Rebecca Clarren

Outside the trees bloom pink, yellow daffodils cluster near the sidewalk and my lawn has suddenly sprouted into a large bushy rug that has prompted chilly looks from my neighbors. To my untrained eye, spring has arrived in its usual showy fashion, but I’m missing something. We all are.

New data by bee biologists indicate steep declines of three common bumble bees species, including the Western Bumble Bee, found from the Rocky Mountains and California up into Alaska. These native populations of bees are important pollinators of wild flowering plants and crops. Though there are a number of plausible reasons for these shrinking populations, such as climate change, habitat loss and pesticides, Dr Robbin Thorp, an entomologist at U.C. Davis, suspects a more acute cause.
(Read on …)

Rebecca Clarren

School lunch has never been the stuff of Gourmet. In my day, there were jokes about the mystery meat in the sloppy joes and fake gagging on the tacos. Twenty years later I still wonder sometimes how exactly they got the pudding to achieve such a fluorescent yellow color. The news last month that 50 million pounds of meat from sick “downer” cows went to public schools nationwide gives the term gag-reflex a whole new meaning. The US Department of Agriculture officials told the Los Angeles Times “the health risks posed by the recalled beef are “very, very remote” and that good quality beef is served through the school lunch program.”

I have a hard time swallowing their assurances.

I agree with those who say the USDA program, which buys in bulk from lowest-bid processors, attracts large-scale industrial operations that are likely to cut corners to provide cheap beef.

This week the Washington State legislature cooked up something that could lead to real improvements over the USDA program. Senate Bill 6483, passed with broad support, relaxes food-purchasing regulations to allow schools and state-run institutions to buy fresh produce and meats from Washington farmers - even if locally grown products cost a little more than their processed or canned counterparts, reports the Seattle PI. (Read on …)

Evelyn Schlatter

I drank my first bottle of beer at age 18.

I grew up in Colorado and went to college in Boulder. I waited until I was 18 before I indulged in my first beer. Which was a 3.2 Heineken, if you must know because then, you had to be 18 to imbibe 3.2 beer or alcohol. That’s 3.2 percent alcohol by weight (or 4 percent by volume–ABV) and it’s a peculiarly American thing. Anymore, you can only find 3.2 alcohol in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Utah, and Minnesota. Here in Colorado in the early 1980s, it was legal for 18-year-olds to drink 3.2 beer until they turned 21, when they could then legally drink and purchase any other kind of alcohol. That changed with the passage of the 1984 Minimum Age Drinking Law, when Colorado raised its all-around drinking age to 21.

At any rate, I can’t say I was overly impressed by my first beer foray. So I didn’t really drink much by way of alcohol until the early 1990s, when I developed an interest in craft beers and also in home-brewing, which is pretty much where most beer starts out: somebody’s garage, basement, back yard, or holler down by the river in the pale moonlight. I consider beer something to be experienced and savored, like coffee. So I’m picky about it, and I love trying new microbeers and drinking local brews. Just so you know.

I guess I’m a little weird. I never really felt the need to drink during high school because my parents and I talked about most anything and everything, including alcohol and its pros and cons. Because alcohol was something that we discussed, I never felt the need to “experiment” with it. Even after I turned 18. So I guess I’m a little mystified by all the temperance battles that continue to rage in this country, just as I’m mystified by why someone would want to do that whole binge drinking thing. Now, alcoholism is a terrible addiction–some call it a disease–but that’s another discussion for another time.
(Read on …)

Francisco Tharp

If you’ll be spending any time in the San Francisco Bay area summer and fall, you may want to hold your breath–while you’re there, that is.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that California’s agriculture department plans to cover San Francisco, Marin County and the East Bay with Checkmate, a hormone that impedes the reproductive efforts of the light brown moth. Beginning in August, the dustings will occur at night.

State officials see the spraying as a preemptive strike against WMD (Widespread Moth Destruction), which could devastate California’s agriculture industry.

But those rascally health aficionados in the area (yes, the same area that outlawed plastic bags in 2007) are outraged. Hundreds of folks who were sprinkled with Checkmate in Santa Cruz and Monterrey Counties from September to December reported coughing, wheezing, and headaches, among other symptoms.

