Dorothea Lange winner hopes to inspire change with her photos

By Carol Ness, NewsCenter | May 15, 2013

Wild bees get boost from diverse, organic crops

By Sarah Yang, Media Relations | March 12, 2013

Berkeley — Fields with diversified, organic crops get more buzz from wild bees, concludes a synthesis of 39 studies on 23 crops around the world published March 11 in the journal Ecology Letters.

The study found that wild bees were more abundant in diversified farming systems. Unlike large-scale monoculture agriculture, which typically relies upon pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, diversified farming systems promote ecological interactions that lead to sustainable, productive agriculture. Such systems are characterized by high levels of crop and vegetative diversity in agricultural fields and across farming landscapes.

“The way we manage our farms and agricultural landscapes is important for ensuring production of pollinated-food crops, which provide about one-third of our calories and far higher proportions of critical micronutrients,” said study senior author Claire Kremen, professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. “This result provides strong support for the importance of biologically diversified, organic farming systems in ensuring sustainable food systems.”

Many of the study’s authors, including Kremen, also co-authored a study published March 1 in Science that found that fruit and vegetable production increased when wild pollinators – as opposed to domesticated honeybees – were more abundant.

“That study showed that wild bees helped crop yield, and this study shows that organic crops in a diversified farming system help wild bees,” said Kremen.

Christina Kennedy, senior scientist at The Nature Conservancy, is the study’s lead author.

Originally published on the Landscapes for People, Food, and Nature blog.

One of the primary objectives in landscape approaches to management is the protection of multiple ecosystem services. Last week researchers from the World Agroforestry Centre provided lessons on how adopting a landscape scale can improve incentives to manage land for a spectrum of ecosystem services. But a better understanding of how agricultural systems themselves provide these services, and to what extent, is still desperately needed. Today, Claire Kremen and Albie Miles (University of California, Berkeley) begin to tackle this question, discussing the findings of a new study on ecosystem services in biologically diversified farming systems, and the benefits, tradeoffs, and externalities in comparison with conventional agricultural systems.

While achieving impressive levels of crop productivity over the past six decades, modern agricultural systems have accomplished this feat at significant ecological and social costs. With the industrialization of agriculture, biologically diversified farming systems have gradually been replaced with biologically simplified monocultures highly dependent on fossil energy and industrial inputs. The industrialization of agriculture and the loss of biodiversity in and around agroecosystems has led to a significant reduction in the provisioning of globally important ecosystem services to and from agriculture, including crop pollination, natural pest control, soil and water quality maintenance, efficient nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity conservation. Further, the suite of practices and agrochemical inputs that substitute for ecosystem services in much of modern agriculture contribute to significant environmental, social, and economic impacts: soil and water quality degradation, eutrophication of surface and groundwater, loss of wild biodiversity, increased greenhouse gas emissions, marine hypoxic zones and occupational and dietary exposure to agricultural chemicals.

Read the full blogpost at the LPFN site.

 

Ann Brody Guy profiles new DFS Center Research in a January 8, 2013 blog:

Mark Bittman, cookbook author and New York Times food writer, used the occasion of New Year’s Day to throw down the gauntlet for real and permanent change to the U.S. agricultural system. “We must figure out a way to un-invent this food system,” he says in a Times opinion column. He likens the scale of the task to tectonic cultural strides like abolition, civil rights, and the women’s vote.
As to how we go about achieving this goal, Bittman speaks in broad terms. He appeals for patience, invoking the pioneers of those transformative movements, who had the perspective that their progress is not just for now but for future generations. He names the culprits of sugary drinks and poor livestock conditions as key points of attack. He calls for goals. Well reasoned approaches, to be sure, but they aren’t a blueprint for specific action.

UC Berkeley researchers have been working on some specifics for several years now, researching the agricultural, policy, and social practices that would make possible the type of systemic change Bittman is advocating. In a special multi-article feature devoted to “diversified farming systems,” or DFS, for the December issue of the journal Ecology & Society, scientists from Berkeley, Santa Clara University, and other institutions lay out a comprehensive scientific case that biologically diversified agricultural practices can contribute substantially to food production while creating far fewer environmental harms than industrialized, conventional monoculture agriculture—that is, large swaths of land devoted to growing single crops using chemical inputs.

Read more here: http://ucanr.org/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=9021

Albie Miles and Liz Carlisle – both PhD candidates affiliated with the Center for Diversified Farming  Systems – have received a $3,000 grant from the AGree initiative to develop a policy paper regarding public agricultural research education, and extension.

Along with four other authors, Miles and Carlisle have been tasked with identifying “best in class  “innovations for strengthening USDA programs, so as to better respond to current environmental and social challenges.

