The price we pay for cheap food.

If supermarket prices included the environmental, health and social issues associated with industrial food then the make up of our supermarket trolleys may look drastically different. Our relentless demand for cheap food has created a powerful industry that has been steadily providing us with ever-cheaper calories at the cost of our personal health and environmental wellbeing.

Although the New Zealand farming industry is better than most and nowhere near as messed up as America’s we still have our problems lurking in the system. Even Michael Pollan, author of the omnivores dilemma and in defense of food, a crusader for food didn’t realize New Zealand’s farming industry relied on chemical fertilizer. Our grass farming mean we don’t have feedlot effluent to deal with but the damage from runoff has destroyed most of our lowland waterways. Some reports state 95% are too polluted for swimming or fishing.

Swine flu is arguably a direct result of humanities quest for cheap meat. Continual price pressure from large supermarket chains force farmers to find more ways to reduce costs resulting the concentration of 65m pigs in 65,000 facilities when 50 years ago there were around 50m on more than 1m farms in the US. A transition from the old-fashioned pig pens to intensive methods and structures, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems ‘living’ in appalling conditions that enable the exchanging of pathogens with incredible velocity among their fellow prisoners.

Intensive pig farming is being phased out in New Zealand but environmental problems caused by the dairy industry’s boom are being accepted as the cost of our standard of living. We have a reputation not only for our clean green image but as one of the most productive farming nations and we are squandering it with short-term policies leading to dependence on high input farming. We may be greenwashing spending more on advertising our greenness to the world than on green policy.

Factory farming extends past the well-known battery chickens plight, to be put off meat for life watch meet your meat a disturbing documentary on farming practices in America -http://www.meat.org/.

Apart from all turning vegetarian we the consumer can demand more local sustainable produced food slowly changing and challenging the system by using factors other than price to determine our purchases.
The consumer has begun to demand more information when looking at product on a supermarket shelf. The boom of organics and fair trade proved consumers can still influence industry with their demand. The return to popularity of farmers markets and the local food movement has begun this potential transition.
Local food is more about increased information than reducing fossil fuel dependency.

Food is not a product where cost should be the most important purchase influencer because the cost of cheap food is far too great.
Go watch Food Inc http://www.foodincmovie.com/

urban gardening over

So been a longtime since i posted, left nyc and enjoying tropical whether in cancun. Decided time to get back to ranting about waste and food. More of the stuff i set out to do when i started this blog.

green tomatoes

The flowers have brought bumble bees and now the fruit is finally showing

why

It was going so good then this sudden spindly sprouting???? To much water? it did rain a lot recently. Not enough sun? Early morning until early afternoon. No i think it must be the crazy spring wheather. It was beautiful and hot for a week then cold for two. Anyone know how to salvage my arugala. Thinking i should remove all spindly sprouts

arugula

mange tout

The salad

Well my peas are going strong but need some staking and i am refusing to buy anything tried to use some rose stems, the tomato seeds died soon after emergence will germinate another round and the arugala is getting eaten by something. Maybe it is the pigeons that are attracted to my garden. I have put in toothpicks as defense but think more is required.......

local fair trade

Food and morals are even apparent when people are struggling to survive. As the percentage of income spent on survival reduces, morals food become more desirable. Hence the success of fair trade and local food. Fair trade has obvious morals that we the rich dont want to exploit the poor farmer. I see local food the same way, we farmers market supports are willing to pay the farmer a premium for a variety of different reasons. One being we dont agree with the power that giant retailers have over suppliers. These specifications often mean whether events causing minor superficial damage renders an entire crop worthless and of course causes a lot of waste. Vegetables and fruit must comform to certian sizes and shapes. Natural varity is bred out and we end up with perfect looking uniform produce of questionable quality. The same fair deal moral converted into premium by fair trade can be applied to local food. Small relatively powerless producers can sell at a premium because there food provides a better deal to the farmer. Local food has succeeded in making the small family farm more viable. The conflict between local and fair food arises because local food aims at reducing the distance food travels. International food supplies immediately are seen as products to avoid but the situation is complicated when you start to look at effiecieny, common sense and unwillingness to give up on modern conviences. Because i live in a cold climate should i never eat tropical fruit? oh its all too hard, i am confused and willl just give up. The problem of trying to create tranparency in the complexity of international trade. Actually i am lost, what was i trying to say, eat morally.
I think the pricing of local moral food is still trying to find a balance, difficult as the elasticities of demand vary widely between different consumers and products. I will pay double for good meat but not mushrooms, why dunno? dont like to feel ripped off and shitake market mushrooms arent worth twice the supermarket ones to me but the bacon is probably because of the awareness of have of what it takes and causes to grow a pig so cheaply.

