That is the real tragedy here folks, and it’s hardly confined to Trader Joes. This country’s ability to throw out 11 million pounds of food every hour stems directly from turning farms into manufacturing plants. We amp up agricultural production to unnatural levels then cull out just the very best to eat. If you think Traders Joes is being wasteful, try walking through an apple orchard in harvest time. Those who’ve seen such a sight know less than one in 20 apples from any orchard get eaten. Yet every year we’re using endless amounts of fertilizer and pesticides to coax this insane overproduction over and over again.

The point is this. Yes, it’s sad Trader Joes, discards enough food to cut the cafeteria budget of surrounding school districts in half. But what’s even sadder is every deli, supermarket, fish market, farm stand, restaurant and household is doing the same thing. Can anyone fathom how much food really gets discarded each day in this country? Then marry that image to the marine deadzones metastasizing at the mouth of every river draining pesticides and fertilizer from the nation’s farms. Think of landfills bulging with discarded food items, many wrapped in plastic that insure the contents inside will not nourish the surrounding soil for a century or so. Think of the fuel that farms burn to produce all that wasted food. Think of the groundwater contamination from the pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers soaking into the soil every year.

When you start to look at this nation’s food production and the waste it generates, you realize those going hungry in the face of it are far from the only concern. This country is not wasteful because we like it. We’re wasteful because we’ve been spoiled rotten by manufacturers who convinced us that buying their products and then throwing them out is the American way of life. But it’s increasingly looking like the worm has turned on our over-consumption. With $4 gas we just can’t afford it anymore. And that’s great news. Not only will we be forced to curb our consumption and all the environmental damage it’s doing, but Freegans may have to get a real job.  In the meantime, head over to Trader Joes for a bite, but you might want to wait until after they close.

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Test-Tube Burgers ?05.31.11

The New Yorker, in the headline linked above, recently devoted a couple thousand words to one man’s 20-year quest for synthetic meat and the prospect that that quest may finally be bearing fruit. As devotees of grass-fed rib-eye steak from Tendercrop Farms, NBN started reading this article with skepticism, but the author make the point that this test-tube-steak is not for making rib-eyes, its for making hot dogs and hamburgers. When you think that McDonalds alone has sold billions of hamburgers and then add Wendys, Burger King, Arby’s, In-and-Out and on and on, we’re going to go out on a limb here and say the world eats a few million ground up cows every year.

And we’re not even taking into account the number of hot dogs, and sausages eaten every year. Where there is no real replacement for a well marbled rib-eye, all processed meats could  theoretically be replaced by the test tube stuff.  When you consider all the ecological damage done from raising all those factory farm cows and pigs, the idea of a test tube-tube steak starts to sound real good, if you can make it as tasty as this little beauty shown here. Not too tall an order in our estimation. Here’s an intriguing study on what the world would be saved if McDonalds sold nothing but vegeburgers: Half a billion pounds of saturated fat for starters. The New Yorker piece linked above is a little long winded but well reported, the McDonalds study is an eye-opener. We recommend both.

Wish Farms Announces Pesticide Residue-Free Blueberries The blueberries discussed in the press release linked to this headline above do not come to your supermarket coated with chemicals and they are not organic. Or, so the farm producing them says. That farm relies on an independent testing company to certify that these berries have less than .01 parts per million of pesticide. That means for every 100 million berries you eat, one is pure blueberry pesticide and we’re talking some pretty nasty stuff. Still, that’s a heck of a selling point for the farm because these super-cleaned blueberries cost a lot less than organic. However, there are two points we’d like to make before pounding down these pesticide purified packets of power-packed antioxidants. First, the berries are still getting sprayed, so the ground they grow these berries in is still soaking up all kinds of chemicals.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it looks like the company that certified these things as being so pesticide-free are being paid by the farm to do so. Sort of like the banks and bond rating agencies that gave us the subprime mortgage meltdown. NBN did a quick cyber reconnaissance and found this: The certification company “is financially independent from its clients and operates based on fees for service.” Which begs the question: Who pays the fees? It’s not the government. Here’s what former employees have to say about the place. Their comments sound an awful lot like what Michael Lewis had to say about the subprime bond rating Moody’s in his book “The Big Short.” Yet when you look at the staff of this certification company, it’s kind of hard to think that they are anything but dedicated and sincere.

Sorry, NBN doesn’t have an answer on this issue, just a little food for thought. Do you think in today’s present economic climate any government funding for an independent blueberry cleaning certification agency will survive? Nobody likes taxes, but we possibly pay a dearer price when we search for alternative funding for such programs. Oh, by the way, NBN estimates it will take one person eating berries continuously for 3,000 years to consumer 100 million blueberries, based on an algorithm of estimate, prevarication, conjecture and a liberal application of multivariate statistics.

