SOS 117 - Diet Analysis Assignment

               The term “local food” can mean a variety of things and isn’t always a clear-cut definition. Though Congress attempted to define local food products in the 2008 Farm Bill as:

“those that are ‘raised, produced, and distributed in the locality or region in which the final product is marketed, so that the total distance the product is transported is less than four hundred miles from the origin of the product, or within the same state where the product is produced’… (though) The distinction between local and regional food is not always clear (Chase & Grubinger, 2014, p. 19).”  

For the purposes of this paper, I will use a personal definition of “local foods” as ones grown and sold within the State of Arizona, and “regional foods” as those produced within a 500 mile radius of the City of Phoenix, where I reside.

               As it currently stands, due to the limited availability of local farmer’s market pop-ups at times when we are available to shop, the cost of the food found at the pop-ups, and the convenience of grocery stores within a 3 mile radius of where we reside, we do not go out of our way to shop local.  We frequent the major, multi-state chain market, Sprouts Farmers Market, to purchase fresher produce at a more convenient time, and a more reasonable price than the traditional farmer’s market pop-ups that I have seen around the area.  We do not make a conscious effort to seek out local food beyond supplementing our chain grocery store purchases with a trip to Sprouts.  Ultimately, my goal is to own my own farm, harvest when in season, and can (or freeze) and store the harvest for use year-round, but for the meantime, we go for what is convenient and cheap.  It’s not convenient to chase a pop-up farmer’s market around the valley, in the early morning hours of a weekday. 

After reading the material in this module, it became a bit clearer to me that there really isn’t a universal definition for what is and isn’t a local food.  For example, Sprouts is also a health food and organic store, frequently selling salmon from across the world next to blueberries that were grown just over the border in Mexico.  According to our text, “Local food is often considered to be a part of sustainable agriculture, which emphasizes community connections to farming and food systems (Chase et. al., 2014, p.22).”  Yet I wonder if this is always the case. 

At Sprouts, I can purchase produce that was grown within a 500 mile radius of the market, but I definitely don’t feel a connection with the farmer, nor do I have a way to verify that the produce was grown sustainably.  There are plenty of commercial operations producing produce grown locally and regionally, usually using unsustainable methods.  A great example of this is Romaine Lettuce.  Grown in nearby Yuma, Arizona, it certainly qualifies as locally grown by my above definition, and I do purchase it regularly, but recent attention on Yuma lettuce farms, for producing lettuce that contains the E. coli virus, proved that not all locally grown food is actually sustainably grown as Yuma lettuce farms are heavy commercial operations, utilizing heavy chemicals, and I have no attachment to the owner of the farms, the migrant workers who tend the fields and harvest the crops, or the truck drivers who transport it barely three hours from field to store. 

Pop-up farmer’s markets are always a rare treat to attend, and I feel a strong connection between the goat cheese and the goat farmer at these pop-ups.  However, the pop-ups normally occur at times when we are unable to go, and, though I realize the increase in cost is do to the love and care that this food gets before it is driven to the pop-up, it is still often out of our budget.  “Meanwhile, smaller local producers – unable to match the volume and prices of larger, faraway competitors – have either gone out of business or receive lower profits from their sales (Food Distribution and Transport, p. 3).”  Were I to have free time at 9am on a Wednesday morning, I am positive I could go to the local pop-up farmer’s market and purchase premium produce for my family, but these pop-ups normally have limited hours of operation, frequently change location, and offer a limited selection of foods.  The relative infrequency of pop-up markets and the early morning hours doesn’t help me when I need two tomatoes and a head of lettuce for tacos at 7:30pm. And it’s entirely possible that were I to plan ahead and buy my produce at a pop-up, that doesn’t always equate to fewer food miles, which is – I feel – the ultimate goal of the “local food movement.” While technically I am purchasing local heads of lettuce when I go to my local Kroger, especially in the winter, the methods used to cultivate that lettuce are a far cry from the sustainable methods used by local farmers, and the cost is usually less, because it simply costs less, per capita, to run a commercial operation than a small farm.  In fact, it’s entirely possible that the produce I can buy at a pop-up uses more greenhouse gas emissions than the commercially grown head of Yuma lettuce. 

“Transportation accounts for roughly 11 percent of the GHG emissions from the U.S. food supply chain (Food Distribution and Transport, p. 3).”  With this important detail, it would appear that locally grown food from a small, organic farmer would have lower GHG emissions than the big supply chain.  Yet, as is stated later in the same article:

“Shorter transport distances do not always equate with less fuel use or fewer GHG emissions. It is sometimes more efficient to trade with faraway places that have advantages in producing certain foods. Recent studies found that shipping diary from New Zealand to the UK, for example, uses less energy and releases fewer GHG emissions than producing dairy in the UK (p. 4).”

