And Do You Wear the Green?

A version of this post originally appeared in the Round Robin, the magazine of the American Women’s Club of Zurich and is meant chiefly for those of you living in Zurich.

Some years ago I had the good fortune to see the “Monet’s Garden” exhibition at the Kunsthaus in Zurich. As I floated from picture to picture, drunk with the beauty of it all, it suddenly came to me that Monet was an environmentalist. His works are a paean to man’s constructive interaction with nature, both in the making of his gardens and in painting them. Because we’re conscious, we’re not just a part of nature; we bear a responsibility to keep it intact. But this does not have to be grim or self-denying; it can, and ought to be, joyful. It’s quite possible that you are an environmentalist and don’t even realize it. Let’s look at some of the ways those of us here in Switzerland may give a new meaning to the wearing of the green.

You may be an environmentalist

-if you eat food that is good for you. It is logical that pears picked yesterday in Thurgau and offered at your town’s market will provide you with more vitamins and taste better than pears picked several weeks ago half way around the world. As for the environment, transport over long distances contributes to global warming and air pollution. If you choose local, organically grown food you’re choosing a win-win situation for you, the environment and the local economy. And now comes the rub – what if you have to choose between organic and local? Here you may have to compromise, deciding which is more important in a particular situation.

Or let’s consider some of those European fish with lots of good Omega-3 fats: sardines, herring, and oysters. Guess what salt-water fish are not over fished? That’s right , wild North Atlantic sardines, European farmed oysters and MSC labelled herring. Then there is the well-known fact that we should cut down on red meat for the sake of our arteries – which thus releases grain to feed people instead of beef cattle. It takes between seven and 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef, a practice that cannot be continued in the future, when food shortages will loom.

-if you like to swim in Lake Zurich and hike in the mountains. Swimming along, gazing at the Alps in the distance, you’re enjoying the fact that clever technology makes it possible for some half million people to live around the lake and not only swim in it but get their drinking water from it with a minimum of purification. The human mind is capable of creating amazing technology - needed in all areas of modern environmentalism. Or, as you stand in a mountain meadow and gaze at those same Alps, rejoicing in clean air. And then – you turn and gaze at Zurich down below, and what is all that smoggy stuff covering the city? We breathe that? Such a moment makes a far greater impression than all the statistics in the newspaper about the air pollution resulting from driving.

-if you serve your guests those parsnips, several tomato varieties and psychedelic striped beets belonging to the Pro Specie Rara vegetable line. They appear to be “designer veggies”, but are in fact old varieties being produced again, and are available at Coop supermarkets. By including them in your weekly menus, you are doing your bit for biodiversity, one of the most pressing needs of our time.

-if you wear eco-cotton because it is kind to your skin. Now you are ranging out into the world away from Switzerland. You’re literally wearing the green. The same thing applies to using body care products without perfumes, colouring agents and the like because your skin likes them. The environment appreciates them too.

-if you enjoy the works of Farley Mowat and Bill Bryson. Try Never Cry Wolf by Mowat. Written in 1963, this amusing (there is a recipe for “Souris à la Crème”), but also enraging and true tale is still relevant today, when sheep farmers in many countries, worried about wolves decimating their herds, are pitted against conservationists who want to protect the dwindling wolf population. Bryson has written at least 5 books of which Sarah van Schagen, writing in GRIST online magazine in 2005, says “…Bryson’s voice becomes a sort of environmental conscience for unsuspecting readers.” In a Sunburned Country describes the teeming, unique life of the Australian continent, A Walk in the Woods makes you think about land management, while A Short History of Nearly Everything discusses, among nearly everything else, human responsibility for taking care of the planet. I’m a Stranger here Myself was written after Bryson returned to the States after 20 years abroad, and is a wry look at such American foibles as blithely wasting energy and hating to walk anywhere. Bryson is always entertaining, even when he is at his most serious.

So what do you think – are you an environmentalist?

What if…

Sometimes the appalling food and agri situation in the world in general and in the USD in particular gets just too heavy. Then one must crawl into one’s cave for a bit or the opposite; indulge in a flight on the wings of fantasy. This week I’m opting for the latter.