It seems prices for everything but health care and housing hasn’t budged since China discovered it had close to one billion people who would happily slap sneakers and refrigerators together for $10 a day. In the US, our oil-fired agriculture allows us to feed a family of five for about the same price, if you’re willing to forego the Lunchables, Go-gurt, juice boxes, and Happy Meals. We could double the price of meat, fish and poultry tomorrow and not know the difference in our wallet if we are willing to eat less of all the above and more grains and vegees.  Or just eat less, period. At the same time we could revert back to small-production, less environmentally disastrous farming while eating healthier food in the process. We enter into evidence People's Exhibit 1: a t-bone steak for $6. Warning! Personal anecdote approaching.

For precious-few years, when the five of us were kids, Dad decided it was a good time to launch a freelance journalism career. We were broke. We didn’t have Frootshoots and Stack’ems in the brown paper bags we brought to school, we had handmade sandwiches wrapped in wax paper bags with an apple. (Very occasionally, someone got a raw potato but that was more for comical, rather than economic effect.) Worse, we’d often come home from school to a dinner of lentil soup my mother used to make in 50-gallon vats. Every fourth vat had hotdogs. Guess what? We survived. Ever since Lincoln, American’s have lectured their kids on how good they’ve got it. But our economy isn’t the only thing we’ve trashed giving it to them. Now our kids are going to have to pay.

What if we make it so the cost of a steak reflects the ecological cost of producing it. Chicken at $.79 a pound is insane when you look at the messy farms it leaves behind. In 1996 the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that for every one fish caught and kept, another six unwanted fish are also caught and discarded. That’s going to end in a hurry if fresh wild fish costs $20 a pound and you can only catch it by hook and line. To keep fishstick fans and Long John Silver’s happy, we could turn our fishermen into fish farmers. With these changes, throwing out our one pound of food per-person, per-day, will not be coming at so dear a cost to our land and marine ecosystems.

So, where does that leave us with our elderly NBC sources decrying the high cost of food and NBN's reluctance to run this lament last week? Consider those sources in the NBC segment again. That first couple looks fairly comfortable in their Florida retirement community and the second woman was interviewed in a café where her bill could buy three meals if prepared at home. Did NBC go out and get the “quotes” needed to support its Social Security story in the same way NBN searched out the links to support its misunderstanding of the facts last week? We had a week to rewrite and rethink our piece. NBC didn’t. Nuf' said.

Over the objections of the auto industry, environmentalists and a broad coalition of other groups, the EPA is expected to increase the minimum level of ethanol in auto fuel to 15 percent from 10 percent, according to this AP piece. Which has us asking: who favors this move? These guys: Growth Energy. They collect about $2.3 million in annual contributions (PDF) to make similar contributions to the politicians pushing this policy. According to the non-profit’s  IRS Form 990 more than half the annual budget went to “communications” and “other” without any additional details. Who gave the money? It all came in membership dues. Who are the members? Guys profiting handsomely from all those donations.

First there’s Steve McNinch, CEO of Western Plains Energy LLC, which is an ethanol plant near Oakley, Kansas. Then there’s Bruce Rastetter, co-founder and chief executive of Hawkeye Energy Holdings, one of the nation’s larger ethanol companies. Then there’s Dave Vander Griend, head of another pro-ethanol group in Kansas. Then there’s Darrin Ihnen, National Corn Growers Association president. Not to be outdone by the GOP over -influence here, former Democratic Prez candidate Wesley Clark, is also on the board of directors of Growth Energy.

You can argue the merits of ethanol all day long. But how can it possibly be less polluting than solar and wind power which consume no fossil fuels, pesticides or herbicides in production and produce no green houses gases. Yet American’s have paid $250 billion to these folks since 1995 to grow or not grow their crops. (We urge you to see the movie Food Inc. and what it has to say about corn growers in this country.) These guys aren’t Republicans or Democrats, they’re the Cosa Nostra. The caporegimes are the guys running commercials right now decrying such corruption while we’re trying to watch the latest episode of The Greatest Loser.

We’re the losers folks. There are no political parties, just vested interests paying off politicians representing corporate interests above ours in Washington. What do we do about it? The same thing we’ve always done: Elect the same people anointed by national political parties to perpetuate policies enriching the contributors empowering these national parties. Look at this Google News search result for “campaign finance reform.” It’s depressing. Are any of the candidates seeking election in your state talking about it? Hell no. The Democrats and the Republicans are as terrified of campaign finance reform as the Saudis are of solar power and the drug cartels are of marijuana legalization. The single biggest problem facing this country is not terrorism, the economy, immigration or pollution. It’s campaign finance reform. And the problem has never been worse than it is right now. How is that possible?

