How will you dress for the Bush Depression this winter? Me, I'm counting on my slightly tattered but super-toasty flannel-lined OshKosh overalls--so old they were actually made in OshKosh. That, and the sweaters I'll be wearing à la Jimmy Carter, since our thermostat and our bank balance will both be chillingly low.

President Carter tried, and failed, to make cardigans and conservation cool during the seventies energy crisis. He warned of "the serious consequences of our long delay in creating a comprehensive national energy policy" in a speech announcing the Emergency Natural Gas Act of 1977, and called on us all to buckle down and bundle up:

Sadly, the sole American family willing to heed Carter's "make do with less" message was the Waltons, who, alas, resided only in the corn pone-filled cranium of Earl Hamner Jr. Two years later, a frustrated Carter asked, plaintively, "Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?" He blamed the loss of community and the rise of materialism in our culture:

Again, Carter channeled the Waltons while the rest of us stayed glued to the oily exploits of the Ewings. We bought into the more-is-more mania, and our collective carbon footprint expanded exponentially. Houses and cars and waistlines grew bigger, while an endless geyser of consumer goods gushed all around us. Will it ever run out of steam?

Consider this astounding statistic I came across in the October issue of Organic Gardening: In 1995, the average number of food items sold in supermarkets was 3,000; by 2006, it had jumped to 45,000. And most it is cartons and cans and clamshells filled with industrially grown stuff that's been processed to death and then schlepped over land and sea. That's why Michael Pollan's "eater's manifesto," In Defense Of Food, advises us to avoid supermarkets altogether and seek out fresh food from local farmers--and our own front yards--instead.

Sure, some folks will continue to fill their cupboards with Campbell's soup--the only stock that didn't tank when the Dow sank. But more and more Americans are rejecting pre-fab faux foods in favor of DIY dining. Today's New York Times cites a report that, as of May, "53 percent of consumers said they were cooking from scratch more than they did just six months before," driven by the rising cost of convenience foods. Hey, when you're unemployed, there's plenty of time to hone those handy Depression-era skills like how to make your own stock, grow your own veggies, and can tomatoes.

We're reverting to old-timey modes of transportation, too--there's been a dramatic spike in bike sales and train travel in recent months. And many of us are buying less, learning to make do, and turning off the lights when we leave the room. We are, at last, achieving Jimmy Carter's dream of a simpler, less-stuff driven life--a dream, by the way, that he shared with another recent U.S. president, George H. W. Bush.

Poppy Bush declared back in 1992 that he wanted to "make American families a lot more like The Waltons and a lot less like The Simpsons". How gratified he must be to see that Waltons-style austerity is finally in vogue. And all it took was his son's catastrophic stewardship of our country.

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Pet Food Politics, What to Eat and Food Politics:)

Kat: You ruffled some high-powered plumage earlier this month when you spoke at the Global Food Systems forum hosted by Jeffrey Sach’s Earth Institute. After listening to executives from Monsanto, Pespsico, Nestlé, Unilever, and Syngenta declare their intention to help solve the world hunger and obesity crises (oh, and climate change, while they’re at it), you expressed the belief that these are social problems that can’t truly be addressed through technological fixes or marketing.

But the agronomists who spoke at the forum insisted that Africa’s soil is so poor, so depleted, that our only hope for eradicating hunger there lies in increasing crop yields via the patented biotech seeds and chemical fertilizers proffered by Monsanto, Syngenta, et. al. OK, so if agricultural conditions are so lousy in Africa, why, then—as this article in Sunday’s Los Angeles TImes reveals—are wealthy nations like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait snapping up Africa’s cropland “hoping to turn the global epicenter of malnutrition into a breadbasket for themselves?”

According to the Times, the Saudis are so worried about insufficient irrigation in their own country that they’re leasing land from Sudan, whose government is waving export taxes and granting low-cost 99-year leases to foreign investors on the grounds that “the new deals will help, not exploit, their country by creating jobs, promoting commercialization, and pumping much-needed investment into its agricultural industry.”

But what about pumping out Africa’s finite water resources onto crops for export when its own people are starving? Many African nations are facing the specter of water shortages and drought along with much of the rest of the world. Presumably, this isn’t what Jeffrey Sachs had in mind when he called for “increased food production in Africa.” What good do genetically modified drought-resistant seeds do for the world’s poor if the resulting crops are grown for the benefit of the affluent?

Dr. Nestle: Ruffling plumage was not my intention and, as usual, I just thought I was stating the obvious: American and European food and agriculture companies that exist for the purpose of earning profits for stockholders are not going to be able to do much to help poor farmers in Africa make a living. For one thing, Western companies depend on government subsidies to keep the prices of their products down and this undermines the ability of African farmers to sell crops at a decent price. For another, political instability and extreme poverty in Africa make it difficult to establish the conditions necessary for agricultural production.

Poverty means that people won’t have enough money to buy the seeds, fertilizer, and farm equipment that are required to make the “green revolution” work. That is why biotechnology companies spend most of their resources developing—and patenting—seeds designed for temperate zone agriculture and invest so little in research on crops that can grow under harsh tropical conditions. Mind you, genetically engineering crops that can grow in hot climates with poor soils and little water present difficult scientific problems that will not be solved easily. But no agricultural biotechnology company of which I am aware is putting much money into this kind of research quite simply because it has no obvious payoff other than public relations. Hence: Golden Rice.