The article says,

The USDA’s Hawkins said the EPA has generally not been concerned over the toxicity of Checkmate. For example, he said, the agency never set a maximum limit for the pesticide in food or required farm workers to stay out of fields that had just been sprayed.

Somehow this doesn’t make me feel any safer. After all, the USDA doesn’t see anything wrong with genetically modified crops (see HCN’s “Brave New Hay”), and the Environmental Protection Agency extinguished California’s attempt to cut CO2 emissions.

Click here to see why one organization is ready to “run” and “escape” from “a toxic cloud of government corruption.”

Or, click here to see why we have nothing to fear…that’s right, nothing to fear at all.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Oregon schools received more than 170,000 pounds of beef this year from a vendor who was just kicked out of the school lunch program — for supplying meat from cows that were too sick to walk. The Oregonian has the sickening story:

An investigator for the Humane Society of the United States went undercover as a worker at the Hallmark plant for six weeks in fall 2007. The group targeted Hallmark because it specializes in slaughtering dairy cows that no longer produce enough milk, rather than cows raised for meat, and because it sells so much beef to the school lunch program, said society President Wayne Pacelle.

“This place became a dumping ground for spent dairy cows,” Pacelle said. “I think it’s troubling that’s the class of animals being funneled into the school lunch program — the poorest quality, most compromised product.”

The employee filmed plant employees shocking downed cows with stun guns, hoisting them with a forklift, poking them in the eyes and spraying water forcefully up their noses to try to get them to their feet. Downed cows have been banned from the food supply since 2004 because they are more likely to be contaminated with E. coli from the ground and are at risk of carrying mad cow disease or other diseases that could sicken consumers.

Between horrifying problems like this, other revelations about this country’s beef supply (see our opinion column “Have another pig-brain/beef-blood/chicken-spine hamburger“), and new information about the environmental impacts of livestock, it’s time to seriously consider switching to PBJs and tofu-burgers.

Francisco Tharp

Thanks to a Food and Drug Administration decision made this morning, you might soon be able to order a McClonewich at the drive-through or spread a smear of low-fat clone cheese on your morning bagel.

The FDA said in a press release today that “meat and milk from clones of cattle, swine, and goats, and the offspring of clones from any species traditionally consumed as food, are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals.”

The decision comes just over a year after the FDA issued a draft approval Dec. 2006. During that time the FDA heard from approximately 145,000 people opposed to their plan.

The Center for Food Safety, a nonprofit proponent of sustainable agricultural practices, petitioned the FDA in 2006 to enforce a mandatory moratorium on cloned animal goods until further risk assessment, including an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), had been completed.

The FDA denied CFS’s petition today, saying in a letter that the Administration’s decision does not require an EIS because it does not constitute a “major Federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment,” which, under the National Environmental Protection Act, would require an EIS.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Even if you merely dip in the news stream, you know the basics about melamine from China showing up in pet foods across this country. Because nothing could be more serious than threatening United States of America pets!

We’re going to see more of this — a lot more — as we understand better all the hidden costs from globalization and Wal-Martization. In this case, thanks to no oversight and belief in the God of Low Prices, Chinese businessmen slipped the plastic into wheat gluten and other ingredients, because it mimicked protein but cost less. Dogs and cats and who knows what else got sick and died. Probably some U.S. businessmen knew of the deception, or some suspected and looked the other way.

It turns out, the Chinese melamine — which is also an ingredient in many kitchen counters — got sold into fish food sprinkled into salmon hatcheries in the West. The stories on that are here and here and here and here.

The most recommended reading goes to the scene of the crime — a factory in China that carried out the poisonous deception. The LA Times has the story, opening with the dateline Xuzhou, China:

Before Mao Lijun’s business exported tainted wheat products that may have killed American pets, his factory sickened people and plants around here for years.

Farmers in this poor rural area about 400 miles northwest of Shanghai had complained to local government officials since 2004 that Mao’s factory was spewing noxious fumes that made their eyes tear up and the poplar trees nearby shed their leaves prematurely. Yet no one stopped Mao’s company from churning out bags of food powders and belching smoke — until one day last month when, in the middle of the night, bulldozers arrived and tore down the facility.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The older I get, the more I love politics. The sport has more body slams than TV wrestling and is far more interesting and somewhat more realistic.