Due to their increased payload, a truck filled with Yuma lettuce that is headed into Utah might have advantages when it comes to lowering GHG emissions over the small farmer who drives fewer miles in less fuel efficient vehicles, to constantly moving pop-up farmer’s markets. 

My current diet contributes significantly to GHG emissions.  We consume a lot of animal products, which account for a majority of food systems GHG emissions.  And while there will be fewer food miles getting from the Shamrock Farms dairy processing plant on Black Canyon Highway to my local grocery store than it would be if I were to buy milk processed in another state, there is a lot more involved than just how far the milk traveled, as stated above.  According to the video, “Life Cycle Assessment of Animal Agriculture (2015),” almost 72% of all GHG emissions involved with producing a gallon of milk happen before the milk even gets on the truck to the store (14:11).  There are many factors to consider in the “Cradle-to-Grave” analysis, such as the methane released by the cows, the chemicals used to produce their feed, the soil where the feed grows, and even the cooling of the product (10:57).  In research published by Carol Johnston and Chris Wharton, “foods like peanuts and protein powders were most efficient at delivering protein with a small environmental cost, while cheeses, grains, and beef were least efficient (Greguska, 2019).” As omnivores, we consume red meat, cheese, and grains as a large part of our diet, especially rice which is listed in the research as a “sometimes” food.  I have known for a long time that the cattle industry is one of the least sustainable agricultural industries on the market.  When we pick up a pound of ground beef at Kroger, we are contributing to inhumane animal treatment, unsustainable crop operations needed to feed these mass produced cattle, and GHG emissions.  Part of why I got into sustainability is that I would like to keep eating steak, but at present, the commercial cattle industry is completely destroying our planet.  When I lived in Las Vegas, I was able to purchase into a cattle farm co-op to purchase wholesale meat raised in sustainable conditions.  Every three months, they would deliver high quality and sustainably farmed beef, chicken, and pork at an affordable rate.  I’ve yet to find an equivalent in the Phoenix metropolitan area, but I am very interested in purchasing animal products from a smaller butcher who has direct access to the farm itself.  After all, one of Arizona’s five C’s is cattle.  We have a vested interest in making sure that the cattle products that we will eventually be able to afford is farmed sustainably, as cattle does not tend to do very well in the middle of the desert.  Does this change how I purchase my animal products?  I am, at this point, resigned to supporting an industry whose practices I do not agree with for the sake of cost, availability, and convenience. 

After reviewing the previous module, we decided to add a few cows to our (purely hypothetical) farm, to increase the hardiness of the crops, till the land with their stomping, and enrich the soil with their manure.  I don’t plan to ever give up animal products, but I recognize that picking up that Styrofoam and plastic prepackaged ground beef and putting it in my cart is a silent supporting vote for the currently unsustainable Industrial Food Animal Production (IFAP) practices.  But my hope is that one day I can assist with the development of technology that will not only maximize profits for “concentrated animal feeding operations” (Food Animal Production), but assist with making the process more humane (as with “The Grandin Method,” which keeps cows moving in a rotational pattern to keep them calm as they are led to slaughter), and less destructive on the environment.  Right now, my options are to buy highly processed plant based meat replacements for meals, which can often be much more expensive and less nutrient rich as animal protein (Food Processing, p. 2), or silently support an industry I fundamentally disagree with because of its impacts on, not just the planet, but the individual animal welfare. 

Right now, I have to save every penny that I can, and a plant based diet in our price range just wouldn’t be able to support the nutrients we need the way that commercial animal agriculture does.  When we earn a little more, we will be better able to endorse with our wallets and support small business by purchasing meat either through a co-op, like the one in Las Vegas, or directly from a butcher who has direct access to the cows he will be processing for my next meal.  Later on down the line, when we establish our small farm to fully sustain ourselves, we will invest in animals to keep the farm healthy and eventually be slaughtered and processed by an independent butcher for our meals.  This way I know exactly how my steak was treated before it hit my plate. I know what it ate, I know how it was treated, and I know its valuable contributions to our family, both as a potential dairy cow and eventually as processed beef.  As my stakeholder friend, Liz, always says, “Every day of an animal’s life should be good up until the last one.”  That’s just not the case in CFAO’s.