I do not claim to know how to solve Africa’s need for agricultural development but I applaud efforts to help its farmers grow enough food to feed themselves and their families—and to have enough left over to sell at a profit. I thought the absence of Vandana Shiva at the conference was a big gap. It would have been interesting to see how its audience reacted to a report on what her Navdanya Center is doing to help small farmers in India grow multiple crops under sustainable conditions appropriate to their particular location. This approach seems to be working well to raise farmers out of dire poverty and is a model that I would think deserves serious consideration. Its one major drawback? It only helps farmers help themselves and will do little in the short run to raise the profits of the food and agriculture corporations represented at that meeting.

In the long run, of course, a population that is better off economically will be interested in buying better food and more consumer goods, which is what we see happening in China. China invested in its own agriculture right from the start of its economic development, but it has a stable government. All I was saying was that government stability and poverty are social problems unlikely to be solvable by genetically engineered crops, at least as currently managed.

The analogies are not very appetizing: House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, described the bailout bill as a "crap sandwich." Rep. Paul Braun, R-Georgia, called it "a huge cow patty with a piece of marshmallow stuck in the middle," which he declined to eat, and his colleagues declined to pass.

Hey, we get it; nobody likes to eat crap (or step in it, for that matter.) And nobody wants to see the return of Depression-era breadlines, either. But it should be clear to everyone, at this point, that we're in for some turbulent times: 

So said an upstate New York pig farmer to Momofuku chef David Chang, who recalls the conversation in an essay for Esquire, What the 21st Century Will Taste Like. Chang calls the rise in food costs a “massive correction,” adding that:

Not impressed by the observations of a fancy-pants New York City chef? OK, then how about this quote from Matt Simmons, a lifelong Republican oilman from Houston turned peak oil prophet, who told Fortune:

 
There may be an upside to this downshift; you know how we've been diminished in the eyes of the world in recent years? It turns out that we've literally suffered a loss of stature over the course of the last century or so, and the cause, according to the New York TImes, "appears to be due to a lower standard of living, poor health care and inadequate nutrition...In 1880, Americans were the tallest people in the world. But by 2000, American men, at an average height of 5-feet-10.5-inches, ranked 9th, and women, at about 5-feet-5-inches, fell to 15th. "

So I guess that means capitalism stunts growth? Warren Buffet's warning that we're looking at the "biggest financial meltdown in American history." Oh well! If David Chang and Matt Simmons prove to be right, at least it may compel us to eat more fruits and veggies--and less meat. And not a minute too soon--as the Guardian reports today, The Food Climate Research Network at the University of Surrey just released a study declaring that those of us in developed nations "will have to be rationed to four modest portions of meat and one litre of milk a week if the world is to avoid run-away climate change." Seed money's vanishing from Wall Street; maybe now Main Street will start investing in seeds. It's not too late to start some fall veggies!

Image: Eco Hustler for Creative Accelerator/ecohookups.com

The fact that rap mogul Sean Combs, aka P. Diddy, stepped in a pile of dog crap on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk the other day would not seem to be an especially newsworthy event, IMHO. But what do I know? The photo of Combs stepping in dog doo made the cover of Saturday’s New York Post, with the caption “Poo-Diddy! Rap Heavy Steps In It Big-Time.”

For my money, Combs already stepped in it big-time last month with the execrable video he posted on YouTube lamenting the fact that rising fuel costs had forced him to park his private jet and fly commercial. He takes the opportunity to beg his friends in oil-rich nations to do something about the price of oil to spare him the trauma of having to fly American.

I don’t know what’s more tragic: America’s insatiable appetite for vacuous celebrity “news,” or the inanities of the celebrities themselves. Talk about a missed opportunity. As Eco Hustler noted over on Current :

Yeah, our problem is that most of the country has yet to grasp the urgency of global warming and seems to think that we can drill our way out of this disaster. Why are we taking our cues from celebrities, anyway?

Maybe because they’re the only people we recognize. As 17 year-old filmmaker Niaz Mosharraf documented in his wry short America For Dummies, his peers could all identify photos of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, etc., but were stumped by images of world leaders and politicians.

True, we’ve got more celebrities than ever giving “green” a more glamorous sheen, as the website Ecorazzi documents daily. Sadly, though, as Eco Hustler points out, the majority of these folks are white: “Are Morgan Freeman, Lenny Kravitz, Don Cheadle and The Roots the only eco-friendly celebrities of color?”

The thing is, we need to find a way to get everyone to understand the challenges we’re facing and how our own choices can make things better—or worse. But asking people who are coping with their own domestic meltdowns, from foreclosures to lay-offs to lack of health insurance, to get worked up about melting glaciers in the Himalayas, well…good luck with that.

I don’t know how you can convince people to care, but I’m pretty sure it’s not by parading around with a bag like this one I spotted in a shop window on my way home from the farmers’ market this morning:

This is about as persuasive as those “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers so beloved by drivers of SUVs.

Just think, if Diddy had a sense of humor, he could design a t-shirt for his Sean John clothing line that says, “I’m flying commercial. What are you doing to curb your carbon footprint?” And then he could donate the proceeds to a non-profit dedicated to fighting climate change, like, say, 350.org.

Diddy was said to be upset when he spotted photographers documenting his encounter with a pile of dog crap, and reportedly pleaded with them not to publish the pictures. I guess it’s kinda embarrassing to have your picture in the paper with the headline “Diddy The Crap Star.” It should be beyond embarrassing, though, to post a video of yourself on YouTube in which you essentially echo the creepy GOP chant “Drill, Baby, Drill.” Why not “Chill, Baby, Chill?” We need to make conservation cool.

Guest blogger Jeanne Hodesh has written for Takeabite.cc , Saveur.com, The Eat Well Guide’s Green Fork blog, Edible Brooklyn & Edible Manhattan. She also writes a weekly e-newsletter highlighting NYC food events, Local Gourmands.