Margot Roosevelt at the LA Times has today’s favorite enviro-politics story, beginning with:

A national consumer campaign to save wild salmon will launch in Washington today, as about 200 chefs from restaurants in 33 states call on Congress to pass laws to restore river habitats and tear down massive hydroelectric dams that have decimated salmon species along the Pacific coast.

The initiative, led by celebrity chef Alice Waters of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse …

OK, great, I can visualize Celebrity Chef Alice — perhaps we pronounce her Aleece? — and her fellow chef-soldiers prancing with spatulas raised onto the battlefield where salmon advocates have been trying to destroy the concrete that is hardest on salmon runs (four dams where Idaho’s Snake River flows to the Columbia River and ultimately to the ocean, and four dams on California’s Klamath River).

“Wild salmon is one of the unique, authentic heritage foods of the Pacific Northwest,” the chefs wrote in a letter to Congress to be released today. “It represents perhaps our country’s last great wild meal.”

Hmmm. “Our … last great wild meal.” I guess bald-eagle burgers and barbecued grizzly-bear ribs never caught on.

The salmon chefs point out that farmed salmon — what you mostly find in restaurants and grocery stores — are contaminated with residues from their industrial upbringing and taste lousy compared to wild salmon. (For more info on the many-faceted yukkiness of farmed salmon, see the High Country News in-depth story by Rebecca Clarren, and her followup columns here and here.) The chefs want more salmon consumers to realize the issue.

The national campaign has adopted as its slogan, “Vote with your fork.”

This chefs-move by salmon advocates does look like good politics, an attempt to get more people nationwide focused on the dams that block salmon runs. And who thinks the sport of politics is always unsavory?

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The biggest chain of health-conscious grocery stories, Whole Foods (191 stores, $5.6 billion annual sales) wants to buy its closest competitor, Wild Oats Markets (110 stores, $1.2 billion sales, hq in Boulder, Colorado).

What’s up with that $700 million deal?

It’ll mean better returns for the usual relentless stockholders, as well as layoffs and possible price hikes, according to industry analysts in Denver Post stories here and here.

It also has to do with green grocers muscling up to compete with monsters such as Wal-Mart that increasingly see profits in organic and whole grain everything.

And … it helps explain why the community food co-op in my town, Bozeman, Montana, has feverishly expanded into a new building and just announced controversial plans to open a second store … Bozeman has no Whole Foods/Wild Oats yet, but one will probably appear here sooner or later. Apparently some local co-ops also believe in muscling up, to battle — or head off — any invasion by what’s becoming the green grocery megachain.

In a discovery sure to be used in a future science fiction movie, Agriculture Department researchers have announced “initial results of a research project involving prion-free cattle,” the ScienceDaily website reports. Prions, you will remember, are naturally occuring proteins, abnormal forms of which cause a variety of scary degenerative brain ailments, including the relatively well-known mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Ag Department researchers have genetically modified cattle so they have no prions and can be used in further research. Or, as ScienceDaily explains it:

“These cattle can help in the exploration and improved understanding of how prions function and cause disease, especially with relation to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE,” said Edward B. Knipling, administrator of ARS. “In particular, cattle lacking the gene that produces prions can help scientists test the resistance to prion propagation, not only in the laboratory, but in live animals as well.”

For the true disease geeks in our audience, and to help the thousands of Hollywood script writers who will be madly drawn to this combination of genetic engineering and scary brain disease, we hereby provide a list of prion maladies (nicked from the CDC website):

Human Prion Diseases

• Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD)
• Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD)
• Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker Syndrome
• Fatal Familial Insomnia
• Kuru

Animal Prion Diseases

• Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE)
• Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD)
• Scrapie
• Transmissible mink encephalopathy
• Feline spongiform encephalopathy
• Ungulate spongiform encephalopathy

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

Thousands of cows are receiving temporary stays of execution each day, thanks to the immigration raids on Swift & Co. meatpacking plants on Dec. 12. The Greeley Tribune reports that Swift’s Greeley plant has curtailed cow slaughter (normally happening at a rate of 2,300 per day) by half after losing some 260 workers to the raids.

