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.