AGree, a collaboration of several food system stakeholders housed at the Meridian Institute, seeks to “drive positive change in the food and agriculture system by connecting and challenging leaders from diverse communities to catalyze action and elevate food and agriculture as a national priority.” 

Miles and Carlisle will travel to DC for a February convening with other white paper authors at the Meridian Institute headquarters.  At this meeting, the group will develop policy recommendations for publication.

For more information about AGree, visit their website at www.foodandagpolicy.org/

DFS COMMUNITY PICKS

Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight, by Timothy Pachirat. Yale University Press: New Haven, 2011.

A powerful indictment of the industrialized meat production system by an anthropologist who worked in a slaughterhouse for a few months. Pachirat not only captures the gore and sweat of the abbatoir but pointedly asks: is it ethical for people to continue consuming meat on such a vast scale if they don’t take responsibility for their effects on animals? – Alastair Iles,  UC Berkeley professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

 

Behind the Kitchen Door, by Saru Jayaraman. ILR Press, 2013.

Diners today increasingly seek restaurants with organic, fair-trade, and local on the menu. Few, however, are aware of the labor that drives the restaurant industry and makes ‘eating out’ possible. Saru Jayaraman, founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and director of the new UC Berkeley Food Labor Research Center, highlights the roles of the 10 million people – many immigrants, many people of color – who work across the nation in kitchens, dining rooms, and delivery trucks, bringing their tenacity to the American dining experience. Whether you eat haute cuisine or fast food, Jayaraman makes clear, the well-being of restaurant workers is your concern, as it affects public health and safety, the strength of local economies, and life in our communities.

Recommended by Maywa Montenegro, UC Berkeley graduate student in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

 

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, by Barry Estabrook. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2012.

This book is a superbly readable commodity chain analysis of the tomato, and it also deftly catalogs the story of the slavery and injustices faced by tomato farm workers and the formation of the Immokalee Coalition.  – Kathy De Master, UC Berkeley professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

 

Weighing in: obesity, food justice, and the limits of capitalism, by Julie Guthman. University of California Press, 2011.

Weighing In takes on the “obesity epidemic,” examining fatness and its relationship to public health outcomes. Guthman focuses the lens of obesity on the broader food system to understand why we produce cheap, over-processed food, as well as why we eat it. Taking issue with the currently touted remedy to obesity – promoting food that is local, organic, and farm fresh – she argues that such an approach can also reinforce class and race inequalities and neglect other possible explanations, such as environmental toxins, for the rise in obesity.

Recommended by Annie Shattuck, UC Berkeley Geography graduate student

The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table, by Tracie MacMillan.

 The author doesn’t just document food workers experiences, she works alongside them. – Jeanette Pantoja, UC Berkeley Alumni and Community Worker for California Rural Legal Assistance

 

Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry About What We Eat, by Harvey Levenstein. University of Chicago Press, 2012.

There may be no greater source of anxiety for Americans today than the question of what to eat and drink. Are eggs the perfect protein, or are they cholesterol bombs? Is red wine good for my heart or bad for my liver? Here with rare and welcome advice is food historian Harvey Levenstein: Stop worrying! Levenstein depicts the people and interests who have created and exploited food worries, causing an extraordinary number of Americans to allow fear to trump pleasure in dictating their consumption habits. From scientists who first warned about deadly germs and poisons in foods to modern-day companies that strategically market their products to combat the food fear of the moment, Levenstein’s story is one that highlights the socially constructed fears of what we eat, even as we seek pleasure in the partaking.

Recommended by Patrick Baur, UC Berkeley graduate student in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

 

Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, by Christian Parenti. Nation Books; First Trade Paper Edition edition, 2012.

“[An] impressive new book… If Naomi Klein, Mike Davis, and James Howard Kunstler had teamed up to write a book, the result would read something like Tropic of Chaos… It illustrates the strengths of merging climate projections with left historical analysis of the poverty and conflicts that define much of the Global South. The result is an important map key to the (possibly near) future, if not strictly a climate book. Viewing climate change as an amplifier of existing inequality and disorder, Tropic not only asks the right questions — an argument could be made that it deals with the only questions currently worth asking. ” (via Foreign Policy in Focus)

Recommended by Alejo Kraus-Polk, Cornell University Alumni and Researcher with the Lexicon of Sustainability Project

 

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth, by Fred Pearce. Beacon Press, 2012.