local washing

Wholefoods in union square is right next to the green market, many business have moved into the area since the success of this pioneering successful farmers market transforming a once undesirable area into a bustling attraction. Wholefoods buy local campaign goes against the fundamental reasons for local food and turns local food into a value added product for the same food system organic food set out to chance. Why would anyone buy a product from wholefoods when the same product of similar price and quality is available from the green market. Convenience is the only argument but that is a weak one, seeing as thought the two retailers are right next to each other. The real convenience of the supermarket is the extensive range that consumers desire, but I wonder whether we really desire this range or have just been tricked by marketing. Are people now realizing the deception of are we reverting back to the olden days. Saving time was the prominent factor in changing the way we shop and eat, now people are beginning to demand less convenience and more morally acceptable food. Eggs, meat and the single use plastic bags have all created some change in the food system, the breach of trust from delivering the ever cheaper prices to the consumer has breed the consumer who seeks transparent food, they want to know where and how it was grown. The choice is creating even more range, now you can buy local, organic or conventional or some mix of the terms. The desire for change does not work in a commercial model so step up the farmers markets and community supported agriculture. Until the better supermarkets like wholefoods actually start informing us rather than confusing us we can not believe in USDA certification or that it is the green way to shop.

this is a local store for locals

Local food has swept through the western worlds food systems creating a movement away from large scale production and sale. Myself and many others are willing to pay a premium and inconvenience of shopping at farmers markets. Why? It is far more pleasant to shop outdoors even in the middle of winter often directly with the producer. The middlemen are shut out and food integrity is highlighted with vendors often becoming educators. Dialogue and interactions is encouraged, people are proud of what they sell and buy. Many varieties unsuited to large scale production are rediscovered, the people can feel more in control of their food supply. Local meat producers slam the regulating authorities, mocking their definitions of free range and grass fed. The whole experience turns shopping from a chore to an educating adventure, learning more about seasonal eating, interesting interactions, free tastings, a cup of hot cider and a sense of responsible consumerism.

There is definitely a perceived sense of environmentalism through the logic of reducing food mile = less carbon footprint but that is debatable due to economies of scale achieved by mass monoculture, and transportation systems. The reality is a tiny fraction of emission related to production are from transportation and one could make a far greater GHG difference by eating less red meat. The beauty of local small scale meat produces is they are more expensive so discourage demand........

Saving on you food bill

We waste huge amounts of food.

“In the United States, for instance, as much as 30 percent of food, worth some US$48.3 billion, is thrown away.”
Most of this waste is easily and entirely avoidable,
“£9bn of avoidable food waste was disposed of in England and Wales each year. It is mostly food that could have been consumed if it had been better stored or managed, or had not been left uneaten on a plate.”

The 12-step program for reforming the wastaholic (no finding god here)

1 - Admit there is a problem with reckless wasting
“On average, households waste 14 percent of their food purchases. Fifteen percent of that includes products still within their expiration date but never opened. Jones estimates an average family of four currently tosses out $590 per year, just in meat, fruits, vegetables and grain products.”

2- Increase your consciousness of the food waste you produce. For me this involved saving my food scraps for compost. Removing the out of sight out and mind mentality brought about by conventional disposal methods, down the sink or out in the trash.

3 – Commit to the extra effort and discipline required.

4 – Organization of your fridge. A good chef keeps an obsessively organized fridge and is pedantic about rotating stock, because one of their main responsibilities is to minimize waste.

