September 2008 Archive for On the Udder Hand

The recent 2008 Olympics were meant to illustrate how far China has come, and how modern it is.  Even as Beijing’s Water Cube and the Bird’s Nest dazzled T.V. viewers in the rest of the world, Chinese children were suffering from poisoned milk – a situation tragically more illustrative of how far China still has to go.

The tentacles from the China dairy scandal continue to reach around the world; read what today’s Washington Post says about how companies that used Chinese dairy ingredients are attempting to prove they are melamine-free. 

In addition to the enormous human cost – four young lives lost and thousands more sickened – this latest Chinese food safety scare (they’ve already had problems with bad infant formula before, and then there was the melamine-laced pet food last year) is sure to change how milk is produced in China in the future.

It also, naturally, begs the question of how vulnerable the U.S. dairy supply may be to a similar situation.  Thankfully, the answer is “not very in the least,” due to the regulations and production practices that are vastly different here in the U.S.

Last week, we posted a summary on the NMPF website that lists some basic facts about how the melamine got into the Chinese milk in the first place.  The bottom line is it was greed, abetted by willful indifference to the consequences of that venality.  Farmers and milk distributors watered down their milk in order to be paid more, the equivalent of a butcher’s thumb on the scale. 

Since more water means less protein – and since protein levels are used as a barometer of the value of the milk – they added melamine, an industrial compound rich in nitrogen, to mask the reduction in protein.  Milk tests for protein actually measure nitrogen, but instead of the nitrogen associated with real dairy protein, what they were actually measuring was melamine.  How long this went on with no oversight, or corrupted oversight, is anyone’s guess.  We may never know.

Here in the U.S., things are different.  This summary from our fact sheet illustrates why no melamine contamination has ever been found in our milk supply:

1. It is illegal to adulterate milk and there are multiple controls that are in place to detect adulteration.

2. Farms are inspected regularly by state regulatory officials who are trained to look for illegal activities.

3. Farms are visited by cooperative field staff often to work with them on milk quality and animal health, so the cooperative would see illegal activities if they were occurring.

4. Water addition to increase volume, with the offsetting addition of a compound like melamine to “fool” tests for protein levels, would be detected in the U.S. (as a reminder, the milk collecting agents in China apparently added melamine to milk to mask reductions in protein levels as the result of watering).

5. The daily volume of milk from a farm is generally consistent, so a sudden increase in volume would be detected and seen as an anomaly unless a significant number of cows were added. This would be investigated to see why it is occurring.

6. The U.S. does not rely on a nitrogen or protein test alone to check milk.

7. Added water would be detected through other tests that melamine would not “fool.” Tests for freezing point and fat levels would detect added water easily.

8. Manufacturers of finished products like cheese, yogurt and milk proteins would see an inconsistency in yields versus volume of milk if water were added and would investigate why the inconsistency was occurring.

After the pet food scandal in China last year settled down, one consequence was that the head of the Chinese food safety agency was executed, for bribery and dereliction of duty.  Will more heads roll this time?  That, much more than the ersatz glamour of the Beijing Olympics, will tell us whether China is really ready to assume a First-World level of responsibility in the 21^st century.

Forty-one years after the Summer of Love put Hippies and Haight-Asbury in the national vocabulary, many of the spiritual kin of the flower children – and probably a handful of the very same people who were there in `67 – returned to San Francisco this summer for a celebration of something much more essential than sex, drugs and rock n roll. 

Food was what got them to turn out and turn on.

This story from earlier this month in the Food section of the Washington Post is a good description of what’s become a major trend in the alt-food movement:  the support for so-called Slow Food.  My posting today is another riff on these movements in the food and agriculture business that really define themselves by what they are not, or what they’re opposed to.  Last week, I blogged about how Farm Aid today is all about Good Food, and isn’t interested in helping mainstream agriculture.  The raw milk movement is all about challenging the evils of pasteurization.  The organic and rBST-free movements are a response to the evils of modern technology being applied to agriculture.

And drawing threads from all of these, Slow Food is a European trend that has migrated across the pond (as many of these trends seem to do) to challenge the Fast Food leviathan where it started (well, Ray Kroc started out in southern California, but San Fran is close enough).  Ultimately, it’s a reaction to the commodity-style mindset that breeds conformity in our approach to feeding ourselves.

Read this quote from the movement’s founder:

"For food to be good, it must be good, clean and fair," said Carlo Petrini, who founded Slow Food International in 1986 in response to the opening of a McDonald's near the Spanish Steps in Rome. "If any one of these conditions is missing, it isn't good food."

There’s some appeal in this iconoclastic, counter-culture approach.  After all, that’s what the 60’s brought us as a society:  the opportunity to ask serious questions about whether mainstream society was collectively making good choices.  Not that many of the fashion choices that ensued in the 1970s were sound, but at least they represented a unique response to grey flannel suits.