As proven by the earlier referenced Yuma lettuce farms, food safety doesn’t just start with a quick spin in water, a clean knife, and a disinfected cutting board. It starts on the farm. Currently, the FDA is largely responsible for keeping tabs on industrial farms to make sure they use tactics to reduce the spread of disease, but the last time the laws were updated was in 1938 with the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) (Food Safety Modernization Act, 2013, 0:17).  But 1 in 6 people will get sick of a foodborne illness, and 3,000 people die annually as a result (1:10).  Causes that affect the safe handling of food from farm to table are animals entering the field, workers with poor hygiene, and water with pathogens.  In the case of the lettuce farms, food tracing was able to backtrack thousands of cases of E. coli to poor conditions on the farm.  Commercial lettuce farms often hire migrant workers, many of whom aren’t allowed time for a bathroom break, much less taught proper food handling methods.  The farms also likely do not use potable water for their crops, as potable water is a much more expensive purchase than reclamated water, which is often full of pathogens since it has not been properly sanitized.  As a result of the owners’ desires to make as much money as possible while spending as little money as possible, they put the public health at risk to turn a profit.  In one documented case described in our text, “one egg company in particular was well known for repeatedly being fined by state and federal officials for violating workplace and environmental regulations in several states, stretching from Maine to Iowa (2014, p. 191).” Given the case of the egg company that would rather pay millions in fines than clean up their hen houses, I don’t believe it’s worthwhile to trust the commercial food industry to care about anything other than profits. 

There’s a scene in “Fight Club” where the Narrator explains to Tyler Durden that if the cost of a recall is more than the cost of the litigation, they don’t do a recall.  I feel that this egg company took a page right out of that playbook.  It is cheaper for them to continue operations as is, regardless of the health and safety of the consumer.  And fundamentally, that is the driving force behind most commercial agricultural companies – profit.  As we saw with the Yuma lettuce, poor working conditions, abuses of the migrants tending the field, the use of highly toxic chemicals on the plants that cause leukemia in their workers, the GHG emissions caused by their massive machinery, the soil erosion of monocropping, using inferior water instead of potable water, and the other factors that led to the perfect storm of an E. coli outbreak across the nation, profits are more important than precaution.  I personally think the government is overspent, and there’s very little that the FDA can do to keep a set of eyes on every food crop grown in this country, and every crop that’s imported.  There have been improvements in regulation, but we can’t be everywhere at once. The American people just wouldn’t fund an expansion like that, no matter how much it mattered to their health.  Much like with Covid-19, food poisoning generally just causes a few days of feeling under the weather.  Far less people die of food borne illness per year than die by the annual flu.  It’s seen as a non-issue to many Americans, an almost insignificant number of people, a statistical margin of error, rather than a public health risk worth looking into.  Big business doesn’t want more eyes on their operations.  Americans don’t want to pay for enough funding to keep us all safe from preventable illnesses, choosing instead to blame the individual for not washing their lettuce well enough, instead of inspecting the contaminated water that is poured onto crops and seeps into the soil. 

As to the final question, I was actually impressed with all of the information on vertical farming and growing indoors.  I had always planned on having a few greenhouses on my little farm, mostly to grow Bell Peppers, and crops that otherwise wouldn’t survive in the cold Ohio winter soil. What I hadn’t considered is that, instead of spending 18-24” of land per Bell Pepper plant, and then adding in various other crops to fill in the gaps and manage the many problems that come with growing in the raw land, I could grow the plants in an indoor vertical farm, virtually eliminating the need for cover crops, staking, and friendly IPM neighbor plants.  This revolution is how technology is going to revolutionize the agriculture area.  In the first video of the module, we’re shown an indoor vertical farm where the Dutch are growing 35% of their country’s vegetables on 1% of the land (Could Indoor Farming Help Address Food Shortages?, 2017).  Advances in LED lighting, retrofitting unused urban structures, water delivery technology, and the water cycle are allowing us to now farm seasonal plants year-round, as is the case with the mushroom farm.  The initial cost can give a bit of a sticker shock, but once you have the set-up, the possibilities are almost limitless, well beyond spinach, leafy greens, and mushrooms.  If we were to farm on 10 acres, we could save valuable land space with indoor vertical farms and greenhouses.  There are advantages to the traditional methods of growing, for sure.  But with our population exploding and cleared land becoming a very valuable commodity, indoor vertical farming provides a solution to the most perplexing problems of my little Ohio farm: that of preserving habitat for native wildlife, while preventing native wildlife from breaking in and eating all my lettuce harvest.  If it is all in a closed-door green house, stacked vertically in columns on the walls, native wildlife can’t just open a door and eat my whole farm apart, destroying my family’s food supplies, and forcing us back onto the grid just to feed ourselves. 

