Righteous Blog
Hope for Farming’s Future
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
For a nice change, there’s some good news about agriculture. The most recent Census of Agriculture, released a few weeks back, shows that the number of farmers in the United States is actually on the rise. From 2002 to 2007, the number increased by 4 percent. This is welcome news for everyone who cares about sustainable food production. The Census also shows that the new farmers tend to be younger, less white, and more female than the farming population of recent decades. For example, the number of female farmers grew by almost 30 percent. The downside of this growth is that many of these farms are tiny—hobby farms of people with other jobs. In my view, in order to create a truly sustainable food system, we need to make farming a sustainable profession. So, much work remains to be done. But this is certainly a glimmer of hope for the future.
1 Comment | Permalink | Posted in Farming
Pork & Peanut Butter
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
I’ve been mulling over the pork and peanut butter connection these past few days. Both contain a lot of fat, that’s true. But a much more troubling link is the lack of regulation by our government, you know the body that’s supposed to make sure food is safe and wholesome. Tainted peanut butter from a plant in Georgia has caused one of the Food and Drug Administration’s largest recalls in history. The contaminated paste has caused at least eight deaths and 500 cases of human illness. (It’s also believed to be in pet food, though I’ve seen no figures on the number of pet deaths). Numerous reports in the past two years, such as by the Government Accounting Office, have pointed out that the Bush administration had failed to fulfill its duties with respect to protecting our food supply. The peanut butter scare is just the latest in a series of incidents that make that all too clear. In pork, the issues have been meat tainted by the bacteria Listeria, various other antibiotic-resistant pathogens, and drug residues including ractopamine, a steroid-like drug that promotes muscle growth. The latter was the basis for China rejecting huge shipments of U.S. pork in July 2007. On January 30, the New York Times editorials opined that, “Consumers have faced far too many food-supply emergencies in the last few years… The FDA, an important agency charged with protecting the food supply, was one of many hobbled by the Bush Administration’s antiregulatory efforts.” I join with the Times’ editorial board in hoping that the Obama administration will swiftly remedy this failure.
1 Comment | Permalink | Posted in Food Safety, Pork