THE KONGQUEST

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Cheap food is about to end and when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil calories and spewing greenhouse gases. Michael Pollan writes an open letter to the future president purposing some solutions for new food policies. He says that we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food. These new policy suggestions will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our national security.

In drafting these proposals, I’ve adhered to a few simple principles of what a 21st-century food system needs to do. First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.

Here are some paraphrased notes from the long letter:

1. How We Got Here
   1. Diversified Farming -> Cheap Energy, WWII, & Government subsidization of commodity crops -> Farming Monocultures -> Cheap Grains -> Animal Farming Monocultures -> Two Problems: Fertility problems on the farms & Pollution problem on feedlots
   2. Cheap Energy -> Global Transportation Networks -> Global Food Economy
   3. Now when the era of cheap energy is over, both massive farming monocultures and the global food economy will collapse. We need reform!
2. Resolarizing the American Farm
   1. Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops — including animals — as possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides. Begin with the subsidies: payment levels should reflect the number of different crops farmers grow or the number of days of the year their fields are green — that is, taking advantage of photosynthesis, whether to grow food, replenish the soil or control erosion.
   2. The F.D.A. should ban the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug-resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like the factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other industry or municipality.
   3. The sun-food agenda must include programs to train a new generation of farmers and then help put them on the land. The average American farmer today is 55 years old; we shouldn’t expect these farmers to embrace the sort of complex ecological approach to agriculture that is called for. Our focus should be on teaching ecological farming systems to students entering land-grant colleges today.
   4. We need to recognize the value of farmland to our national security and require real-estate developers to do “food-system impact statements” before development begins. We should also create tax and zoning incentives for developers to incorporate farmland (as they now do “open space”) in their subdivision plans; all those subdivisions now ringing golf courses could someday have diversified farms at their center.
3. Reregionalizing the Food System
   1. Four-Season Farmers’ Markets. Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers’ markets, on the model of Pike Place in Seattle or the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. To supply these markets, the U.S.D.A. should make grants to rebuild local distribution networks in order to minimize the amount of energy used to move produce within local food sheds.
   2. Agricultural Enterprise Zones. Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers’ market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. This is not because local food won’t ever have food-safety problems — it will — only that its problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable.
   3. Local Meat-Inspection Corps. Expanding on its successful pilot program on Lopez Island in Puget Sound, the U.S.D.A. should also introduce a fleet of mobile abattoirs that would go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and inexpensively. Nothing would do more to make regional, grass-fed meat fully competitive in the market with feedlot meat.
   4. A strategic grain reserve, modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, would prevent huge swings in commodity prices and at the same time provide some cushion for world food stocks, which today stand at perilously low levels. Governments should buy and store grain when it is cheap and sell when it is dear, thereby moderating price swings in both directions and discouraging speculation.
   5. In the same way that federal procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some minimum percentage of government food purchases — whether for school-lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons — go to producers located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food. We should create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce. To channel even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local food would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed.
4. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture
   1. Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals.
   2. To change our children’s food culture, we’ll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children.
   3. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn’t be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking.
   4. In general we should push for as much transparency in the food system as possible. The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced.

This concept may not be a new one and this video is pretty old already, but I think as time progresses, this video is becoming more and more relevant to our culture and future generations. Michael Highland has created a documentary called As Real As Your Life that foreshadows how our technological innovation is going to affect children and adults in the future. Just as some books and movies tell us how machines will be integrated into our lifestyles in the future, Michael Highland shows us the reality and unreality of video game addicts that is today. The integration is almost part of our real world and will be reach the masses in the very near future.

"Tree of life", Tsavo national park, Kenya (© Yann Arthus-Bertrand)

Yann Arthus-Bertrand inspires us to think about sustainable living on a globally scale through his photography collection, Earth From Above. His gallery will be on display in New York City at the World Financial Center Plaza from May 1, 2009 to June 28, 2009. All his works are absolutely stunning and gives you a glimpse at how other people are living around the world. You must check out this amazing gallery!

