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  • From: "E. E. Mitchamore Jr" <emitch@att.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] DIET FOR A DEAD PLANET
  • Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 17:37:21 -0600

Ok, there are already enough books (at least 30 years worth) detailing the failings of our agricultural system.  I don't expect this one to have any more impact than the others.
 
At another level, although there are plenty of books about how to garden (or farm), there still isn't much to bridge the gap between gardening and eating.  In other words, if you're already convinced, what, precisely, should you grow to feed, first your family, then others?
 
For any given area, there must be crops that give the most nutrition.  Surely someone can tell me what open-pollinated species and varieties to grow without me spending 10 years learning the hard way.  By way of example; I want to grow the Three Sisters (corn, beans, squash), so I asked at The Natural Gardener, Austin's best nursery.  The lady working in the seed department had grown many of the varieties there, but had never heard of the Three Sisters.  I also asked online:  One reply, and only about corn (samples, but no name).  I don't understand: I'm convinced and I know how to grow stuff, but I can't find out WHAT to grow.  "Everything" is not an option I can pursue.
 
E. E. "Mitch" Mitchamore
www.hillcountrynatives.biz
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2007 1:06 PM
Subject: [Livingontheland] DIET FOR A DEAD PLANET


I said it too, but I bit my tongue to keep from sounding overly dramatic.
I've insisted on the seriousness of our food production problems and with
others offered practical solutions. Food growing has to be done in ways
that the masses can afford and in ways that sustain the farmer. Cook lays
it out in a more damming story than I could. Thanks to Alan Lewis for the
heads up.  Feel free to forward this everywhere.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
--------------------

"We need a whole new way of thinking about food, one that
encompasses health, affordability, accessibility, ecological
sustainability, and an economics that enables farmers to keep
farming."

----------------------
"Just about every arm of our food production system has a heart
monitor beeping with the warning signs of death. Cook's title, it
turns out, isn't the exaggerated scare tactic it at first seems to
be."

DIET FOR A DEAD PLANET
http://www.dietforadeadplanet.com/

A new book by Christopher D. Cook
About the book

More than 75 million Americans fell sick last year from the food
they ate, and 5000 of them died. Obesity and diet-related diseases
are soaring to record levels. Mad cow disease has spread to the
United States. The issue of food safety has never been more stark.
Now, Christopher D. Cook's riveting and timely investigation takes
us beyond fast food and GMOs to explain why our entire food system
is in crisis. Corporate control of farms and supermarkets,
unsustainable drives to increase agribusiness profits, misplaced
subsidies for exports, and anemic regulation have all combined to
produce a grim harvest. Food, our most basic necessity, has become
a force behind a staggering array of social, economic, and
environmental epidemics. Yet there is another way. Taking heart
from the promising surge in organics, farmers' markets, and slow
food, Cook argues cogently for a whole new way of looking at what
we eat -- one that places healthy, sustainably produced food at
the top of the menu for political change.

----------------------

http://www.dietforadeadplanet.com/food.html

Food by the Numbers: A Few Facts from the Book

CONSUMER HEALTH

* Some 325,000 Americans are hospitalized each year for
food-related illnesses; more than 5000 die annually.

* Two thirds of Americans are overweight, and 30% are medically
obese. The rate of obesity among children and adolescents has
risen from 4% in the 1970s to nearly 15% today.

* Diet and physical activity are now the second leading cause of
preventable deaths in America, after tobacco.

* Medical costs to treat these diet-related ailments, such as
diabetes and heart disease, run $78 billion a year -- nearly 10%
of all US medical expenditures.

ENVIRONMENT

* Factory farms, packing thousands of animals into barns and
feedlots, produce more than 1.3 billion tons of waste each year --
enough to fill 52 million 18-wheeler semi trucks.

* US agriculture dumps nearly 500,000 tons of pesticides -- many
of them carcinogenic -- on food crops each year.

* Agricultural pesticides kill an estimated 67 million birds
annually.