5 – Keep a strong awareness of your inventory, this enables you to avoid duplicate purchases and use produce before it spoils.

6 – Plan menus around the ingredients that need using, yesterdays leftovers become the basis of today’s meal along with the carrots that are starting to go limp. The internet is a great resource for ideas of what to do with the sad looking celery.

7 - Control portions, cooking and serving smaller portions reduces the potentials for leftovers and waste. We generally over eat and won’t become malnourished if we don’t cook quite enough once in a while.

8- Buy less more frequently. You will be eating fresher food and shopping more precisely when you purchase for only a few meals at a time.

9 – Get inventive. Some of my most well received meals was created from leftover this and that. See bottom of the fridge salad…….

10 – Use your freezer wisely. Certain meals and foods freeze well. Most ripe fruit, certain vegetable for certain uses, a juicer is great too.

11- Habit, create your own shopping and cooking techniques that make it is easy to recycle, reduce and reuse food waste.

12 –Fun, enjoy the time you spend saving yourself money and helping reduce the worlds wasteful ways

If we all stop wasting food that could have been eaten, the CO2 impact would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 5 cars off the road.

Bottom of the fridge salad

This was a fusion of left over flavours, Middle Eastern met Mexican and Asian. As usual the plan changed many times, they were going out for dinner then not, so I grabbed things and ended up with.
Marinated eggplant – roast cubes with a little oil, s and p, toast spices cumin, coriander, fennel, anise, clove, etc and grind. Coat cooked eggplant and cover with plenty of oil, some lemon juice, garlic ginger etc anything you like…….
Pico de gallo – a simple salsa of chopped tomatoes, jalapenos, onion, lime, cilantro…..
Chicken –chicken poached in sake and mirin with lemongrass
Rice -

A little chopping and combining, some reheating and one problem they wanted me to make more.

The fruits of the streets of Manhattan

A little explanation, most people notice a terrible waste and do nothing about it. It didnt sit right with me, I couldnt just let it go, it wasnt right. So many people are struggling and would seriously benefit from this waste. Half a dozen bags of frozen food took my eye on broadway, mainly because of the gaint bag contianing hundreds of haagen daz icecreams. After a double take, I decided to enter the store to ask why they had throw out so much product. Before I picked someone to ask, I noticed the broken freezer. There it was empty with a paper note stating dont open broken door. Back outside and the hardest part opening rubbish bags on a busy street. All still frozen even most of the icecream and all i have is a mini fridge with ice box. So I carried a few meals home and put one in the microwave. I hate ready meal microwave food, it doesnt deserve the title food a better description would be highly processed edible substance. As my substance heated I sent out a alert to the free section of craigslist and to the freegan mailing list. By this time my substance was themonuclear, it burnt my mouth reducing my ability to taste any hint of flavor it did contian. I gathered my tools, string, sisscors, stapler, camera and bag and set out to reduce the cities waste. Once you have opened a trash bag and eaten from it, any aprehension is gone. Dessert time, mmm almond haagen daz made all the better when other began to turn up and pilage the bounty of broadway and broome st. My craigslist ad had helped a struggling artist who biked over from brooklyn and was stoked on the score. Even some vegans took meals to give to friends and as soon as others are rummaging through trash it is much easier for more to join. I left with a full bag to try and make more take notice of the failures of the market. My grand plan - hang food from trees. Was asked by one passer by what i was up to, as i explained she and I both realised i was just another crazy person and she hurried away. I watched much interest in my instalations but didnt see anyone follw the intructions, simply eat me, dont waste me, still frozen and safe @9pm 2/26. On a few i tried to explain the story of the store freezer breaking. I am left thinking about the trust required to eat from my street fruit tree and decide I would feel safer eating from the trash bags rather than a out of place looking product placed or hanging from a tree. Maybe I need to look at setting up a better system for getting the word out in these situations. Soup kitchens, homeless shelters etc could find people happy to eat this food but my goal is to reduce waste and inspire thought... hmm time to think some more

sprouted

I have babies in my window sill. The snow peas, well i think they are actually sugar snaps have just emerged. Seems a bit ridiculous as there is half a foot of snow outside the window. My urban gardening has begun, the food scraps I took to be turned into compost are now feeding my peas.
The urban cycle

Freegan tree

When a shops freezer breaks, does the food all get wasted. The laws in America seem to mean so, perfectly "good" well it was food is thrown out because of the perceived health risk. Yeah it feels weird going into trash bags but saving food from felt good tonight as at least one person other than me benefited from it and my fruits of the streets of manhattan tree got some attention.