The date of the infamous Rabbit Roast was changed three times before the end of the summer, and by the time the chosen weekend finally rolled around Hurricane (which one on are we on now?) posed a cloudy threat to the planned skinning/cooking/farming/teaching festival sponsored by The Greenhorns. Severine von Tscharner Fleming, producer of The Greenhorns, a forthcoming documentary about young farmers, is criss-crossing the country collecting footage and rousing interest in farm interns and savvy urbanites alike. Whether you’ve had soil under your nails for years or you like to wear straw hats while bar hopping in the Village, the mix at Severine’s educational/fundraising parties always runs the gamut from hippie to hipster, and once you’re out in the field together, examining a root cellar, or checking out the horse-drawn tiller, you realize there’s not much of a difference between the two anyway.

Having been to several of the Greenhorns shindigs before, I’d been looking forward to the Rabbit Roast all summer, an event that I would get occasional updates about, each with more promises than the last.  “Vegetarian yum-yums”, “Bicycle-powered rotisserie!” and “Pig curing workshop” ratcheted up my anticipation.  And, of course, there would be rabbit.  I imagined a rollicking barn raising party of sorts, plenty of mud slinging, and maybe a dilapidated old farmhouse.

Instead, we met at the Cold Spring train station, just an hour up the Hudson from the city, and were whisked off down the winding roads to the Glynwood Center.  The moment our car turned off the main road into the fairytale-like driveway and the lush never-never land leading up to the farm I knew my expectations had been way off.  It’s not often that a young urbanite like myself gets to spend the weekend amidst foggy emerald hills in old stone buildings taking walks amidst the goldenrod and eating wine grapes from the vine.

At first there were only fifteen of us. We dodged the drizzle and pitched our tents, then gathered on the terrace where Judy LaBelle, Executive Director of the Glynwood Center, welcomed us. “How many of you are farmers or gardeners?” she asked with the warmth of a grade school teacher.  Three people raised their hands. One guy was growing tomatoes in his backyard, someone else had a patch of herbs on her roof.  Almost all of us hailed from Brooklyn.

“How many of you are interested in becoming farmers and gardeners?” Judy continued.  I was one of a few more who raised my hand quietly, and she latched right on. With land in the Hudson Valley going for the asking price of $10,000 an acre young farmers who want to get started have an uphill battle ahead of them—not to mention start-up costs.  One of Glynwood’s big projects is working with area land trusts that have acreage which could be rehabilitated for agrarian use. There’s about 2,000 acres in the Hudson Valley that is currently protected by land trusts—it will never be developed—and about half of that is perfectly farmable.

Now, we need some farmers. The average farmer in America is nearing the age of 60, a statistic that seems to hit me over the head daily. I looked around at our modest crew of girls and boys clad in skinny jeans and vintage shirts. If Judy questioned why we were there for the weekend, she never revealed her doubts.

The afternoon started with a tour of the Glynwood CSA vegetable garden, an operation which provides 50 families with boxes of produce grown on just 1.5 acres of land.  There’s an old horse named Maggie who walks the till around, and the heating system in the nearby greenhouse has recently been retrofitted to function without its old fuel-eating heater. We oohed and ahhed at the cool of the ancient root cellar and petted the horses that board in the surrounding field.

By and by we gathered around for the moment of truth: Severine took the stage with the rabbit she had so carefully brought along in a hay-lined basket.  While stroking the animal, more than one story about a childhood pet floated through the audience.  But Sev was all business.  How can young farmers make a financially viable living?  Well, they can come up with a “sexy new product” that does not “step on the shoelaces of older farmers.”  When she ran into Dan Barber of Blue Hill in he halls of Slow Food Nation she asked if he might consider buying rabbit for his menu. Absolutely—he’d need at least 18 a week.

Later, when she e-mailed to follow up on the prospects of her company, Yummy Bunny, he confirmed the quoted amount, and then asked if she needed start-up capital.   Stroking the bunny who grazed freely on the grass, Severine explained that Barber’s offer showed he was not only seeking a quality product for himself and his restaurant, but his commitment to the conditions of the place and the person who would be providing the commodity.  The next phase of her business plan is still being worked out with a fashion designer in Europe who wants to make leather gloves from the rabbits’ hides. “You know, to sell at Bergdorf’s. $300 a pair is a lot better than $5.99 a pound.”

By now our crowd of fifteen had swelled to forty-five. We were NYU food studies students, newly minted lawyers, random friends, food non-profiteers, urban gardeners, policy pushers, bloggers, writers, advocates and activists.  Severine explained what would happen next. First she would stun the bunny with a hammer between the eyes, then slit its throat, then hang it up…The tension mounted with her rambling digressions in between steps, and slowly the process moved from G-rated conversation to R-rated demonstration.

By dinnertime the promised bike-powered rotisserie had not yet arrived from Brooklyn.  The rabbit fur was splayed on the roof of Sev’s red (veggie-powered) Mercedes station wagon. We crowded into the dining room at the Glynwood’s Main House where volunteers had prepared a meal made of entirely local produce, most of which was grown by young farmers. Between bites of celery root and carrot soup someone seated across from me posed the question “What’s the definition of young farmer?” Is there an age cut off?

“I think it has more to do with a state of mind,” said his neighbor. On the back porch we tapped into the keg, serving up heady beer in mason jars. Drizzle came and went, and the crowd began to get giddy.  The next morning there would be yoga at 7:30, a workshop on beekeeping, a walk through the herb garden to gather flowers for making tinctures, a lesson in fermentation. Tom Mylan was scheduled to give a workshop on curing pig, and it was rumored, sometime past midnight, that the Reverend Billy was on his way to give ceremonial closing remarks. By the time I left, mid-Sunday, the rabbit rotisserie had not yet crossed the stage, but I boarded the train with the confidence that making burping bottles of home brewed kimchi is about to be en vogue in Village kitchens.