* Over the past 30 years, nearly half of all pesticides studied
have been found in stream sediment and in 64% of edible fish and
other aquatic life.

* In California's Central Valley, 2.6 million cows have become the
region's top emitter of reactive organic gases, a major smog
ingredient.

WORKERS

* Roughly 20% of meatpacking workers are injured on the job each
year, many crippled by carpal tunnel syndrome.

* Sixty-one percent of farmworkers earn incomes below the poverty
level.

* Nearly 500 farmworkers suffer acute pesticide poisonings every
year -- in California alone.

* The federally approved line speed limit for chicken processing
plants is 91 birds per minute.

FOOD AND FARMING, INC.

* More than 17,000 farmers go out of business each year -- one
farmer every half an hour.

* Four corporations control 80% of the American beef business;
four firms control 67% of the US seed market.

* The top five food grocers in America, led by Wal-Mart, take in
nearly half of all retail food sales.

* Supermarket markups of farm produce run as high as 900%. For
instance, farmers in February 2004 were getting $.19 for a pound
of lettuce for which consumers paid up to $1.92.

* There are now as many prisoners in America as there are farmers.

(Note: All source information is available in the book.)

------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/revicontent_deaddiet.htm

Diet for a Dead Planet

Reviewed by Erica Wetter

06.21.05

Christopher D. Cook's new book Diet for a Dead Planet is
definitely not for the weak of stomach. From mad cow to meat
packing and pesticides to farm subsidies, the book offers a
troubling but comprehensive overview of the many ills plaguing
America's diseased food industry. Beginning with the supermarket
and ending with the global agricultural market, Cook inspects each
facet of our complex food system and reveals that the cheap,
processed food we enjoy daily has costly social, economic, and
environmental consequences that reverberate globally. His findings
are alarming, to say the least.

Consider some of the numbers that reveal the startling scope of
the problems we face. Each year, 75 million Americans are sickened
by the food they eat; an estimated 67 million birds are killed by
the millions of pounds of toxic agricultural pesticides sprayed on
crops; and factory farms confining cattle, hogs, chickens, and
turkeys produce enough manure waste to fill 52 million large
18-wheeler semi-trucks -- a "convoy of excrement," as Cook says.
Corporate agri-giants like ConAgra, Premium Standard Farms (PSF),
Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland increasingly dominate the food
scene, devastating small family farms and wreaking havoc on the
environment. Every half hour, one small family farm folds under
the pressures exerted from the increasing corporate control of
agriculture. Those farmers that remain take home only about 19
cents per food dollar spent by the average consumer (this is in
comparison to 37 cents in 1980 and 47 cents in 1952). Expensive
slotting fees charged by grocery stores for product placement
destroy the hopes of any independent producers who try to sell
their products directly to grocery stores. Government farm
subsidies, mostly directed to the wealthiest producers, further
handicap small-scale producers.

Taken all together, the message couldn't be clearer: Just about
every arm of our food production system has a heart monitor
beeping with the warning signs of death. Cook's title, it turns
out, isn't the exaggerated scare tactic it at first seems to be.

But Diet for a Dead Planet goes well beyond a statistical
catalogue of the horrifying problems disrupting the food
production system. The book also provides a critical summary of
the history of farming in the US and the way food production has
turned into such a mess of pesticides, factory farms, subsidies,
and corporate control. Whether it be the injustices done to
migrant farm and factory workers, or the effects of exporting
heavily subsidized American foodstuffs to rural communities
abroad, Cook attempts to touch on it all. As could be expected in
a project of such breadth, Cook gives grateful nods to many of his
food and environmental muckraking predecessors, referencing and
relying upon Rachel Carson, Frances Moore Lapp, (who blurbed the
book and whose famous work, Diet for a Small Planet, inspired the
title), Michael Pollan, and Eric Schlosser to state his case. He
also makes a convincing, if disturbing plea that our current food
system is in dire need of a complete turnaround. The problem is
trying to envision a new path, which Cook somewhat feebly attempts
to do in one short end chapter and a resource guide.