Planters

Saw a free ad on craigslist. This ended up with me guiding and balancing 4 planters full of soil on my skateboard though chinatown. Quite ridiculous but fun and now i have 3 big window sill planters that may have been diverted from landfil. Not quite what i set out to do with the salad in my window project but considering my lack of tools and space. I am satisfied and need to figure out how to make space through creative design. Too many planters and not enough windowsills...

perma frost planting

So ignoring all advice I have seeds in the ground. Well in a pot next to the heater to help defrost. The inside windowsill is the only possibility for growing at this stage as the pot out side froze solid. So if i get lucky in 5 - 10 days my first vege will be growing....

Warm up

Sick of waiting until the last frosts so have brought my seeds and am attempting despite the advice of people who can probably keep a tulip alive more than two day. My snow peas seeds are soaking and will be planted tomorrow. with a 70 til harvest estimate I mite be able to get a harvest off these before the end of the lease, June 1st. My attempt at urban gardening may extend to public space gardening. Kinda like graffiti gardens..... who knows but i don't have enough space for the number of seeds i have.

Continued food saving

My next target meat. I find it weird that i am recommending ways to save when my cooking philosophy has evolved around quality ingredients. I guess food doesn't need to be expensive to be top quality but more often than not it is. So my advice here is buy the best meat but only half the amount. Along the lines of Michael Pollans advice to push meat away from the centre of the plate and replace it with more plants. I would be interested to see a experiment that slowly reduced the meat component of meals. How slowly would this need to be done? Surely no one would notice reducing a ounce or two off a 160z steak. I imagine as you design food around the starch and veges the whole concept of whats for dinner would change from the dominant protien to the rice or pasta or brussel sprout and squash. So eating healthy doesn't need to be more expensive, my beloved lamb curry is now sweet potato and spinach. Lamb at least $10 a pound replace with Veg at around $2 a pound leaves plenty of room for savings and buying the best. Will you or I miss the meat, I think I will appreciate it more when I do eat it. Moderating meat the answer to eating well in the recession and reducing environmental impact.

Recession special savings

All over Manhattan the bars and restaurant are fighting for your dollar, prime time tables are readily available, dining and drinking deals are everywhere. Fantastic for those who still have jobs or money and difficulty for many whose livelihoods depend on the industry.
Food is one of the first places people look to save, CNN recently ran a excited piece highlighting how easy it was to make significant shopping bill savings by switching to store brands. Alternatively people could look at reducing waste. Still simple but requires a little more effort and discipline.
“In the United States, for instance, as much as 30 percent of food, worth some US$48.3 billion, is thrown away.”
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2008/2008-08-22-01.asp
“The study found that £9bn of avoidable food waste was disposed of in England and Wales each year. It is mostly food that could have been consumed if it had been better stored or managed, or had not been left uneaten on a plate.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7389351.stm
Just like an industry professional the family chef is responsible for managing and minimizing food waste. A good chef keeps an obsessively organized fridge and is pedantic about rotating stock. This means they have accurate mental inventories that enable them to avoid duplicate purchases and prevent produce from spoiling.
Working on boats my menu’s often revolved around the produce that was closest to spoiling. There is no store to pop down to for fresh fruit and vegetables so you learn how to best utilize your supplies and preserve them. Also leftovers are a asset, often the basis of tomorrows meal, success being measured by whether the crew could tell if the meal contained recycled elements.
Next, portion control is so strict in commercial kitchens many products are weighed out to the gram. Don’t be afraid of not making enough, you are not going to starve your family or guests. More likely you will be improving their health
Continue to buy responsibly, carefully manage your stock, consciously control portions and enjoy good food.