There comes a time in our lives when people begin to believe they should be consuming fewer chemicals. Not just the obvious things like salt, nicotine and saturated fats, but the nastier things like pesticides, herbicides and synthetic hormones. You begin to wonder about lasting impacts from having these things floating around in your bloodstream for half a century. You start stopping at the organic produce sections in the supermarket before recoiling at the prices and moving on. You envision for a moment the residues coating the inside of your lungs before inhaling that cigar you're enjoying with your single malt scotch. As you sip that scotch you weigh more deliberately the wisdom of once again bathing your dwindling supply of brain cells in ethyl alcohol after an illspent youth devoted to drowning same in a broad spectrum of intoxicants.

Before you assume NBN is once again on a mission to bum you out, relax. All this middle-aged angst actually has a happy ending. We've discovered the curative powers of organic beef for middle-age anxiety over environmental health threats. Make no mistake, NBN has pounded down our share of Big Macs. Hey, we’re lugging it. But there’s this movie out called Food Inc. that will put the fear of food into you. This is must see TV for anyone with an aversion to auto-immune diseases. According to this movie, chicken, cows and pigs aren’t raised, these days, they’re cultivated with the same sort of chemical inducements discussed in Biodiversity News today. Without getting into all the gory details the movie does, we'll just say that movie definitely takes the fun out of Happy Meals. So, does that mean you shell out $1 each for organic bananas and $16 per-pound for grass fed beef?

Call it kismet, but just about the time NBN started weighing these unpleasant realities we discovered Tendercrop Farms. Five miles away there’s a market that sells grass-fed beef, free range poultry and whatever you do to pigs to help them lead a cleaner, happier life before being eaten. Contrary to popular belief, grass-fed steaks and other organic meats are not all lean and tasteless. On the contrary, every incarnation of muscle tissue Tendercrop sells is delicious, so far as we’ve eaten anyway. We ate this steak Sunday, it was slaughtered Friday. For all we know the day before that it was chowing down on clover thinking nice thoughts. This steak was every bit as delicious as it looks. There was blood in the plastic bag we carried the meat home in. No styrofoam cartons pressurized with oxygen that adds months onto the shelf life of steak.

We’re not being paid to promote Tendecrop. (In fact, we’re not being paid at all. Please see our Reader Services page to correct this travesty.) We’re just making a point: You can have your organic steak and eat it too. Just not as often as you used to enjoy the hormone-fed, antibiotic-injected, penned-up versions of meat supermarkets sell for a third the price. Those steaks can taste pretty dam good too. Who buys grass-fed organic steak for three times the price of the chemically enhanced version during these tough times? We do. In a perverse twist of logic, shopping at Tendercrop has become part of our new austerity plan. Here’s how it works. We’ve cut back to only eating meat once or twice a week. When we do, it’s usually a 1.5 inch rib eye or strip streak that costs about $10 each for a 12-ounce serving; A perfectly marbled, morsel of the grass fed fellow pictured two paragraphs up. Steak for us has become once again what it was when we were kids: a treat.

During the week we fill the void with various cereals covered with flax seed and left-overs climbing out of the Tupperware they’ve been sentenced to. On the weekends it’s Tendercrop bacon with free range eggs for breakfast and grass fed beef or day-boat haddock for dinner, usually with a side of some sort of chemically enhanced veggies. (We haven’t gone that organic, yet. We explain why in Popular Wisdom this week.) We’re not just doing this because we're slaves to good-tasting food that's good for you. We also are getting a little concerned about what stuff like Zeranol does to your immune system. Do we really want any more of these things clogging our capillaries and muddling our metabolism than absolutely necessary? Warning: This is where this cheery conversation turns a little dark.

Could there be a link between all these chemicals in our environment and the increase in autoimmune disease? Let’s indulge in completely reckless speculation for a moment. Is it possible all these complex chemicals are rolling through your blood stream like millions of little red flags setting off alarm bells for your immune system to attack? Could all these complex chemicals be wearing out your immune system the same way white sugar and wheat wear out your pancreas, giving you diabetes? There is also thought to be a connection between auto-immune diseases and cancer. While we wait for science to sort out some answers, it just seems like common sense to hedge our bets by consuming fewer chemicals. And, as all the above suggests, you can still enjoy a fine steak every once in a while. If you want to know what’s really in your Big Mac, check out this Mother Earth News piece.