Frankly, after reading 12 chapters graphically detailing the
history and scope of the problems afflicting our food system, I
wasn't optimistic about the world's ability to forge a more
sustainable, healthy, and just approach to food. Sure, there are
farmers' markets, organic products, and numerous nonprofits
working to bandage the sick system, but, after 200 pages of
depressing news, it was hard to muster any hope that people will
ever be able to unravel the nightmare. Cook acknowledges the
difficulty of the situation, and argues that in order for us to
change course, we need to focus on fixing not just one problem --
like the exploitation of migrant farm and factory workers, or
agricultural pollution -- but the entire system. In his words, we
need "a whole new way of thinking about food, one that encompasses
health, affordability, accessibility, ecological sustainability,
and an economics that enables farmers to keep farming." In short,
we need to make dramatic changes to our national priorities and
recognize that food is more than a profit-producing object -- it's
an essential element of life.

While Diet for a Dead Planet is certainly not uplifting, it does
inspire a certain amount of rage, fear, and nausea-all of which
may be necessary to shake America out of its glazed complacency in
regard to food. With mad cow disease, genetically modified
organisms, and agricultural-related pollution increasingly all
over news headlines, Cook's book is definitely a timely reference
for those hoping to delve into the food hell we've found ourselves
in, and begin the process of re-evaluating the role of food and
farming in America.

------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9315

Food for Thought

Book Review by Kelly MacDermott, March 2005

Review of 'Diet for a Dead Planet', Christopher D Cook, New Press
o14.99

Recently I went shopping with a friend of mine. He had just
returned from a lengthy stay in eastern Europe, and as we walked
into my local supermarket he gasped in astonishment at the array
of fresh fruit and vegetables. We take it for granted - rare
delicacies and convenience foods from every corner of the globe
without season or limit. It seems too good to be true, and this
book proves beyond doubt that it is.

Christopher Cook looks at the US food industry, but the same
methods he details and the same drive for ever-increasing profits
dominate the British food industry too.

That extraordinary bounty of fruit and vegetables I described is
produced by eroding topsoil, polluting rivers with millions of
gallons of pesticide, and allowing tons of toxic manure to run off
from factory farms.

In meat packing and poultry plants the intense speed and volume of
output maim and cripple tens of thousands of workers every year.
Many of them are immigrants and are discarded and replaced every
few months.

The system that produces and transports this superabundance runs
on oil and diesel. In total more than 100 billion gallons are used
per year in food production.

Just a handful of powerful corporations exercise increasing
control over what we eat, how it is made, how much it costs and
who profits from it. Twenty thousand farmers go under each year in
the US.

As Cook argues, these are just some of the immense costs on our
grocery bill that are not itemised but which we pay in taxes and
public spending to treat food-related illnesses like diabetes,
obesity and heart disease. There are other costs too - for
cleaning the environment, for unemployment and welfare payments to
injured and laid off workers. Cook provides a damning account of
the rise of agribusiness and its effects in all areas of our
lives. But this is not a depressing book: he details growing
resistance against the food industry's power, through union
organisation, protests, lawsuits, 'penny auctions' - and even
shootings!

In the final chapter Cook looks at ways forward. He recognises
that there are no individual solutions. Despite its growth,
organics remain a niche market of 2 percent of foods consumed in
the US. And already the corporations have moved in - Horizon, for
example, is a $127 million public corporation that controls 70
percent of the retail market in organic milk. While an organic
variety is less toxic than conventional farming, it still fails to
sustain the soil the way diversified farming would.

While Cook is inspired by growing protests like that of José Bové
against 'bad food' and wants 'a larger commitment... that takes
into account the needs of the whole society - consumers, workers,
farmers, the environment', he makes no attempt to link the
struggle against agribusiness with the wider movement of
anti-capitalist, anti-war activism. Yet without challenging the
totality of the system we cannot hope to provide the sustainable
food industry that we and the planet need.

Nevertheless I would recommend this book to anyone. It's a
comprehensive exposé of the food industry and underlines the
urgency of the need for change.



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