Whether fearing future food shortages or eager to profit from them, the world’s wealthiest and most acquisitive countries, corporations, and individuals have been buying and leasing vast tracts of land around the world. The scale is astounding: parcels the size of small countries are being gobbled up across the plains of Africa, the paddy fields of Southeast Asia, the jungles of South America, and the prairies of Eastern Europe. Veteran science writer Fred Pearce spent a year circling the globe to find out who was doing the buying, whose land was being taken over, and what the effect of these massive land deals seems to be.

Recommended by Alejo Kraus-Polk, Cornell University Alumni and Researcher with the Lexicon of Sustainability Project

 

Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America, by Wenonah Hauter. The New Press, 2012

 

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, also runs an organic family farm that provides healthy vegetables to over 500 families as part of a Washington DC-area CSA program. Despite this commitment to the local food movement, Hauter believes that localism is not sufficient to solve America’s food crisis and the public health debacle it has created. In Foodopoly, she takes aim at the deeper problem: the massive consolidation and corporate control of food production, which prevents farmers from raising diverse crops and limits the choices that people can possibly make in the grocery store. In the end, Hauter illustrates how solving the food crisis will require a complete structural shift, a grassroots movement to reshape our agricultural system from seed to table—a change that is about politics, not just personal choice.

Recommended by Alejo Kraus-Polk, Cornell University Alumni and Researcher with the Lexicon of Sustainability Project

 

The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World, by Sandor Ellix Katz. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012.

“What exactly is fermentation? And how does it work? Those were the questions that fascinated Sandor Ellix Katz for years. Katz calls himself a ‘fermentation revivalist’ and has spent the past decade teaching workshops around the country on the ancient practice of fermenting food. Katz collects many of his recipes and techniques in a new book, The Art of Fermentation.” (via NPR)

Recommended by Adam Calo, UC Berkeley graduate student in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

¶

OTHER NEW NOTABLE BOOKS (compiled from a variety of blogs, magazines, and newspapers)

Food Systems and Globalization

Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food, by Fred Kaufman. Wiley, 2012.

In Bet the Farm, Fred Kaufman connects the dots between food commodity markets and world hunger.  Kaufman is a wonderfully entertaining writer, able to make the most arcane details of such matters as wheat futures crystal clear.  Readers will be alternately amused and appalled by his accounts of relief agencies and the interventions of rich nations.  This book is a must-read for anyone who cares about feeding the hungry in today’s globalized food marketplace.  It’s on the reading list for my NYU classes. – Marion Nestle

 

White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, by Aaron Bobrow-Strain.Beacon Press, 2012.

How did white bread, once an icon of American progress, become “white trash”? “Is this stuff even food?” In this lively history of dietary crusaders, bakers, and social reformers, Bobrow-Strain prods the humble, puffy loaf and finds much about who we are and what we want our society to look like. Today, as alternative ag movements champion foods deemed to be more ethically, nutritionally, and environmentally ‘correct,’ the pale and fluffy industrial loaves are about as far from the whole-grain, organic, artisanal ideal as one can get. Still, the beliefs of early 21st food experts – that getting people to eat certain foods could restore the nation’s decaying physical, moral, and social fabric – will sound surprisingly familiar.

This terrific book does for the humble loaf what Mark Kurlansky does for cod.” — Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved

From the Academic Press

California Cuisine and Just Food, by Sally Fairfax, et al. MIT Press, 2012.

California Cuisine and Just Food takes a deep and comprehensive look at past and present efforts to bring tastier, healthier, locally grown, and ethically produced food to San Francisco Bay Area eaters, poor as well as rich.  The story is inspiring.  The authors of this collectively written account, cautious academics as they must be, describe the development of the Bay Area food scene as a “district” rather than as a social movement.  But I have no such compunctions.  It looks like a social movement to me.  This book is about how the Bay Area food movement evolved to what it is today: a vibrant community of highly diverse groups working on highly diverse ways to produce better quality food and promote a more just, healthful, and sustainable food system—for everyone along the entire system of what it takes to produce, transport, sell, prepare, serve, and consume food. – from the foreword, by Marion Nestle

Food and Culture,  Third Edition, by Counihan C. and Van Esterik P, eds.  Routledge, 2012. 

Food and Culture is the indispensable resource for anyone delving into food studies for the first time.  The editors have conveniently gathered readings from classic texts to the latest writings on cutting-edge issues in this field.  Although in its third edition, the book has so much new material that it reads as fresh and should appeal and be useful to students and others from a wide range of disciplines. – Marion Nestle

Editor’s note: Check out this 634-page book’s table of contents – quite a collection of voices and subjects, from Levi-Strauss on “The Culinary Triangle” to Sidney Mintz on “Time, Sugar, and Sweetness.”

 

The New Agrarians

Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World, by Joel Salatin.Center Street Press, 2012.