First, let’s imagine that blueberries, nuts, sweet potatoes and kidney beans were subsidized in the US instead of corn and soybeans. We can start with the certainties, such as the fact that fast food and convenience food, meat and the hundreds of products made from corn would become more expensive.

Then one can let the imagination have free rein:

  Iowa might become known as the fruit and veggie belt instead of the Corn Belt.

  The Brazilian rainforest might be saved from being turned into soybean farms

  Toasted nuts might become the snack of choice. Dense in healthy fats, they also teem with valuable minerals.

  Chocolate-coated blueberries might replace chocolate-covered potato chips as another snack.

  Thai veggie soup and Pad Thai with lots of added veggies might replace pizza at the local fast-food restaurant

  Convenience food might mean precut and peeled veggies – fresh or frozen - in combination to make easy, inexpensive one-dish meals. Grocery stores already have a hot soup pot and a salad bar; surely they could add an inexpensive one-dish healthy meal pot? I’m thinking of chili sin carne or with a little carne, ratatouille and the like. Corner stores, at which many of the poor shop, could sell precut mixed veggies for stir-fries etc. Friday might be pizza day, with a bag containing a roll of pizza dough, the aforementioned pre-cut veggies and herbs, a small tub of tomato sauce and a ball of mozzarella. Customers could bring their own bags or tubs.

The certain results of all this? A healthier population, a decrease in medical costs, a reversal in the present shocking life expectancy trend, which is that the youth of today have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

Are such subsidies realistic? Not at present, with the enormous power of big aggie behind the present subsidies. More realistic, perhaps, would be a tax on fast food and sugar, like the tax on alcohol and tobacco.  

And now let’s suppose that fossil fuel subsidies were given instead to alternative energy projects. Some ensuing situations seem pretty certain:

  There would be political repercussions, as relations with states from which we import oil would change.

  Coal mining and fracking would slow down and then stop, as coal and oil would no longer be economically competitive.

  Solar panels might sprout on every roof.

  Air quality would improve and global warming would be slowed.

  Electric cars and bikes would become much more popular and less expensive. Those solar panels would be necessary to provide the juice for the batteries.

  There would have to be more and better public transport, company mini-bus solutions and the like.

 Once again, let’s imagine:

I have a picture of the following: very small electric carts – two-seaters and four-seaters – are stationed here and there throughout the community. One can call up one of these carts on the computer, whereupon it arrives automatically at one’s front door, perhaps on tracks laid in the street like tram tracks. Once aboard, one programs in one’s destination and is ferried there, again automatically. The system includes automatic braking in case of threatened collision. One pays via credit card. These systems would function mostly in the suburbs and countryside. One can dream…

  Big oil might become big energy, featuring a broad band of alternative technologies. The oil companies have money, clout, international presence and experience with marketing, all of which could be put to good use in the alternative energy field. As I say, one can dream.

From Commodity to Culture

Bridging the grocery gap

The other day I read an article praising large concerns in the food and agriculture sector. This is the only way to make food affordable, wrote the author, just as large-scale manufacturing has brought down prices in other sectors of the economy.

What is scary about this point of view is that it is quite right where processed food is concerned. Stable, with a long shelf - or freezer -  life, processed food is just another commodity to be centrally manufactured in huge quantities and shipped everywhere. Add in the subsidies paid to farmers to grow the basic ingredients and you’ve got a winner in the cost contest.

Compare this with its opposite situation; local, seasonal, fresh food. There is a lot of waste. No one cares about the imperfections in an ear of corn that will be used to make corn chips, whereas the shopping housewife will reject an apple with a few black spots, and a bunch of radishes with wilted leaves is a goner. The process of getting the crop from the field to the sales point must be rapid and temperature controlled in hot weather. Fresh fruits and veggies are mostly water; their weight means high shipping costs and they take up a lot of space. They need to be packed very carefully. Small shops in the inner cities are unwilling to stock produce that may or may not sell within its short life span. The result is that good quality, environmentally sound, healthy food sells at high prices to those who can afford it, while the poor nourish themselves on fast and processed food. The cost per calorie of energy-dense junk foods is about one tenth that of nutritious foods. An ethical, health and social scandal.