“This is only a taste of the rock show it’s going to be!” cried Severine, who dreams big.  Next year she imagines the Rabbit Roast will draw thousands. These parties for young farmers need to happen in every city and town across the country—and she believes they will. Speaking of rock shows, the Ginger Ninjas made it just in time for dinner. The bike powered, bike touring, forward-thinking rock/folk band swung by for a surprise pit stop to tickle our ears beneath a near-full moon. “This is what it’s going to be like,” said Severine.  “The bands are going to have to leave the cities to come to us because we’ll be farming the land.”

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Pet Food Politics, What to Eat and Food Politics:)

Kat: Well, here we go again. I was astonished, as were you, by the news that China’s biggest manufacturer of infant formula has just recalled 700 tons of melamine-tainted milk powder. As David Barboza reports in Saturday’s New York Times, “the formula is implicated in the death of one infant, and at least 432 others have been afflicted with kidney problems.” Supposedly, this stuff wasn’t imported to the US, but, as you note, the FDA has issued a warning that it may have found its way onto the “grey” market.

Melamine and the cutthroat, corner-cutting manufacturers who used it in the production of pet foods are, of course, the primary culprits in your latest book, Pet Food Politics, which thoroughly documents China’s food safety problems as well as our own.

In the book, you note that in the aftermath of the tainted pet food debacle, the Chinese government launched a new food safety campaign and declared, in January of this year:

Gao Qiang, China’s vice minister of health claimed at a press conference on Saturday, “This is a severe food safety accident.”

You must be our foremost authority on melamine-adulterated foods, now, so I have to ask you, in the vulgar vernacular of the blogosphere, WTF? Or, if you prefer, what the hell?

Dr. Nestle: Astonished doesn’t begin to describe it. The point of The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine, the subtitle of Pet Food Politics, is that the 2007 pet food recalls were an early warning of disasters to follow. By the time the book went to press in May this year, we were already dealing with the heparin crisis. This was a completely analogous situation in which Chinese producers substituted chondroitin sulfate for heparin because the heparin assay only looks for sulfur, apparently. Melamine has a lot of nitrogen.  Protein assays test for nitrogen and don’t care whether it comes from protein or melamine. Chondroitin sulfate and melamine are a lot cheaper than the drugs or food ingredients they replace.

In Pet Food Politics, I trace the use of melamine—fraudulent and not—back to the mid-1960s. David Barboza, the intrepid New York Times reporter based in China, actually got animal and pet food producers to confess that they had been fraudulently adding melamine to feed for years. My guess is that these producers had been adding it in lower doses, got greedy, and upped the dose or used sloppier formulations that contained cyanuric acid. You need a lot of melamine to damage kidneys. But when melamine is mixed with cyanuric acid, it crystallizes in kidneys at very low doses. If it could be added to food for cats, dogs, and farm animals, why not add it to other foods? If nobody is checking—which, apparently, nobody is--you have a good chance of getting away with it, especially if the animals are eating other foods as well.

But infant formulas? These are just like pet foods in that the animal or baby is completely dependent on the one product for complete nutrition. So as with pet foods, there is a good chance of doing great harm and getting caught. Officials didn’t get upset about pet foods because they view dogs and cats as “just pets.” Infant formulas get everyone’s attention.  And you can find plenty of Chinese infant formula in Chinese markets in the U.S.  It’s doubtful that getting rid of them would be on anyone’s priority list for enforcement.

As for what’s going on in China, good luck. It’s the Wild West over there, with foods being made by millions of small backyard producers and a food safety system absolutely unprepared to deal with the scope of the problem. We are talking here about rampant early capitalistic development, just like what we had in the United States prior to 1906 when Congress passed the first food and drug laws. Chinese officials know they have a problem and maybe now that the Olympics are over they can get on it.

In the meantime, we can all exercise personal responsibility and buy local. We also should exercise social responsibility and insist that (1) companies test their products for dangerous contaminants, (2) companies inspect the suppliers of their ingredients, (3) Congress gives the FDA the authority to regulate imported foods more effectively, and (4) Congress demands enforcement of the new Country-of-Origin-Labeling laws that are supposed to be in effect by the end of this month.    

Kat: Uh-oh. Your response begs a follow-up question. Speaking of adulteration, have you seen this article from Sunday’s Chicago Tribune about the watered-down COOL standards? As consumer watchdogs Consumers Union and Food and Water Watch tell the Tribune, there are “giant, giant loopholes in the law." Specifically, foods that are considered “processed” are exempt from the COOL standards, and the USDA is defining “processed” so broadly that it’s severely reducing the number of foods that will be required to carry the labels.

Here are a couple of the more head-scratching examples:

In a word, oy. It seems as though the food industry, having fought the COOL standards for the last few years, is now resigned to the fact that they are going to be implemented, so their new strategy is to undermine the standards by limiting their application as much as possible.

This makes your oft-repeated edict to “avoid processed foods” more timely than ever, but it also compels me to ask, what will it take to put the “us” back in the USDA? Will they ever stop kowtowing to Big Food and start looking out for the little guy?

Dr. Nestle: I had not seen the article but certainly was aware of the problem(s). Congress passed COOL years ago, but then postponed implementing it (except for fish—a fishy story in itself) until now. Why? Because the food industry hates the very idea. I can totally understand why and the pet food and infant formula scandals are great examples. If you knew that the foods you were eating had a good chance of being produced someplace where nobody was minding the store, you might buy something else.