Salatin, profiled in the Academy Award nominated documentary Food, Inc. and the bestselling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, understands what food should be: Wholesome, seasonal, raised naturally, procured locally, prepared lovingly, and eaten with a profound reverence for the circle of life.

Chances are slim you’ll agree with everything in this wonderfully cranky book. But I’m almost certain you’ll agree that Joel Salatin has earned the right to his convictions, and that they shine a powerful light on some of the paths out of the predicament we find ourselves in as a world. – Bill McKibben, author Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

 

Taste, Memory: Forgotten Foods, Lost Flavors, and Why They Matter, by David Buchanan. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012.

In Taste, Memory Buchanan narrates his own personal rediscovery of in situ conservation, alongside stories of slightly obsessive urban gardeners, preservationists, environmentalists, farmers, and passionate cooks, and other leaders in the movement to defend agricultural biodiversity.  The book begins and ends with a simple premise: that a healthy food system depends on matching diverse plants and animals to the demands of land and climate. In this sense of place lies the true meaning of local food.

Taste, Memory may well be the most beautiful book ever written about food biodiversity and how it has ‘landed’ on earth, in our mouths and in our hearts. Once you have read and digested David’s book, you will never again regard this two-word phrase as an abstraction, but as a vital element of our common food heritage, one that continues to nourish and enrich our lives. – from the foreword by Gary Paul Nabhan

 

Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works, by Atina Diffley. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Turn Here Sweet Corn is an unexpected page-turner.  Atina Diffley’s compelling account of her life as a Minnesota organic farmer is deeply moving not only from a personal standpoint but also from the political.  Diffley reveals the evident difficulties of small-scale organic farming but is inspirational about its value to people and the planet.”  The book comes with an insert of glorious photographs illustrating the history she recounts.  The political?  The Diffley’s fought to keep an oil company from running a pipeline through their property—and won. – Marion Nestle

 

Food Movements, Urban and Rural

Change Comes to Dinner:  How Vertical Farmers, Urban Growers, and Other Innovators are Revolutionizing How America Eats, by Katherine Gustafson. St. Martins, 2012.

Katherine Gustafson is a troubadour for sustainable food, inviting us to jump into her rental car as she maps the inspiring alternative food system emerging across the United States. And here’s a pleasant surprise: we don’t spend any time in the privileged bubbles of Brooklyn or Berkeley; Gustafson’s expansive and hopeful portrait puts the rest of America back in the picture. Change Comes To Dinner shows us the outline of a sane food system: now it’s up to us to fill it in.” – Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine

 

Eat the City: A Tale of the Fishers, Foragers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders, Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters, Bee Keepers, Wine Makers, and Brewers Who Built New York, by Robin Shulman. Crown Publishers, 2012.

Eat the City is about the men and women who came to New York City–now and in the past–and planted gardens, harvested honey, made cheese, and brewed beer and made New York what it is today.  Robin Shulman uses their stories to bring this rich history to life and to reflect on the forces that brought immigrants and their food traditions to this city.   Not all of these stories have happy endings, but they inform, move, and inspire. – Marion Nestle

By Maywa Montenegro and Jennie Durant

Order up a cup of shade-grown, organic coffee and it is likely that the beans have been farmed under a canopy of trees, helping keep the air cleaner, the wildlife more diverse, and cycles of water and soil nutrients flowing in good health. These kinds of “ecosystem services” – so called for the benefits they provide to people – have in the past few decades generated a swell of interest from ecologists, policymakers, and economists worldwide, as they seek to understand how nature, such as trees on a coffee farm, confers value to humanity in ways that aren’t currently priced. But what happens on the farm is only the very first step. Linking coffee berry to coffee cup is an entire supply chain that depends upon ecosystem services, even while it has major effects on those services.
What kinds of ecosystem services are involved at each stage in a commodity chain? Can we measure how these services flows are shaped by commodity production, transporting, and processing? In a world where global trade has created geographically complex commodity chains, can we quantify the entire chain of services that go into making our fuel, fiber, and food? These are some of the big picture questions that inspired UC Berkeley Professor Claire Kremen and her post-doctoral student Joanne Gaskell to co-organize a workshop on December 1-2 on the Berkeley campus. Gathering researchers with expertise and interest in ecosystem services and agricultural supply chains from Berkeley, Stanford, McGill, Princeton, and the University of Minnesota, they came together for a two-day blitz of brainstorming, mapping, and, eventually, paper outlining, about the links between farming systems, supply chains, and ecosystem services.