If you see food as just another commodity, you don’t see this as a scandal, you see it as a marketing opportunity. There are more fast-food restaurants in poor areas and a higher percentage of corner stores stocking processed food. If they stock fresh food at all, it is often of poor quality. Low-income families, and particularly their children, are exposed to more advertising for soft drinks and fast food. Speaking of advertising, how often do you see an ad extolling the virtues of tomatoes or apples? These ads are virtually non-existent in all the media, no matter the social class for which the advertising is meant. Tomatoes and apples are not products in the advertising sense; they don’t bear brand names. Besides, your local tomato farm, no matter how large as these things go, can’t afford the advertising fees.

At the most basic level, the US government policy of subsidizing corn and soybeans percolates up through all levels of food production and marketing. Corn, particularly high-fructose corn syrup, finds its way into hundreds of inexpensive processed foods, while both corn and soybeans feed beef cattle, whose meat thus sells at an artificially low price. That this same government promotes a healthy diet with its ChooseMyPlate program while slipping subsidies to corn and soybeans with the other is the height of absurdity and hypocrisy.

What is one practical social result of seeing food as a commodity? There are a substantial number of “food desert” counties in the US where all residents live 10 miles or more from the nearest supermarket or supercenter. According to the Food Trust, over 70 percent of food stamp eligible families in Mississippi are more than 30 miles from a supermarket. As these families often lack a car, they are dependent on the convenience store and the fast-food restaurant around the corner. Small wonder that Mississippi has the highest obesity rate in the US. Only slightly less shocking statistics can be quoted for poor areas everywhere in the States.

 Fortunately, fast-food purveyors no longer have quite the stranglehold on government that they have enjoyed until recently. Alarm at the horrifying climbing obesity rates in the country, social conscience and imagination are tackling the problem with growing success.

Green Carts and Healthy Bodegas

It is inspiring that the federal government is tackling this situation with its Healthy Food Financing Initiative, which seeks to help finance grocery stores in low-income communities, both rural and urban. It has been found that supermarkets are the most effective solution to the food-desert problem, as they have a wide choice of fresh food at reasonable prices, have long opening times and generally accept electronic benefit transfer (the electronic version of food stamps). Several states and cities are getting in on the act as well, participating in public-private partnerships to finance grocery stores in poor areas.

Less expensive and easier to implement are programs at the community level, like farmers’ markets and community gardens. Valuable also are the social aspects and the empowerment felt by the residents who participate actively in setting up local programs. In New York city, for instance, Green Carts seeks to encourage small food vendors to set up in poorer neighborhoods, while Healthy Bodegas brings fresh food to corner markets. Such programs create jobs and can revitalize dying neighborhoods, encourage other businesses to locate in the area and raise property values.

Heartening as these programs are, they do not touch the basic causes of the dire food situation itself. How would it be if the federal government stopped subsidizing corn and soybeans and starting subsidizing farmers who grow tomatoes, carrots and leafy greens instead? Novel as this may sound, it is no stranger than the fact that in the US today one must be fairly well off financially in order to eat healthily. Steak, lobster and caviar are luxury foods; kale and squash should not be. From the social, economic, health and moral points of view, a major overhaul of the basic facts of food production life is a crying need.

  

The Green Tomato Friendship

The prolific tomato plants on my balcony are still covered with fruit; little green globes that will not ripen. Perfect for green tomato chutney and my favorite Ginger Tomatoes, a Pennsylvania Dutch sweet chutney made from red and green tomatoes, ginger, lemon, cloves and sugar. I attempt to skin the tiny green spheres by scalding and then chilling them, and have rather mixed success. Ah well, tomato skins will not ruin the concoction. I have great jars this year, only 1.5 deciliters, about ¾ cup, with wide mouths. At some point I must get a jam funnel but for the moment I am relieved not to have to spoon in the mixture with great care and a small spoon.

The first jar is set aside for my friend Vera, she of the prolific fig tree. Enjoying the golden light of a perfect October day, I walk down the hill to her house. She and her husband and one of their grandchildren are working in the garden, and Vera announces that she needs a break and invites me for coffee. Good espresso, vermicelles with cream and quince paste with almonds appear on the table in their winter garden, and we gossip over the coffee cups. I leave with a jar of their green tomato chutney, different from mine, figs (!), chestnuts from Ticino and a persimmon. Neither the fig tree nor the persimmon tree is very large, but both are handsome trees with glossy leaves. They are also extremely generous, like Vera herself.