The problem for the food industry is that so much of our food comes from elsewhere. On the order of 80% of our shrimp come from Asia, for example. In the course of working on Pet Food Politics, I met an official of a pet food company who agreed to tell me where the ingredients in his products came from (provided I never mentioned his name or the name of his company). He could tell me the name of the ranch that raised the meat in those foods but the other ingredients constituted an international feast. You have to assume that foods and ingredients come from overseas unless the companies tell you otherwise.

Is this good or bad? I think it’s great that we support farmers in developing countries but I want to have the choice. And the choice isn’t mine if the country of origin isn’t labeled. This is a huge consumer protection issue and it would be nice if our congressional representatives took it seriously. As for the USDA, it and the FDA need some serious depoliticizing. Will we get that in the next administration? Only if we organize, lobby, and exercise our democratic rights as citizens. And start working on the next farm bill, of course.
 

In part two of Sarah Palin’s interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, she gives lipstick-y lip service to the notion that human beings may, in fact, be contributing to climate change. What a difference a month (and a nomination) makes! ‘Cause back in August, before John McCain singled Palin out as our nation’s foremost expert on energy, Alaska’s climate change denier-in-chief told Newsmax.com that “I'm not one though who would attribute [global warming] to being man-made.”

Hey, Sarah, great to see that you’re not afraid to peel off the pumps and dip your toe into the reality-based community! If the reception seems a little chilly, well, chalk it up to your party’s shrill Drill, Baby, Drill mantra, your God-endorsed pipeline project, your anti-polar bear agenda, and your work husband’s lousy record when it comes to actually supporting alternative forms of energy.

The Straight Talk Express may have hit one pothole too many on the low road to the White House; are the wheels coming off the bus? The MSM, from Krugman to the AP, is finally exposing many of the McCain campaign’s most egregious lies without mincing words.

But when it comes to dealing with climate change, McCain’s still benefitting from the perception that he’s been more progressive than the fossil fueled fossils that fill his party’s ranks. Thanks to some sleuthing on the part of clean energy activist Susan Kraemer, though, we now have proof that when it comes to voting to support renewable energy, McCain’s no better than James “Global Warming Is A Hoax” Inhofe.

Kraemer tallied up McCain’s votes and found that McCain has “voted consistently against government support of solar, wind, geothermal, bioenergy, ocean and any other clean energy, with the exception of being strongly for nuclear power.” Hey, nuclear families, nuclear power, it’s all good. Whatever.

Maybe it’s kind of age-ist for us to expect a geezer like McCain to grasp the potential for new technologies to solve our energy woes; after all, as the latest ad from the Obama campaign notes, he has yet to master the art of the email. Feisty, Facebook-savvy Palin, on the other hand, is presumably up to speed on cutting edge solutions—after all, wasn’t Senator Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens a mentor of hers, back when the Bridge To Nowhere was her ticket to ride?

And yet, despite this energy hog’s judicious application of lipstick, it’s clear that “pitbull” Palin routinely pits economic growth against environmental preservation. The day before John McCain selected her as his veep, our gutsy Governor from Alaska penned a letter to fellow Governor Schwarzenegger strenuously protesting the Governator’s proposal to impose a fee on the cargo containers that move more than 40% of the nation's goods through the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “The fees would raise $400 million annually for such pollution-reduction projects as installing cleaner-burning truck and train engines and building roadways under or over railroad tracks to avoid long lines of idling vehicles.”

State Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) sponsored the bill in the hopes of reducing the number of Californians killed by air pollution, estimated to be some 3,400 annually.

Palin objects to the proposal on the grounds that it will raise the cost of goods shipped to Alaska, where, as the Times notes, many communities “lack road access and depend entirely on goods shipped by container, something that has significantly increased in cost in recent years.”

So I guess Palin’s m.o. is to choose life, unless it’s going to hit her constituents in the pocketbook. If you’re unlucky enough to live near the ports of California, Palin’s message seems to be “suck it up.” A change of heart on climate change that we can believe in? If you buy that, I’ve got a bridge to nowhere to sell you.

For nearly two weeks now, I’ve been suffering from a newly-minted malady called Palin-paralysis--a nasty tv-transmitted virus I caught after watching Sarah Palin’s divisive and derisive acceptance speech. You know, that salute to “small town values” that lionized plucky, scrappy hockey moms and demonized yucky, crappy community organizers.

The primary symptoms are nausea, a perpetually clenched jaw, and a half-baked Alaska-induced brain freeze; can’t get out of bed, can’t blog, can’t even blog in bed. The surreal spectacle of the Palin pick, the depth of cynicism and carelessness that it demonstrated, and the embrace of this ludicrous choice for veep by so many folks is truly appalling. As Matt Damon told the AP:

But the McCain campaign is not so much a bad Disney movie as a Beltway retread of Invasion of The Body Snatchers, in which the straight talkin’ maverick senator’s crusty ol’ carcass comes back to life—well, sort of--as a robotic Rovian pod-politician flatly intoning flagrant lies, pandering to the basest of bases, doing whatever it takes to win. Josh Marshall said it best on Talking Points Memo:

As Grist’s Dave Roberts noted, McCain, in an interview with a Portland, Maine tv reporter, claimed that Palin “knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.” If he really believes this, he’s an idiot, and if he doesn’t believe it, he’s a shameless liar. Either way, he’s demonstrated, yet again, that he doesn’t deserve to be president.