[via The Big Picture Blog]

This has been one of my favorite songs for a while now. At first, you may think the song is about love but it’s not the love you would expect. Sam Sparro crytically spins some existential flavor into this catchy song that will keep you playing it on repeat.

Black and Gold - Sam Sparro

If the fish swam out of the ocean
and grew legs and they started walking
and the apes climbed down from the trees
and grew tall and they started talking

and the stars fell out of the sky
and my tears rolled into the ocean.
Now I’m looking for a reason why
you even set my world into motion.

Cause if you’re not really here
then the stars don’t even matter.
Now I’m filled to the top with fear
but it’s all just a bunch of matter.
Cause if you’re not really here
then I don’t want to be either.
I wanna be next to you.

Black and gold
Black and gold
Black and gold

I looked up into the night sky
and see a thousand eyes staring back
and all around these golden beacons
I see nothing but black.

I feel a way of something beyond them
I don’t see what I can feel.
If vision is the only validation
then most of my life isn’t real.

Cause if you’re not really here
then the stars don’t even matter.
Now I’m filled to the top with fear
but it’s all just a bunch of matter.
Cause if you’re not really here
then I don’t want to be either.
I wanna be next to you.

Black and gold
Black and gold
Black and gold

I was driving home yesterday listening to KEXP (91.5FM), which is an awesome independent radio station in the New York Metro Area, and found this amazing gem of a song! It’s go soul and it’s got a good message. I love songs who keep it badass while spewing social commentary that shows how ridiculous human beings are. Thank you Dave Bartholomew for keeping it real.

The Monkey - Dave Bartholomew

The monkey speaks his mind

And three monkeys sat in a coconut tree
Discussing things as they are said to be
Said one to other now listen, you two
“There’s a certain rumour that just can’t be true
That man descended from our noble race
Why, the very idea is a big disgrace, yea”
No monkey ever deserted his wife
Starved her baby and ruined her life

Yea, the monkey speaks his mind

And you’ve never known a mother monk
To leave her babies with others to bunk
And passed them on from one to another
‘Til they scarcely knew which was their mother
Yea, the monkey speak his mind

And another thing you will never see
A monkey build a fence around a coconut tree
And let all the coconuts go to waste
Forbidding other monkeys to come and taste
Why, if I put a fence around this tree
Starvation would force you to steal from me

Yea, the monkey speaks his mind

Here’s another thing a monkey won’t do
Go out on a night and get all in a stew
Or use a gun or a club or a knife
And take another monkey’s life
Yes, man descended, the worthless bum
But, brothers, from us he did not come

Yea, the monkey speaks his mind
Yea, now the monkey speaks his mind

Since the beginning of email, people have been pissing each other off by sending chain letters to a massive list of contacts. In response, you will always have some jokester or heckler replying back to everyone on the list, basking in the limelight of mass communication. From PopMatters magazine comes a great article on this odd cultural phenomenon. Check it for some great writing and humorous reflection of our electronic culture. Here’s an excerpt:

REPLY ALL is an attention-seeker’s dream: within seconds, we find that our reach and impact has spread like the first sneeze in a second-grade classroom. Providing the recipients bother to open the email – and read it—our voice is being heard not only by friends and coworkers, but by utter strangers around the world. With a simple click from someone who’s bored at their day job in the cube, looking to kill some time, the spot – er, computer-light—is cast upon us.

It is our moment, so we had better make it count; we may as well use all capital letters, you know, THE SHOUT – let’s not forget multiple exclamation points, too. And hey, may as well tell our best jokes, perhaps show off our erudition and cultural savvy with a few well-chosen references to the latest books, movies, or a phrase gleaned from news coverage of international politics.

Link: No Reply Needed

No more excuses.
No more procrastination.
It’s time to be daring.
It’s time to make mistakes.
This is where the fun starts…