But it seems that most people, at least in this country, like fast food precisely because it’s predictable and comfortable.  Not to mention convenient and affordable.  There are some who will pay a premium for esoteric foods that are novel or offbeat, especially when it becomes fashionable to look for exotic truffles and heirloom tomatoes.  And precisely because food today is abundant and cheap, it frees up more disposable income for some to experiment with these alt-foods. 

In my last post, I blogged about being back in Nebraska in the 1980s, during the farm crisis.  One of the responses to that crisis was the creation of a benefit concert in 1985, known as Farm Aid.  It had plenty of big-named entertainers all working together to publicize the dire economic conditions facing farmers, and raise money for the good of the cause.

In 1987, when I was a cub TV reporter in Nebraska, I covered the Farm Aid concert in Lincoln.  It was a heckuva show, which is saying something, in that it was held in a place – the University of Nebraska’s famed football stadium– that typically housed maddening crowds of 70,000 plus red-clad football fans.  Farm Aid was a unifying event designed to spur public support for farmers, whether in Nebraska, or across the nation.  FA’s founding fathers – Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, among them – were rightly viewed as doing the Lord’s work for farmers and rural communities.

So, two decades later, it’s somewhat sad to see what’s become of Farm Aid.  Read this description from a recent Boston Globe story reporting on this year’s upcoming Sept. 20^th Farm Aid concert in Mansfield, MA: 

Farm Aid, the Big Kahuna of farm-relief benefits, was also founded on the belief that music has the power to raise consciousness as well as money - and not just among audiences. Attendees will be able to experience farm life firsthand in the Homegrown Village and eat local, organic, family-farm food at the Comcast Center's concession stands.

If you look through the Farm Aid website, it provides a list of laudable services for “family” farmers, if in fact your farm is in the business of producing “sustainable,” “local” and “organic” foods – what the site in no uncertain terms says is Good Food.  I guess that means if you’re just a normal family dairy farmer in the U.S. who is among the 98% that are not certified organic, and has trouble defining sustainability with a straight face, you’re out of luck.  You’ve become the problem, buddy – and Farm Aid doesn’t like your Bad Food.

In fact, if you look at the bottom of the Good Food page, it makes it sound like our domestic, conventional food supply – which is what the vast majority of American farmers produce – is a hazard, not a benefit, to the rest of America.  GMOs and mad cow disease; since when were these real threats to farmers or consumers?  BT corn traits this year may be the only thing between the public and $10+ bushel corn this fall – why would Farm Aid say we’re threatened by that?

Indeed, 98% of dairy farms are family owned, even if an identical percentage are not organic.  For that matter, a significant portion of the nation’s organic milk supply is not produced by the small, family-farm types extolled by Farm Aid.  Not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to serve the niche markets that seem to be FA’s bread and butter, but it’s such a small sliver of both production and consumption that it hardly seems to be relevant.  How helpful can any charity be if the litmus test for its largess raises the arbitrary bar to such heights?

And perhaps, in the end, that’s the logical denouement of Farm Aid after 23 years:  what began as a mainstream, unifying effort to amalgamate support for agriculture has become a tool to separate good vs. bad farming and enforce a political correctness about how and where food should be produced.  Isn’t that what Whole Foods used to be about?

I was last in Blair, Nebraska, back when I was in college, 25 years ago.  I was at a summer camp there (there’s a long story about why, as a college student, I was at a camp of high schoolers, but that’s another blog post) in the early 1980s, at a time when the regional economy was heading into a depression.  Not a recession, which the national economy was confronting, but an honest to God depression, with plunging commodity and land values, banks going under, and jobs hard to find.  Actually, my lack of employability was one of the reasons I was in Blair at the camp.

So it was remarkable to see Blair again, this time on the front page of the Washington Post, last month.  From the sound of it, the good times are rolling in Blair, as they are in many similar small communities across the Corn Belt (like my hometown of Seward, which is about the same size as Blair and just 60 miles away).  Because with corn and soybean prices being what they are, there’s plenty money to be made in them thar…plains.

The Post article posted some interesting statistical tidbits:  land values in Nebraska have doubled in the past three years.  Unemployment has risen to the oppressive level of 3.4 percent.  And car and truck sales in nearby Omaha have actually increased in 2008.  You’d be hard pressed to find anyplace not in flyover country that could also brag about statistics like these.

I reported on this Corn Belt boomtown trend myself back in December, when I last visited Nebraska and there was plenty of money being spent on Christmas presents.  Looks like, with corn prices still clinging to a $5+ bushel level this fall, Santa can afford to be generous again this December across the Midwest.

The Post article calculates that high corn prices mean almost a seven-figure increase in gross income for the average-size Nebraska farm…while also noting that high input costs will reduce the net increase significantly.  And imagine what those high prices for both feed and fuel will do to the average Nebraska feedlot operator or pig or dairy farmer, whose economic model is very different these days than his neighboring row crop operator.

The astute mayor of Blair closed the article by noting that the good times never last, because straight line graphs can’t maintain those upwardly-mobile lines forever….and corn stalks can’t grow to the sky forever.  But until those stalks stop growing, it’s a nice crop to watch.