Sure, we probably didn’t need all that beef anyway. But wine and peaches are another story. In Western Colorado, vineyard and orchard owners are quaking in their irrigation boots, worried that they’ll be targeted for the next raid, or that their main stock of labor — immigrants — may be scared away from working the fields next year.

It just goes to show how vital immigrants — documented and otherwise — are to our economy. According to a study by Pia Orrenius, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, immigrants boost the Gross Domestic Product by more than $14 billion per year. Meanwhile, at least 50 percent of undocumented immigrants actually have payroll taxes deducted from their wages (because they use fake Social Security numbers), and therefore fund Medicaid, Social Security and other federal programs. Yet, very few ever collect on these same programs.

As a result, concludes Francine J. Lipman of the Chapman University School of Law, “undocumented immigrants provide a fiscal windfall and may be the most fiscally beneficial of all immigrants.” Indeed, the Social Security Administration’s earnings-suspense file now includes over $421 billion in unclaimed earnings. The bulk of these funds come from employers in agriculture, restaurant and service sectors, and originate in California, Texas and Illinois, industries and states heavily populated by undocumented immigrants.

That’s a heck of a lot of money (and don’t forget the peaches and wine) that depends on immigrants. Should we really be trying to “round them up” and send them home?

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

Agents from Immigrations and Custom Enforcement carried chains holding up to 100 pairs of handcuffs along with search warrants into the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colo., this morning. Similar scenes played out simultaneously in Swift plants in Nebraska, Texas, Iowa, Minnesota and Hyrum, Utah. Hundreds of workers were reportedly taken into custody to be interviewed, according to the Greeley Tribune’s ongoing coverage.

Operations at the affected Swift facilities have been temporarily suspended pending the anticipated end-of-day completion of the interview process. Shortly thereafter, Swift expects to resume operations, but production levels will depend on the number of employees, if any, detained for further interviewing or otherwise unable to return to work.

Chances are, an employee or two will be detained, even though Swift has relatively high standards for ensuring that its employees are documented. More than 27 percent of the nation’s meat, poultry and fish processors are undocumented immigrants, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. The Greeley plant alone employs some 1,800 workers, many of them hailing from Latin American countries.

As of 9:30 a.m. this morning (Dec. 12), it appeared as if the immigration officials would have some resistance to their raid. A crowd gathered near the plant’s exit in an apparent attempt to block the ICE vans and buses. About a year ago, Greeley Hispanics rose up to protest a proposed ICE office there. HCN took a close look at Greeley’s immigrant situation here.

If there are as many undocumented workers in the plants as statistics suggest, and if they are all detained, production at one of the nation’s biggest beef processors could be seriously curtailed. And we could all get a very quick lesson on the enormous influence undocumented workers have on the U.S. economy.

Swift & Company, the “world’s second-largest processor of fresh beef and pork products” has a nifty press release related to the May 1 immigrant walkout, aka “Nothing Gringo Day.”

Under a delightfully low-key headline: “Swift & Company Announces U.S. Operating Plans for May 1, 2006” they say:

Four of five U.S. beef plants and two of three U.S. pork plants will be closed on Monday due to a combination of factors, including previously scheduled maintenance activities, general market conditions, and advance employee requests for time off.

That’s one way to phrase it.

Other possibilities include:

“Our entire workforce will be organizing into a union soon.”

Or:

“Gosh, this diversity employment initiative sure is more complex than we thought.”

Or, after reading this part:

Swift Beef plants scheduled to be closed on Monday, May 1, 2006:
• Grand Island, Nebraska
• Greeley, Colorado
• Hyrum, Utah
• Omaha, Nebraska
Swift Pork plants scheduled to be closed on Monday, May 1, 2006:
• Marshalltown, Iowa
• Worthington, Minnesota

perhaps the message is, “The honorable Senators and Congressmen of Colorado, Utah, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota should be aware that our lobbyists will be scheduling meetings with you on May 2.”