Some horrifying stats from the piece, emphasis mine:

The contracts of 10 of Maine’s 65 organic dairies will not be renewed by HP Hood, one of the region’s three large processors. In Vermont, 32 dairy farms have closed since Dec. 1, significantly altering the face of New England’s dairy industry.

Vermont is a big dairy farming state, but it is a small state; thirty-two farms is a lot of farms.  And then there’s this:

Organic Valley, a nationwide cooperative, told Maine organic dairy farmers last month that its sales growth had dropped to near zero from about 20 percent six months ago.

Yikes.

I was surprised and happy to see some pushback from the foodosphere.  While acknowledging that there’s a real, tragic problem in the dairy industry, the Ethicurean took issue with some of the report, including the notion that the “price of organic feed shot up.”  As the Ethicurean points out, there’s no mention of farms that rely more on pasture (read: grass) than feed.

And Ali at GastroNomalies points out that “ALL feed costs have gone up, not just organic.”  It seems that the Times, while solidly reporting the crisis, apparently twisted the story just a bit to make it look like only organic farmers are suffering.  Unfortunately, the reality is worse than that; all farmers are hurting.

So do we, as the Ethicurean suggests, get the government involved to buy up all the surplus milk and sell it cheap to school lunch programs?  It’s a good idea, but it seems a bit too pat and easy.  Do we allow these farms to go under and cite market forces, over which we (allegedly) have no control?  Or do we inaugurate yet another federal bailout for small farmers — and not the big ones, who have been bailed out for decades — for the sake of mythic nostalgia for an old, pure America?

Someone get me a Pontiac, a mortgage, and a milkshake.

But the highlight of the trip was the bowl of peanuts and anchovies we purchased on a lark.

I’d never had the dish before — didn’t even know it existed — but I was pleasantly surprised. The fishy saltiness (or is that salty fishiness?) of the anchovies mingled nicely with the peanuts, and it was all complemented by a slightly spicy chili sauce. I found it pretty addictive, but others in the office stayed away, perhaps intimidated by the anchovy heads swimming among the peanuts in the plastic bowl.

I felt like I’d made a good culinary choice, though, especially since I’ve been obsessed with eating small fish like anchovies and sardines, egged on by increased warnings about the safety and sustainability of both farmed and wild big fish like salmon and tuna.

Turns out sardines and other small fish occupying the lower echelons of the oceanic food chain are super high in Omega-3 fatty acids, contain very low levels of mercury, and aren’t in danger of becoming extinct. Maybe it’s time to start a sardine diet.

Another common response is for people to challenge my eating habits, trying to poke holes in my “argument.” I rarely ever make an argument in defense of how I eat, especially before I’m approached about it, yet people often feel justified debating with me.

The point is, and I think this is true for a lot of vegetarians (or, as I am, lacto-ovo-pescatarians), much of my motivation is intuitive. I don’t often think about why I don’t want to eat certain things, I just feel that it’s right in my gut (sorry, I just couldn’t hold that pun back).

Nevertheless, every once in a while I come across an intelligent, reasonable argument for vegetarianism that I find virtually irrefutable, like this one. In it, Dan Brook makes an environmental argument for vegetarianism using a metaphor familiar to all of us: the SUV versus the hybrid.

Geophysicists Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin from the University of Chicago concluded that changing one’s eating habits from the Standard American Diet (SAD) to a vegetarian diet does more to fight global warming than switching from a gas-guzzling SUV to a fuel-efficient hybrid car.

I find it a pretty effective argument. In addition to resource consumption, the huge number of livestock themselves add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by, um, doing what we animals do: burping and farting. In fact, “belching, flatulent livestock emit 16 percent of the world’s annual production of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.”

Even the rainforests are being armed by meat farming. Check out this mixed metaphor:

“In a nutshell,” according to the Center for International Forestry Research, “cattle ranchers are making mincemeat out of Brazil’s Amazon rainforests.”

There’s much more. For all of you that need to argue with me about what I eat, instead of opening my mouth and saying something reactionary I’ll just send this and its comment thread your way.

technorati tags:vegetarianism, environment, food

The globalization of organic food is already well under way: at Whole Foods you can buy organic asparagus flown in from Argentina, raspberries from Mexico, grass-fed meat from New Zealand. In an era of energy scarcity, the purchase of such products does little to advance the ideal of sustainability that once upon a time animated the organic movement. These foods may contain no pesticides, but they are drenched in petroleum even so.

The history of the complex status of Whole Food and the legacy of corn in the American diet make it a pretty interesting read.

technorati tags:organic, nutrition, sustainability, local, vegetarianism