should added sulfites be allowed in organic wines?
| January 07 2011 at 01:32 PM
EPA memo reveals concern that pesticide causes bee deaths
A prime suspect in bee colony collapse — the mystery that threatens a third of our food supply — is neocontonoid pesticides.
Bayer's clothianidin (brand name Poncho) — which is excreted in pollen — is particularly suspect, and beekeepers and environmentalists recently called on the EPA to pull the pesticide from the market.
The groups based their request on a leaked EPA memo [pdf], which questioned the validity of the study Bayer used to obtain approval of the pesticide.
According to the memo:
information from standard tests and field studies, as well as incident reports involving other neonicotinoids insecticides ... suggest the potential for long term toxic risk to honey bees and other beneficial insects.
Although Bayer's initial study turned up no problems, the memo states, "in another review of this field study in light of additional information, deficiencies were identified that render the study supplemental."
Essentially, the memo seems to suggest that further study may be needed and that, in the meantime, clothianidin should bear a label indicating that it is harmful to bees.
Strangely, the EPA is now downplaying the memo's significance, in language that also downplays colony collapse — which is weird because beekeepers have lost between 30 and 90 percent of their hives since 2006, and bees, it bears repeating, help produce a third of our food.
My guess is the EPA doesn't want to ruffle any corporate feathers while it sorts out what to do about clothianidin — but sort it out it must before we run out of fruits and nuts and get really cranky.
| December 28 2010 at 02:00 PM
Don't blame feminists for estrogen in the water
Hell hath no fury like a man emasculated: The recent brouhaha over TSA security scans and pat-downs makes that clear. And it's also no coincidence that one of the most widely shared environmental concerns is over feminizing hormones and the endocrine disruptors that simulate them.
iStockphoto
Can I catch womanhood by drinking the water?
Perhaps, but don't blame women for it, says a new UCSF study. Yes, there are almost 12 million American women who take the pill, and they do excrete some of its estrogen in their urine. But all humans excrete hormones in their waste, and sewage treatment plants handle them readily.
The real culprit of the effeminacy — err, estrogen in the water is agriculture. That's right, all those dairy cows also excrete lady hormones in their waste, and when agricultural waste is used untreated as fertilizer, problems arise. The other major culprit of our threatened masculinity is soy. And, no, not from tofu, but from the soy that's fed to feedlot-raised livestock.
Birth control pills account for less than 1 percent of the estrogen in the water.
So there you have it: It's not the feminist on the pill or the tofu-eating vegan man who make your masculinity catawampus, but the über-macho industrial rancher who thinks environmentalism is for sissies.
| December 10 2010 at 01:03 PM
Green your cocktail hour
In the past, when I've written about the environmental problems associated with pot growing, many 420-friendly readers have responded that alcohol is no environmental saint, either.
Shutterstock
The U.S. alcohol industry releases as much greenhouse gas a year as 1.9 million households. But not all liquors are alike, according a handy analysis from Mother Jones.
If beer is your thing, go for what's on tap or what's in a can over what's in a bottle to get the most buzz for your ecological bad.
If you're into oenophilia — not that there's anything wrong with that — you might need to make some surprising choices to go green. If you live in California or anywhere west of the Mississippi, you ought to buy California wines, whether you like the value or not. (As I've written before, the local wine industry has made some major environmental advances.) If you live East of the Mississippi, you'll put down a smaller carbon footprint if you buy French or Italian.
If you're into the hard stuff, drink whiskey, preferably Maker's Mark. Yes, it's that specific — here's why: Other alcohols are made to be super pure, then diluted, requiring more energy and water. Both rum and (Write it!) tequila also produce a lot of plant waste that often gets dumped into waterways (exception DonQ, which reuses the waste).
OK, you liquor snobs may say, why not some single-malt honey from a boutique producer? Well, according to Mother Jones, those high-end producers use more energy-intensive distillers. Maker's Mark earns the medal of distinction because it buys local grain and generates energy from plant waste. As a coup de grace, much of the company's land is also a nature preserve.
| December 07 2010 at 03:37 PM
Who does the ethanol tax credit help?
Ethanol is a controversial issue, with many greens claiming its better than fossil fuel and quite a few shaking their heads at the assertion. It's a hard-fought issue, too, because big players with big pockets win or lose with the federal government's endorsement of the alternative fuel.
Here's but one scene from the corn wars. In its lame-duck session, Congress is poised to renew the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit. Designed to make ethanol cheaper, the credit pays refiners such as BP, Shell and Exxon, 45 cents a gallon to blend ethanol with gasoline.
Do farmers also win with the subsidy? Probably not. Ethanol has long been touted as a deus ex-machina for the endangered American farmer, and back in the Bush years, it was popular to point to farmer-owned ethanol plants as proof. Indeed, in 2002, farmers owned about half the country's sixty-odd ethanol plants. But today they own just 19 percent.
It was also popular to say, when faced with evidence that getting fuel from corn was not greener than burning dinosaur bones, that corn ethanol was merely a bridge to so-called next-generation biofuels. But instead of moving away from corn and towards next-gen fuels, the share of ethanol plants using King Corn has nearly tripled.
At least on its face, then, the VEETC is yet another handout to Big Oil and King Corn, who hardly need the boost.
| November 18 2010 at 07:34 AM
The end of chocolate?