E. J. Dionne wrote a column in the Washington Post on Wednesday plaintively entitled “Does The Truth Matter Anymore?” in which he expressed surprise at the McCain campaign’s fearless fibbing. Other pundits, notably Chris Matthews and James Carville, are still having trouble reconciling the McCain they once admired with this disingenuous creep and his equally creepy veep.

But wallowing in all the moose manure from Wasilla gets us (on a bridge to) nowhere. After moping around for days, bemoaning the swift-boating of Obama and badgering my female friends to add their voices to the chorus of Women Against Sarah Palin (90,000 strong and growing), what finally roused me out of my slump was a rant from Craig Ferguson, the Scottish talk show host who became an American citizen earlier this year. I never watch the Late Late Show, so I would have missed it if it weren’t for this Daily Kos diary from paddykraska. The whole clip is worth watching, but here are some highlights:

And if you’ve done your homework, you’ll conclude, as Thomas Friedman did, that there’s only one choice. Unless, of course, you want to ride the Straight Talk express right off the edge of this hot, flat, crowded earth.

On the one hand, the folks at Slow Food Nation have done an awesome job of staging this high-profile, low-impact extravaganza; the Marketplace and Victory Garden at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza are giving the public a lovely and luscious lesson in all things local, while Friday’s Food For Thought forums brought out a galaxy of sustainable superstars: Vandana Shiva, Wendell Berry, Carlo Petrini, Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, Eric Schlosser, and Dan Barber, to name just a few.

And the trail-blazing steps the Slow Food folks have taken to spread the sustainable gospel and curb the carbon footprint of this Sasquatch-sized shindig are truly heartening, from Food and Water Watch’s tap-touting, bottle-banishing water stations, to the composting exhibit demonstrating the alchemy that transforms waste into that precious commodity we call black gold, to the clever use of reclaimed materials everywhere you turn.

On the other hand—hey, are those teeth marks? Geez, can’t Alice Water’s Ambassadors of Good Food count on nothing but goodwill when they give a humble (and hungry) blogger entrée to the “VIP preview” of the Taste Pavilions?

This “monument to fresh delicious food” transformed a 50,000 square foot pier at Fort Mason into a dazzling culinary display that Destin Joy Lane, the luminous leading light of the Eat Well Guide, rightly described as a “Willy Wonka playground for adults.” For me, it was Alice Waters In Wonderland--a lavish through-the-local-looking glass array of seductive sips and snacks declaring “EAT ME!” or “DRINK ME!” The Ice Cream pavilion had me grinning like a Chesire Kat, lapping up every last drop of the dreamy, creamy confections in my corn-based compostable bowl.

The Taste Pavilions showcase the finest, hand-picked regional foods, chocolate, wine, teas, coffees, etc. from the cheesemongers, brewers, bakers, beekeepers and others who are leading the real food renaissance. So why can’t I just give my impressions of this gourmet gala without biting the hand that feeds me—especially when the food is so undeniably delectable?

Well, maybe because my mantra, according to agrarian “it” girl/Greenhorns director Severine Von Tscharner Fleming, is “My name is Kerry Trueman, and I care about what’s true, man” (if only I could return the favor and devise a clever slogan for soil-saving Sev, who’s to the manure born and a genius at making shit happen.)

So I’m compelled to sound off about a couple of slightly sour notes in the middle of this sweet ‘n’ savory symphony. As I noted in a previous post, a whiff of elitism clings to the Slow Food contingent despite all the fine work they do on behalf of building a better food system. Look, I’m as fond of artisanal cheeses and biodynamic wines as the next sustainable ag advocate, and of course there’s a place for such gourmet goodies in the grand scheme of things.

But there were some critical components of the good food movement missing at this invitation-only event. Clearly, in this case, VIP didn’t stand for Very Inclusive Party: the complexion of the crowd ran--if I may poach a line from Dorothy Parker--the gamut from A to B, as in alabaster to barely beige. It’s safe—and sad—to say that the audience at the Republican convention next week will feature more people of color than we saw at Fort Mason.

I fear there’s a parallel here to The Unbearable Whiteness of Green that Van Jones laments in the environmental movement. Jones has noted that it’s a tough sell asking folks who are just treading water to get worked up about the fact that polar bears are having the same problem as climate change melts the ice sheets out from under them.

And speaking of climate change, what was up with the speaker (whose name I didn’t catch because we arrived at the pier mid-way through her remarks) who stated that the single most important change you can make to your diet if you’re concerned about global warming is to “eat organic.” As Anna Lappé’s Take A Bite Out Of Climate Change website clearly spells out, you’ll get way more mileage out of eating less meat and shifting to a plant-based diet. Anna’s participating in the Food For Thought Climate Change and Food forum later today and I’m sure she’ll make this point effectively and eloquently. Here’s hoping that will help offset the misconception conveyed to the crowd last night at Fort Mason.

Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle, our most high profile advocates of eating “low on the food chain”--i.e. putting fruits and vegetables front and center on your plate--were among the happy eaters at the Taste Pavilions last night. But where were the fruits and vegetables? Admittedly, the more populist, free-to-the-public Marketplace does feature lovely local produce, so perhaps the Slow Food folks thought it redundant to add fruits and veggies to the culinary cornucopia of cured meats, fish, cheeses, honeys and jams, breads, pickles and chutneys, chocolate, coffees, teas, beers, wines, spirits, olive oil, ice creams, and native foods.

Given that part of Slow Food Nation’s stated mission is to support “clean,” i.e. “environmentally sound,” food, though, it seemed odd that produce had no presence at the Taste Pavilions.

But at the end of the day, the kudos far outweigh the quibbles. I arrived in San Francisco Friday mid-morning a sweaty mess after a two-hour drive from Boonville where I’d been visiting friends, and rushed straight to the Herbst Theater to hear the forum on Building a New Food System. The panel featured, among others, Marion Nestle and the Center For Food Safety’s Andrew Kimbrell.

