Food Related Bits in the News and in Blogland

The slow food movement's Civil Eats website had a bit a few days ago on Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson's op-ed piece in the New York Times about the damage we're doing to our soil and what it means in terms of our civilization's ability to survive. Jackson's a plant geneticist and president of the Land Institute, while Berry is a farmer and writer whose voice has been gaining significance in discussions of sustainable vs. industrial farming these past few years.
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Marion Nestle recently posted on her blog that the Government Accountability Office just produced a report looking at how federal agencies regulate (or, more importantly, fail to regulate) genetically modified crops. Nestle writes that "[t]he report documents long-standing gaps in coordination and direction among the three regulatory agencies involved: FDA, USDA, and EPA". Read the rest here. This comes just in time for Monsanto's recent attempts to have a strain of drought-resistant corn approved in the United States. Two bits says the report gets forgotten in as long as it takes to air pop a handful of kernels.
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Speaking of corn... The Ethicurean had a blurb a few days ago about how Monsanto's profits have doubled this past quarter and how they currently control 25% of the global market for seed corn. Must be nice.

Huffington Post's Marion Nestle Interview on Organic Standards and Certification

During the holidays, Huffington Post featured a short interview by Kerry Trueman with food expert Dr. Marion Nestle about the USDA's organic standards. The interview kicks off with a reference to the recent story in the news about the company in California that managed to sell fertilizer that wasn't organic to up to a third of California's organic farmers for five years. It seems that a whistleblower told the state's Department of Food and Agriculture about it as early as 2004, but the state didn't take the product off the market until three years later, in 2007. Furthermore, state officials didn't come out and reveal its knowledge that this had been going on until a year and a half later, after the company had received a mere slap on the wrist for "mislabeling" their product.

Dr. Nestle talks about how the entire organics industry is based on trust and the integrity of the inspection process, and of how the "beyond organics industry" (which focuses on consuming locally and knowing who exactly is growing your food instead of relying on certification) is still entirely based on trust. She also comments that we have no real way of knowing how widespread cheating either is or isn't in the organics industry, regardless of certification. Business is business, after all, and as the organics industry becomes more and more lucrative, profit and not integrity will hold more and more weight.