If making one’s own jam and chutney is satisfying, sharing the results with friends is more so. Something about the distillation of one’s lifestyle, the work of one’s hands, the memory of time spent together, the richness of life, sharing.

Ginger Tomatoes Recipe

3 lbs green tomatoes

1 lb red tomatoes

2.5 lbs sugar

2 lemons, thinly sliced

1/2 tsp whole cloves

2   1.5 inch pieces ginger root

Scald the tomatoes, peel and cut into pieces*. Stir in the sugar, lemons and spices. Bring to the boil and then reduce heat; cook slowly until mixture thickens. Pour into sterilized jars and seal. Yield: about 8 cups.

* I do not cut cherry tomatoes into pieces, rather mash them as they cook. Larger tomatoes or a mixture of large and cherry sizes works best.   

The Lost Mouthful

No. Impossible. Can’t be. Here it says that 40% of the food grown in the world never gets eaten; it goes to waste. Must be alarmist; let’s check the website of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. The FAO figures that one third of food produced is wasted, not much less than the 40% - horrifying! Wanting to know where on the long road from farm to fork this staggering loss occurs, I decide to watch the film “Taste the Waste”. I watch about half of it and have to stop. I cannot see yet one more scene in which a truckload of fish/bread/vegetables/apples lands on the scrapheap.

I retreat to the more-distant printed word and learn that

-the amount of food wasted each year would feed the world’s hungry four times over.

-an amount of water equal to the annual flow of the Volga River is used to grow wasted food.

-an area three times the size of Thailand is used to grow food that is wasted

-the bread discarded each year in the EU could feed all of Spain

So where is all this loss taking place? In the developing countries, mostly before production: poor farming practices, disease, parasites, inadequate storage and transportation. In the developed world too severe quality standards and restrictions are often to blame. Tomatoes are thrown out because they are not quite red enough, potatoes because they are the wrong size, carrots because their shape is weird. “Sell-by” and “best before” dates are widely misunderstood as being indicators of safety, whereas they generally indicate quality. Discrepancies between supply and demand are the major factor everywhere. Farmers are left holding the bag of zucchini because the market doesn’t want it, restaurants and grocery stores toss out perfectly good food at the end of the working day.
 
At this point I realize that one’s personal experience with food waste repeats in microcosm what happens on the worldwide scale. There is the friend in Vermont who did not have time to get all the tomatoes in her garden canned and made into sauce before an early killing frost squelched any further processing plans. I have just experienced the temptation to simply throw out a glut of figs, very ripe, that I blithely accepted from a friend here – not realizing that there would be 1700 grams of them! Scrounge in the cupboards for suitable containers for jam, rush to the Coop for more sugar to make it. While at the grocery store I chat with a friend who is buying too much food for the visitors who will arrive tomorrow, because she is so afraid of running out.

I remember chatting with the farmer’s wife when I went to pick up apples and learning that the major grocery stores won’t take the ones with the tiny black spots, which are perfectly harmless, because people won’t buy them. Cosmetics seem to have taken the place of taste as the deciding factor in purchasing. Having enough money and enough food tips into unnecessary perfectionism.

So where does this leave us as a society and as individuals in relation to wasted food? The best option for food unsold by the end of its particular limit is to get it quickly to those in need. Food pantries for those on welfare abound in the States, here in Switzerland Tischlein Deck Dich and Schweizer Tafel fill the same need, as does the zanily named Flying Croissant in Zurich. Imagination plays a big part in solving this problem, particularly for the housewife faced with unexpected leftovers – pop them into the freezer, make soup, add them to salads, make dried breadcrumbs/croutons out of stale bread, make pudding out of stale cake. Food no longer fit for human consumption may be just fine as animal feed, and resources are saved that would be used to grow that quantity of feed. Finally, composting works for the community and for the individual, and the production of biofuels or fertilizer is another community option. 