It was the only Food For Thought forum I was able to attend yesterday (for a terrific write-up of all the day’s forums, see Paula Crossfield’s post over on the Slow Food Nation website.) But the lively and thoughtful discussion of the dire need to reinvent our broken food chain was a fine example of how Slow Food Nation is bringing experts and eaters together to take on this challenge.

Marion Nestle ventured beyond simply blaming the Big Food baddies for the lousy diet that kills more Americans each year than Al Qaeda could ever hope to. She noted that without campaign finance reform, there’s no hope for fundamental change in our food system. She cited another culprit, too; Wall Street’s obsession with quarterly profits, which compels food manufacturers to focus all their energies—and their vast resources—on persuading Americans to fill up on empty calories.

So, at the end of the day, I wholeheartedly share my fellow blogger Bonnie Powell's enthusiasm for Slow Food Nation; any conference that provides The Marionator, as we fondly call Dr. Nestle, with a platform from which to fire away at the forces that have held our nation hostage for so long to fake foods that are as artificially cheap as they are artificially flavored. And you can join the call for real reform of our food system, too, by signing on to the Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture that Marion and some of her fellow famous foodies recited at a Slow Food Nation reading on Thursday evening. Can we change our food chain? Yes, we can. Along with you!

A swarm of 40,000 to 50,000 locavores will descend on San Francisco this Labor Day weekend to attend Slow Food Nation, a four-day extravaganza of teach-ins and tastings that's being billed as a kind of "Woodstock for gastronomes."

I'd rather go to a Woodstock for garden gnomes, myself -- at least those Lilliputian lawn ornaments share my fondness for front yard farming. Gastro gnomes, on the other hand, sound like elitist elves who are overly fond of artisanal cheeses and grass-fed beef. Do we really need a celebration of such highfalutin culinary novelties at a time when high fuel and food costs are making it harder for people to keep their pantries stocked with even the most basic staples?

Well, yes, we do, because we need to remember that the fresh, unadulterated, minimally processed, locally produced foods that Slow Food Nation is showcasingwere our pantry staples, before the military-industrial complex annexed our food chain a half a century or so ago in the name of progress.

Our great-grandparents would be flabbergasted to learn that grass-fed milk in glass bottles bearing the local dairy farm's logo is now a rare luxury item available to only the affluent few who are willing to pay $4 for a half-gallon of milk.

Back in the day, our breads were fresh-baked and free of high fructose corn syrup, and our eggs and bacon came from chickens and hogs that rolled around in the dirt and saw the light of day. The word "farm" still evokes nostalgic pastoral images for most Americans, but there's nothing even remotely benign or bucolic about the fetid, brutal factory farms that supply us with most of our meat, poultry, eggs and dairy products today. And unmasking this unsavory reality is as much a part of Slow Food Nation's agrarian agenda as dishing out local delicacies.

So don't be distracted by the aroma of wood-fired focaccia wafting from the Fort Mason Center "Taste Pavilions"; Slow Food Nation has the potential to spark a crucial dialogue about where our food comes from, how it's grown, and why all that matters. With forums featuring the good food movement's marquee names, including Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle and Eric Schlosser, this Alice Waters-sponsored shindig could be the watershed event that puts America's foodsheds on the map.

Don't know what a "foodshed" is? Don't worry, nobody else does, either -- the word is still so obscure it hasn't earned an entry on Wikipedia. It means, essentially, the area through which food travels to get from the farm to your plate. That would have been a pretty short trip a few generations ago, but in this era of globalization, our foodshed now encompasses the whole world, more or less.

This far-flung food chain has enslaved us with a false sense of abundance, turning the produce aisles of our supermarkets into a seasonless place where you can find berries and bell peppers all year round. But this apparent bounty diverts us from the fact that industrial agriculture has actually drastically reduced the diversity of the foods that our farmers grow.

As small and mid-size farms got swallowed up by the massive monoculture operations we now call "conventional," the varieties of fruits and vegetables grown on those farms got whittled down to just those few that shipped the best and had the longest shelf life. Breeders chose to focus on species of livestock and poultry that fatten up the fastest, such as big-breasted but bland Butterball turkeys so top-heavy they can't reproduce naturally and have to be artificially inseminated. For this we give thanks each November?

This focus on economies of scale, and the illusory "efficiency" of a food system dependent on cheap fossil fuels and perpetual subsidies, gave us, the richest nation in the world, the cheapest food. And we are all the poorer for it.

Along the way, we lost hundreds of different kinds of plants and animals; currently, "at least 1,060 food varieties unique to North America are threatened, endangered or functionally extinct in the marketplaces of the United States, Canada, and northern Mexico," Gary Paul Nabhan writes in Renewing America's Food Traditions, a new book that celebrates the distinctive culinary regions of our country that Agribiz almost obliterated in recent decades.

But Renewing America's Food Traditions is not just a book; it's an alliance: Called RAFT for short, it's a collaborative effort from Slow Food USA and six other sustainably minded organizations. RAFT's mission is to inspire what the folks at Slow Foods USA call "eater-based conservation" by preserving and promoting the culinary heritage and extraordinary biodiversity that blessed this country for centuries before we shifted gears and became a fast food nation.

Nabhan is participating in a Slow Food Nation forum, "Re-Localizing Food," along with Pollan, Dan Barber and Winona LaDuke, but this powerhouse panel is, alas, already sold out, along with most of the other forums featuring the rock stars of the real food movement.