We can only do so much with what remains of our land, and vertical indoor farming seems to be the best idea we have come up with thus far to feed an exploding population without taking up too much space.  Rooftop gardens turn bleak heat islands with no other purpose into green spaces that provide ecosystem services far beyond just snacks to eat.  Turning old warehouse buildings into wall farms means less impact to the urban landscape while providing huge yields.  And on my little farm… a few animals - some to breed, some to sell, some to milk, and some to butcher – can easily trample the land where crops grow that are better suited for the Ohio landscape.  They can graze openly on clover as I enrich the soil for a crop of corn, stomping some of the plant matter into the soil as biomatter, using their manure to add nitrogen and phosphorus, eating a more natural diet than they do penned up in cattle farms.  And with the further development of technology to advance some of these early experiments, it is entirely possible that we CAN turn the completely destructive CAFO’s into sustainable animal agriculture farms, thereby ensuring that we can still enjoy a steak without destroying our planet in the process. 

It all started with one question: How can we do this better? I recently went to visit those old cotton crop fields where I first asked that question, and what I found amazed me.  Unlike the poor sharecroppers in the George Washington Carver video (Modern Marvels: George Washington Carver Tech, 2005) who only grew cotton in all of their fields, with no crop rotation, no cover cropping, no soil enrichment, and leaving themselves completely vulnerable to total crop failure, I was surprised to see many sustainable practices in use in those commercial fields.  Of the four fields on the 100-acre farm, one was actively growing cotton, two were covered in native grasses, and one was sprouting a new winter crop that I couldn’t yet identify.  The irrigation canals were properly maintained and slowly adding water to the two crop fields.  The soil was moist and looked healthier than any I’ve seen on a commercial farm.  And I smiled when I stood in the field where I first asked that question, while watching it being harvested by large farm equipment, to see it covered in a regenerative cover crop, surrounded by native vegetation (and wildlife), and the crops being rotated around the 100 acre property.  It gives me hope.  Just like indoor and vertical farming give me hope.  We have to figure out how to feed almost 10 billion people within 30 years.  If those farmers behind my old neighborhood have figured out how to maximize yield while maintaining sustainability for their crops, we can figure out the technology that will help us use far less space to grow far more food.  And who knows.  Maybe we will be able to reproduce the success rate of the Dutch tomato farmer, with his 2.5 million pounds of tomatoes on 20 acres of space.  With the right technology, I think sustainable eating is not only a possibility for me and my family, but possible for the world.  And it all started by standing in a cotton field, for me as well as George Washington Carver. 

 

 

References

Chase, L., & Grubinger, V. (2014). Food, Farms, and Community: Exploring Food Systems. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.

Could Indoor Farming Help Address Food Shortages? (2017). [Motion Picture]. PBS News Hour.

Crumpacker, M. (2019, January 31). This is What You Need to Know about Aquaponics. Retrieved from Medium: https://medium.com/@MarkCrumpacker/this-is-what-you-need-to-know-about-aquaponics-596f73cefbe

Food Animal Production. (n.d.). In Teaching the Food System. The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.

Food Distribution and Transport. (n.d.). In Teaching the Food System. The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.

Food Processing. (n.d.). In Teaching the Food System. The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.

Food Safety Modernization Act (2013). [Motion Picture]. U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Greguska, E. (2019, June 21). The Environmental Impact of the Protein We Consume. Retrieved from Health@ASU: https://health.asu.edu/environmental-impact-protein-we-consume?_ga=2.127890830.2092213379.1604219347-1055522527.1585865428

Life Cycle Assessment of Animal Agriculture (2015). [Motion Picture]. Livestock & Poultry Environ. Learning Community.

Modern Marvels: George Washington Carver Tech (2005). [Motion Picture]. History Channel.

 

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Grade: 100/100

Comments: Excellent, (Katlin)!! 

Part 1: Excellent discussion, (Katlin). Nice examples, especially Yuma. 

Part 2: There are some ranches local-ish to Phoenix that you might consider looking into; I've heard good things (prices & sustainability)! 

Part 3: Love that you used a "Fight Club" reference! A first :) 

Part 4: I think a couple of the videos in Mod 7 about the future of farming/ag will intrigue you! Some neat ideas for your soon-to-be (hopefully) farm. 

 "[I]t is entirely possible that we CAN turn the completely destructive CAFO’s into sustainable animal agriculture farms, thereby ensuring that we can still enjoy a steak without destroying our planet in the process." I think we can! 

George Washington Carver was amazing, wasn't he?! Loved that you had shared moment (in a manner of speaking).