Better stock up on chocolate now, because in 20 years a bar will cost $11, say industry insiders.
The Cocoa Research Association produced the latest round of data, but big players like Hershey and Mars have already sequenced the cocoa genome to hunt for ways to create more resilient, higher-yielding trees.
Cocoa can only be grown close to the equator, mostly in West Africa, and farmers there lack incentives to replant the trees as they die. Cocoa trees take three years to mature. Small-scale producers of the delicious stuff earn just 80 cents a day selling to the mega-corporations that control the market.
Combine that with ever-more gluttonous choco-habits and you've got a shortage. Indeed, the price of chocolate has doubled in the last six years.
Says John Mason, founder of the Ghana-based Nature Conservation Research Council: "In 20 years chocolate will be like caviar. It will become so rare and so expensive that the average Joe just won't be able to afford it."
Glenn Beck be damned: Don't buy gold bars; buy chocolate.
| November 09 2010 at 10:47 AM
Your carbon metabolism
A recent Spanish study analyzed human food consumption's contribution to carbon and water pollution. It found that eating — from production up to and including excrement — makes up a full 20 percent of an average (Spanish) person's carbon footprint, or two full tons of carbon a year.
The biggest chunk of carbon pollution came from agriculture, livestock, fishing and food processing. The same activities contribute the lion's share of water pollution, as well.
But the study also documented — apparently for the first time — that human excrement does in fact pollute waterways by contributing nitrogen and phosphorus, fostering algae and decreasing the amount of oxygen in the water.
The good news is, your potty breaks are carbon neutral, even with T.P. factored in because your — ahem — emissions are offset by the carbon-fixing of photosynthesis (basically, no more carbon comes out than went in).
I see a future for this study and other potty-sci research as good bathroom reading.
| November 05 2010 at 03:27 PM
The fate of the bad apples who produced those bad eggs
This summer's record-breaking egg recall didn't come fast enough for more than 1,500 people who were sickened by salmonella.
Getty Images
The public ire was further raised when reports emerged that both of the factory farms from which the eggs had emerged were infested with manure, rodents and maggots. And to add insult to injury, one of the filthy farmers in question, Jack DeCoster, had already been cited hundreds of times.
So what punishment was meted out by the FDA? DeCoster received a tepid warning letter, threatening the "regulatory action" that you'd think would come from having sickened more than a thousand people by failing to remedy problems previously cited.
The other filthy farm received a letter clearing them to resume selling their eggs.
But don't (just) blame the FDA. The agency doesn't have the muscle to back up its threats. A bill now stalled in the Senate would supply the spinach protein needed to beef bulk it up. If ever something deserved an up-or-down vote, it's this bill.
| October 26 2010 at 11:13 AM
Big Ag's big PR blitz
The Corn Refiners Association's move to rename high-fructose corn syrup "corn sugar" is apparently not an isolated event in the industry.
With our factory farming system coming under so much scrutiny that even the mainstremiest of all, Wal-Mart, announced local produce purchasing goals this month, Big Ag is ponying up to fight back.
Industry bigwigs have tapped Tip Tipton — the man behind the wildly successful "Got Milk?" campaign — to head up a $30-million-a-year PR blitz to offset Big Ag's increasingly bad reputation.
National Corn Growers Association PR man Ken Colombini told a trade publication that, "The other side is getting so much more funding, so much more interest in the mainstream media."
A factory farming industry group apparently made the same absurd point in order to secure nearly $1 million in federal taxpayer funds to counter the anti-pesticides work of the Environmental Working Group.
EWG is a relatively well funded nonprofit with an annual budget of about $5 million, but compare that to a single $30-million ad campaign and it's clear that if the sustainability camp is winning, it's because they've got facts, not dollars, on their side.
| October 25 2010 at 06:34 AM
Turkey: fiction and fact
With the holidays approaching and having recently bought some "turkey breast" slices for my dog, I started thinking about how turkey is raised.
Farm Sanctuary
I have a vision of the big, ugly birds plucking around in a grassy area, which I think I must have picked up in public school somewhere. But there's way too much turkey for sale for that vision to be accurate: Upwards of 250 million birds are raised for slaughter every year in the United States — 46 million of those are for the last Thursday in November alone.
According to the animal rights group Farm Sanctuary, turkeys are raised in warehouses, where they get three square feet to live in. To limit the damage done by fights in such crowded conditions, poultry farmers clip off the birds' beaks and toes without anesthesia. Turkeys and other birds are also excluded from the Humane Slaughter Act, which requires that animals be stunned prior to slaughter.
We've genetically engineered the birds to grow unnaturally fast and unnaturally large. Farm Sanctuary cites an article in an agricultural newspaper: "If a seven pound [human] baby grew at the same rate that today's turkey grows, when the baby reache[d] 18 weeks of age, it would weigh 1,500 pounds."
As a result of their unnatural size, the birds suffer from cardiovascular disease and "cowboy legs," a condition in which their legs, unable to support their weight, bow out.
Hardly the happy picture evoked by the multi-colored, hand-shaped birds your kids bring home from school.
So what are your choices? As with chickens, a "free range" label doesn't mean much. The World Society for the Protection of Animals suggests that you look for "pasture-raised" birds, ideally also bearing a "certified humane" label.
And, of course, there's always Tofurky.
| October 22 2010 at 10:16 AM
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