wow

"A more recent study by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that Americans generate roughly 30 million tons of food waste each year, which is about 12 percent of the total waste stream. All but about 2 percent of that food waste ends up in landfills; by comparison, 62 percent of yard waste is composted."
A better way to save on the food bill = stop throwing it away

wait

After hunting for seeds and getting setup with pots, soil and compost it seems I need to wait a little longer. No, no, no, too early wait, april. The compost lady doesnt understand that the lease runs out on june 1st. I need to start early if i want to be able to enjoy any harvest but she is right it is going to snow tomorrow and seeds are not going to germinate yet. I did some research and people do try winter gardens in ny with limited and varying success. My revised plan is going to try and begin with indoor windowsill salad growing......

pots

I went for the $1 planter but came back with two pots.So i may have to go back to the building my own planter concept.

topic

I have got a bit off track. Should probably start a new blog for my gardening project but dont know whether i will. In these troubled times all i see and read is about the rescue bill or how bad things are, mistakes, the pain ahead etc. Sick of it. We brought it upon ourselves, dont blame the bankers, we are all part of the society that allowed or accepted financial institutions to operate us into a mess. Anyway my topic is food and waste, so..... One of the first and eiasest ways to save money people think of is the grocery bill. Already we spent a tiny percentage of our income on these essential items, well eating is essential. I am concerned that the premium priced foods, organic local, sustianable whatever are going to be the first to go, a shame after the success of movements that started to move the agricultural industry in the write direction. Keep paying a premuim for real food, try to waste less of it. I recently discovered that the average american consumer will turn half of what they buy at the supermarket into landfill. So my recommendation is to shop a little more regulary, be very careful with portion control, keep track of what is lurking in the back of the fridge and design meals around what needs to be used.
Pontentially this could save you much more than the stardard school of thought, buy store own brands. No enjoy and respect good food.

+12

Wow spring will arrive one day. I have climbed out on the fire escape for a inspection of my available growing space. Conclusion very little. The high note was seeing a wire I hadn't noticed before, looks as though it may have once been used to hug something to the windowsill. The screws that attach it on either side seem to go into wood. Not very confident about this being able to hold a lot of weight. Picked up some garbage and tested it unfortunately it has been returned to the street. Saw a post on craigslist during my job searches selling a planter for $1. Not sure weather this will make my project too easy or ruin the concept. After being able to walk outside in less than 5 layers of wool for 2 days I feel it is time to sow the seeds. Well not yet but I dont want to be late.

Minus 10

It hurts your eyes to walk outside. To save power in these high heating cost days and time for frugality. The whole of new york could unplug their fridges or and freezers. An outside windowsill will maintain an acceptable freezer temperature and an inside windowsill with the correct insulation (cardboard maybe) and ventilation (how far window is open) could work as a cooler. I struggle using a mini fridge with a ice box incapable of keeping ice cream from melting, sucks. Why would anyone go to this kind of inconvenience? The reality is it doesn't save a lot of power, so for fun maybe. Fun this is the reason for my lastest green venture. Trying to grow a salad in my windowsill. Decided i want to get the material for building my planter box from the trash.

Negative 8

Snow and ice surround the sad looking few stalls that make up the market. Barely more than apples and pears are available, how can the green market driven restaurants create a dish let along a menu to the standard required of a NYC restaurant that wants to last more than a few months? My only purchase today was a hot cider, mainly to get some feeling back into my fingers. So my only purpose of the trip was to drop off our food waste for the lower east side ecology center to turn into compost. I keep on telling myself that soon the bounty of spring will bloom vibrancy back to the market. In reality it is a month or two away, so hard after enjoying a real summer in New Zealand. Before spring arrives I need to be ready, as i am planning to grow a salad in my window sill. I like the urban nature cycle concept, I can use the compost created from my diligent food waste disposal methods (mostly the good work of the LESEC) to feed what ever edible plants will grow with no space or gardening skill.