Most of all, there needs to be a rethinking of date labeling. “Best before” means only that there may be changes in consistency or color, for instance, after the date given, but the food will still be safe. Trusting one’s sense of smell or taste or vision is still the best bet. To bolster your confidence there is the maximum storage times for foodstuffs brochure put out by Cornell University and the Food Marketing Institute, called the Food Keeper: http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/TheFoodKeeper.pdf

And now back to that fig jam. It didn’t jell properly. Bummer. I suppose I could cook all 8 jars of it up again with added pectin, but the enthusiasm wanes. It should be good mixed with yogurt or vanilla pudding, or on porridge, or used instead of sugar in cake or puddings, or mixed with peanut butter or cream cheese, or made into jam tarts, or…..I am certainly not going to waste it!

Many are the ways

If all the threatened aspects of the environment were wrapped up together they would make up a ball the size of – that’s right, the earth - because they all link together and are international. Enormous. Overwhelming. Complex. Biodiversity, global warming, rising sea levels, depleted fish stocks, rainforests, food and agriculture; these are not challenges for the weak. One is tremendously grateful therefore not only for those who devote their lives to working out solutions to these challenges, but also to those who communicate these issues to their fellow human beings. Effective communication is so vital that every channel thereof needs to be utilized, not just the written and spoken word, meaningful though the article, the speech, the e-mail newsletter and the professional blog may be. Let’s look at some effective communicators who rely on imaginative solutions to get the message out there.

We’ll start with Greenpeace, which has been very much in the news lately, and whose methods are about as far as one can get from merely talking about the problem. Charged with piracy by Russia for attempting to hang a large banner objecting to drilling for arctic oil on a Gazprom drilling station, 30 activists could receive sentences of 15 years each. Greenpeace emphasizes action, with imagination and in ways that get attention. Peaceful and non-destructive, these actions demand physical and civil courage, as participants chain themselves to fences, rappel down water towers, approach huge ships in tiny rafts and are sometimes arrested, injured or killed.  They are reported in the international news, usually with photographs, and thus attention is called to the environmental problem in question. www.greenpeace.org/international/en/

One of the reasons for the success of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, otherwise known as World Wildlife, is that it appeals to children. Kids all recognize the panda logo and kids in Switzerland can join the Panda Club or the LiLu Panda or Pandaction. There are also camps and special school materials. A few years ago the WWF offered deeds to small plots of rainforest in return for contributions, and I got two for my older grandchildren. My granddaughter wanted to know if she could visit her land and maybe go camping there? Catching the next generation early is the way to go, considering that they will inherit problems grown even more massive with time. http://worldwildlife.org/, http://wwf.panda.org/

The Swiss NGO Biovision has organized an imaginative hands-on exhibit related to food and agriculture and our food-shopping habits. Appropriately named CLEVER, this exhibit features a grocery store through which one pushes one’s cart, selecting food along the way with an eye to 6 criteria (climate, pollution, livelihood, social responsibility, biodiversity, resource consumption). At the “checkout”, one finds out just how well one did in making environmentally sound choices. The CLEVER exhibit is being presented in the Verkehrshaus in Lucerne until Oct. 20. What could be more a part of one’s everyday life than food choices? www.biovision.ch/en/news/events/clever-supermarket/

If you want info that stays with you, both in the computer and in the head, nothing beats an infographic. Plant-the-plate shows you, in only 2 colors and using simple icons, how the American diet could be improved at the level of agriculture. Numbered statistics are there as well, but it is the graphic presentation that one remembers. www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/solutions/expand-healthy-food-access/plant-the-plate.html

Finally there are a couple of somewhat unusual websites that come at environmental concerns from other angles. One, presented by the Climate Reality Project, is called What I Love, and it presents in picture form various aspects that may be what you love about your life. When you choose some of them you find how they are threatened by environmental changes and what you can do about these threats. www.whatilove.org/#!/intro

The simplest way to support the environment is my last suggestion: click every day on http://thehungersite.greatergood.com/clickToGive/ths/home and choose all your favorite causes, of which one is the rainforest. Partners and sponsors will provide funds to fulfill the particular needs of each site, donating a specific amount for each click. Funds generated by clicking on the rainforest site, for instance, are used to purchase and preserve endangered land. You can click once on each site each day.

Happy surfing!  