On Saturday, the workshop participants broke into smaller groups in order to explore three interrelated themes: What is the relationship between farming practices and the length and complexity of supply chains? Does farm size and farm management affect the types and quantities of ecosystem services provided? What kinds of ecosystem services are most important along the entire length of food supply chains, and how do these service flows change for different types of chains?

Over the course of the weekend, unpacking these questions required detailed analysis of the farm-to-table process: starting with cultivation of the crop, they moved to the milling and refining stages, then to manufacturing and distribution, and finally, to the link between retailer and consumer. To keep things manageable, the workshop participants decided to focus mostly on palm oil, but also kept in mind globally important commodities such as coffee, soybean, and tomato. At each step of the palm commodity chain, their challenge was to identify the flows of services both into and out of the ecosystem. For example, they considered how plant pollination, water filtration, and genetic biodiversity support palm plantations, which in turn support services such as wildlife habitat, water supply, and of course, the making of the oil palm crop.

The researchers also paid close attention to ecosystem dis-services – things such as habitat destruction that results from expanding farm activities, or water pollution from the intensive milling and refining of oil palm fruits. Extrapolating this commodity chain analysis over time (from forest-to-farm conversion, followed by multiple rounds of palm planting and harvesting), and taking into account particular climates, ecologies, and cultivation practices was an additional conceptual hurdle. In practice, what it looked like was a Berkeley faculty club papered-over in brainstorming posters tacked to the wall – a flurry of carbon sequestration profiles and schematics of oil palm processing mills stippled with “energy,” “pollution,” and “atmosphere” arrows decorated the meeting rooms as the workshop progressed.
Helping to integrate the otherwise cacophonous detail of commodity chain analysis was the idea of “embodied services.” Although food is considered an ecosystem service, food also embodies all of the natural processes that are required to produce the product but that are not contained within it – and that therefore rarely influence food pricing. Assessing embodied ecosystem services, the researchers realized, could be an essential first step toward incorporating these services into decision-making.

These embodied services become particularly important when considering the geographical re-distribution of ecosystem services in a globalized food economy. Extended supply chains imply that imported food consumption “embodies” ecosystem services from the country or region where food was produced, explains Gaskell. Trade in these “virtual” ecosystem services, she says, can be efficient: for example, water-scarce countries can import irrigated crops from countries where water is abundant. On the other hand, weak regulatory environments, or instances where the full social costs of production are not incorporated into private production costs, can mean that virtual trade in ecosystem services adds to local environmental problems – or displaces problems to other countries. When consumers are separated from the environmental and social implications of their consumption choices through globalized trade, they may find it difficult (or impossible) to make informed decisions about where, when, and what they should buy.

The participants also grappled with the complexity inherent in defining the relationship between farm size, farming practice, and supply chains. As Gaskell explains, “We began with the working hypothesis that smaller, more diversified farms tend to be connected to local markets via shorter supply chains, whereas larger farms have longer supply chains linked to more globalized markets.” To take the extreme case, a backyard chicken coop could supply a single household with all of the eggs a family needs – no other processing required other than cooking. At the other extreme, when a 200-hectare soybean farm in Mato Grosso supplies feed markets in China, pork consumers in Beijing are thousands of kilometers away, and many processing steps removed from the original soybean farm. In general, the researchers predicted, larger, less-diversified, higher-yielding farms are likely to be connected to more extensive markets since those farms will supply more of a crop than can be absorbed by local demand. But they already anticipate exceptions to this hypothesis. In the case of Indonesian oil palm, says Gaskell, the relationship between farm size and supply chains may not hold.

On Sunday, the workshop participants continued to work in small groups but with the goal of designing at least two publishable papers. The first, a conceptual paper, will combine the literature on mapping global value chains, sustainable supply chain management, and ecosystem services to create a framework for evaluating embodied ecosystem services (EES) within a commodity chain. This paper will diagram the EES at specific stages of production specifying the producers, processors, farmers responsible for each stage. The workshop participants were especially interested here in identifying points of intervention – the links in the commodity chain at which policy-makers and business managers can best target their efforts. The other paper will take a quantitative approach, generating numerical estimates for the effects on water quality throughout a commodity chain. Palm oil or soybean will be the likely case study, enabling the researchers to compare the ecosystems service effects across different management regimes and certification schemes.

Although the workshop was just a starting point for what is likely to be a long-term collaborative project, the researchers hope that embodied ecosystem services will be an analytical framework that travels widely. That it will reach not only fellow conservation scientists, but also social scientists, agricultural planners, policy-makers, and business managers who may be in a position to incorporate the EES into product sourcing and design. By taking a closer look at the nature that figures into every step of making our food, they hope, nature will be around a little longer to keep alive the very chain that keeps us living.