The Flat-Earthers Return

The serious, the shocking and the silly: the IPCC report and the climate deniers

The Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just issued its report. The result of thorough evaluation of respected, peer-reviewed scientific literature written by thousands of experts, the report represents the work of 800 scientists and government officials from 195 countries. Each of the five reports issued to date, at intervals of 5-6 years, has stated with yet more certainty that humans are the dominant cause of global warming, with the probability now up to >95%. In this latest report, phenomena in the oceans and ice cover are perhaps the most disturbing aspects: a much more rapid rise of sea level is now expected, the Greenland ice cover is more unstable than previously thought, and the Arctic ocean is expected to be ice free in summer by mid-century, far earlier than in previous estimates. For the first time, the panel set an upper limit on greenhouse gases – a sort of carbon budget.

One of the impressive aspects of this panel is its cooperative nature. Everything from the papers to be studied to the final wording is arrived at by consensus. Both scientists and government officials participate. Because of the sheer volume of highly-regarded material studied, the openness of the painstaking process and the credentials of those on the panel, the reports are widely respected in the scientific world and by the governments of the participating countries. Because the many participants must be reasonably happy with the final report, all agree that the conclusions are conservative and cautious, certainly not exaggerated.

Now let’s turn from the rational and the measured and look at the statements of American climate deniers. Dismissing these as members of a fringe group ignores the terrifying fact that not a single Republican on the Senate Environment Committee accepts climate science, and 17 out of 22 Republican members of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, or 77 percent, are climate change deniers. Searching for reasons for their beliefs and behavior, it is difficult to ignore the enormous contributions made by the fossil-fuel industry to the reelection campaigns of many of these lawmakers.

One egregious example of political pressure can be found in the report issued earlier this year by the state of Virginia on the effects of climate change on the state’s shores. Virginia is responding to rising sea levels with millions of dollars poured into raising roads and houses, replacing piers etc. But thanks to pressure from the Tea Party, words like “climate change” and “sea-level rise” were omitted from the title of the report – they are considered “liberal code words”. Head-in-the-sand behavior, projection, cynicism or just plain self-serving: take your pick.

Political ideologists are joined by the likes of radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who has solemnly announced that “you can't believe in both God and climate change”. He is not alone in coloring science with religious ideology, with statements abounding that call it arrogant to say we humans have anything to do with climate – God is in charge thereof. This group seems not to believe that God helps those who help themselves.

Perhaps the height of foolishness can be laid at the door of California congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who stated that maybe climate change was caused by dinosaur flatulence. Less bizarre, but completely unscientific are the comments from those who assert that climate change has stopped, or that the planet is in fact cooling. If one looks at a chart of average temperatures for the last several decades, the recent short-term average has indeed not shown an increase, as is the case for several other short-term averages on the chart, but it is the unequivocal long-term climb that is scientifically meaningful.

If one stands back from the fray one sees, as David Roberts says on grist.org, that if conservatives accepted the facts of global warming they would have to accept federal action to deal with such an enormous problem or witness widespread human suffering. An impossible choice for a group that rejects more federal power, so they attack the science instead.

The very best comment on climate deniers came from President Obama, explaining his program for climate change in June of this year. Telling listeners that he has little patience for those who deny that the problem of climate change is real, he said, “We don’t have time for a meeting of the flat earth society”. And that’s what is most appalling about climate deniers; we are running out of time as it is, we simply can’t afford to be held hostage by the hidden and not-so-hidden agendas of the self-serving and the deluded.

Overkill Here and There

Oh no, they’re done it again. Replaced the ticket machine at the

railway station for the second time in surely no more than a year. Of course the instructions will be different and even more confusing. Grumble, grumble. The original machine was perfect, in my opinion. One made one either/or choice after another until one got what one wanted. Now the frequently traveled routes are indicated directly on the initial page, which means that one has to search for any other wish, like the 6-trip tickets I want to buy. Hmmmm….surely they must be here? No, let’s try this “other offers” category. Ah yes, here we go. Mission accomplished, I smile at the man waiting for the machine, who is staring at it with incomprehension. “May I help you?” I inquire. “Oh yes, please”. Together we attempt to navigate along baffling pathways until his ticket finally pops out, both of us feeling that we have accomplished a difficult task.

To add to this exasperation is the fact that the old machines seem to disappear into machine heaven rather than being installed at the bus stops outside the city. The bus that is already delayed by the construction I moaned about a while ago is held up by the passengers without 6-trip tickets or yearly passes, as they negotiate with the driver for their single-trip tickets.

OK, in all fairness I must say that it’s wonderful not to have to stand in line at the train station and a great convenience to pull out the particular 6-trip ticket one needs that day. I have a choice of 12 of them, covering every possible route that I travel, each in two versions, one for a one-hour journey and one valid for 24 hours. The system consists of zones rather than routes and one can travel by train, tram, bus or ship. Easy peasy. Really, I should not fuss. Particularly when the public transport here in Zurich is so terrific.

Of course that makes me think of the States – what sort of everyday overkill can one experience there? How about the extreme concern with germs? One hardly dares cut up a chicken without wearing surgical gloves and mask and sterilizing the instruments afterwards with bleach. Washing hands before eating was right up there with wearing gloves to church in my childhood – cleanliness of the hands coming only second to Godliness. The daily shower is a must. Packaged hand wipes are as ubiquitous as paper handkerchiefs. I was shocked when we came to Switzerland to find tarts with a custard filling sitting about at room temperature waiting to be sold at the shop or eaten in friends’ kitchens. Surely we would all come down with food poisoning? No, everyone seems fine. The “suspicion that typhoid lurks in every corner”, as I once read, is alive and well in the States.

Of course now that CAFOs are a fact of American life and packaged salad is shipped from one end of the country to the other, there is reason to worry about food poisoning. The lack of hygiene in factory farms and meat-packing plants is closer to that portrayed in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” than we would like to think. Not typhoid, but E. coli do lurk in many corners.

I think I’ll take the confusing ticket machines instead.

Golden Grain or Glitter?

In the hot controversy over gene manipulated organisms it is very difficult to distinguish between basic issues involving the organisms themselves and issues around the way they are being developed and used commercially. It is therefore refreshing and clarifying to consider Golden Rice, a GMO with a number of differences.

Golden Rice really is golden in color, the result of the insertion of two genes that are naturally involved in the synthesis of β –carotene, the precursor of Vitamin A. Golden Rice is seen as a future substitute for white rice in areas in the developing world where Vitamin A deficiency is rampant. Vitamin A is important for a strong immune system, and the World Health Organization estimates that 40% of children in developing nations have weakened immunity because of a deficiency of this vitamin. Their natural protection against disease is thus compromised, leading to illness and death.

We see immediately one difference between this rice and the GMOs we hear the most about: Golden Rice is meant for the consumer in the poorer parts of the world, whereas Monsanto’s Roundup Ready, for instance, is meant for farmers and for increased sales of Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup. There are other differences as well, most notably that free distribution of Golden Rice is planned, with a number of organizations and foundations footing the bill. Farmers will then be able to reuse the seed year after year. It does not displace traditional foods, a plus in highly conservative areas of the world. Because it is free it does not create dependency.

This sounds like a panacea, and indeed, proponents of Golden Rice see it as a major step forward in the battle to improve the diets of the poor. Why then are there detractors in several camps, not just that group that objects to the very idea of gene manipulation? Perhaps most convincing is the argument that it is a technical fix that does nothing to solve complex political, economic and social problems. A far better use for the money that will go into distributing Golden Rice would be expanding the diet of the proposed recipients to include vegetables with plentiful β –carotene, fortifying existing foodstuffs or distributing supplements. Indeed, a number of international agencies report success with just such programs, and at far lower cost than the money that has been poured into the development of Golden Rice.

Other opponents cite the over-corporatization of farming and fear that opening the door to Golden Rice will let in other GMO foodstuffs as well. They see it as a Big Aggie solution in a world in which local farming should be encouraged. They fear the loss of biodiversity that the introduction of this rice would bring.

The most telling of opposing arguments, however, concern the value of the rice itself. Will the original carotenoid levels in the rice remain after storage and cooking? Will the carotenoid really be “bioavailable” for malnourished systems? Will there be unknown health risks to consuming Golden Rice? Will developing world populations be used as guinea pigs to test this product, without being thoroughly informed about its possible dangers? The answers to these questions are as yet largely unknown. 

Opponents claim that we do not need to know the answers; we already know them for foodstuffs with naturally occurring Vitamin A; carrots and sweet potatoes, for instance, let’s encourage the planting of these vegetables instead.

What do you think about Golden Rice? Expensive, tech fix or the answer to a poor developing country’s prayers?