Thankfully, the Slow Food Nation folks are offering some free events and exhibits, too, including the Marketplace, which promises "to transform San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza into an urban garden, farmers market, outdoor food bazaar andsoapbox," and the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden in front of City Hall, whose impressive array of organic heirloom vegetables is being donated to local food banks.

In keeping with its goal to promote all things sustainable, Slow Food Nation aspires to be a "zero waste event:" In addition to recycling and composting food waste, plates, flatware and packaging, Slow Food Nation is joining forces with Food and Water Watch to banish bottled water from the four-day festival. Echoing Food and Water Watch's Take Back the Tap campaign, the event will instead offer five tap water stations where folks can refill their water bottles -- or, if you didn't bring your own, you can buy a reusable, eco-friendly stainless steel canteen.

Not content to just spare us the spectacle of 50,000 good food fanatics washing down all those sustainable snacks with bottled water, Food and Water Watch has posted a much-needed guide on its Web site for the rest of us on how to "Free Your Event From Bottled Water." Pair this with Slow Food Nation's Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture, to be unveiled on Aug. 28 at San Francisco's City Hall, and you've got a virtual road map to a real revolution, even if you're not going to San Francisco.

Originally published on Alternet.org

Look, I hate the military-industrial complex as much as the next hemp-seed snacking, kombucha-brewing, raw-milk swigging real food revolutionary. After all, they’re the ones who saturated our soil with their surplus nitrogen in the wake of World War II, reversing generations of careful land stewardship in the name of moving forward. They declared corn King, and turned our supermarkets into minefields littered with fat, salt and sugar bombs. Our blown-up kids? Just collateral damage in the eternal battle to boost Big Food’s bottom line.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Agribiz ascendancy; the same military-industrial complex that locked us into this fuel-ish food chain also gave us the key to free ourselves--the Internet. Presumably, the Department of Defense didn’t develop this technology in order to empower citizen activists, but isn’t it nice to finally have an unintended consequence we can cheer about? Unlike, say, cross-contamination from genetically modified crops, or E. coli-tainted produce, or fertilizer-fed algae blooms or—oh, nevermind.

The Internet has proved to be extremely fertile ground for the good food movement, nurturing a virtual community of sustainably minded farmers, foodies, and activists. Websites championing the agrarian agenda are sprouting up everywhere, like Roundup-resistant super weeds, ready to take on the unsustainable status quo.

The challenge, now, is how to keep track of them all. And that’s where the Eat Well Guide’s new booklet Cultivating The Web: High Tech Tools For The Sustainable Food Movement comes in handy. This nifty free guide is available now, in its entirety, on the Eat Well Guide website, and a print edition will make its debut later this month at Slow Food Nation (full disclosure compels me to admit that I was a consultant to this project, which turned out wonderfully nonetheless.)

Cultivating The Web gives a terrific overview of the many ways that such digital tools as social networking, YouTube, and wikis have helped promote an alternative food system, one that aims to give all Americans access to what the Slow Food folks like to call “good, clean, and fair” food. That’s good as in delicious, clean as in sustainably produced, and fair, meaning the workers who grow it are not exploited, and the fruits of their labor are not just for an elite few.

There are anecdotes and quotes from a cross section of movers and shakers in the real food revolution highlighting the many ways that cutting edge technology is being used to revive our local communities, help folks find fresh, healthy foods, and support sustainable agriculture. My favorite is from environmentalist Bill McKibben:

Whether you’re curious to know more about organic standards, or contemplating a stint working on a farm, or looking to find a CSA in your neighborhood, or trying to figure out what varieties of fish are sustainably harvested, you’ll find pages of resources in Cultivating The Web to steer you to the websites with the information you’re seeking. And the beauty of the online edition is that it will be continually updated, as new and noteworthy sites spring up.

In the not-quite-five years since The Eat Well Guide made its debut in conjunction with The Meatrix, its scope has widened from its original focus on sustainably-raised meat, poultry, eggs and dairy into a comprehensive, free online directory that lists thousands of outlets all over the United States and Canada where folks can find fresh, locally grown food, from farmers’ markets, shops and restaurants to CSA programs and family farms. And they’ve added advocacy organizations, as well as “water conscious ratings” for establishments that offer tap water instead of bottled, and practice other conservation measures.

Anyone who travels knows how incredibly hard it can be to find healthy eating options on the road; now, the Eat Well Guide is also launching a new interactive mapping tool, Eat Well Everywhere (EWE), to help you locate fresh, local foods wherever you go. A mash-up of Eat Well’s listings and Google Maps, EWE gives travelers the chance to get off the beaten—or, more accurately, battered and deep-fried--path and create a custom “eat-inerary” of restaurants, farms, and even B & B’s where you can soothe your road-weary soul with real food.

The very notion of using high technology to promote eating low on the food chain may seem incongruous to some folks—specifically, Wendell Berry. Berry, one of America’s most august agrarians, penned an essay back in 1987 entitled “Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer.” He saw no upside to this new technology:

Well, thirty-one years later, The Eat Well Guide’s using computers to build community, support family farmers, and bring eaters and growers together on a scale that was unimaginable a few decades back. Is it time for Berry to eat his words and get an Apple?

Steak or salmon? Millions of menu-mulling diners ask themselves this question every day. Enjoy your dithering while you can, folks, because the day is coming when you may not have the luxury of choosing the lobster over the London broil. For those with a more populist palate, I’ve got some bad news, too; a future with no more fried clam strips or canned tuna, for you.

Why? Because fertilizer runoff from industrial agriculture and fossil-fuel use are causing catastrophic “dead zones” in our oceans, “killing large swaths of sea life and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage,” according to Scientific American.

It’s Agribiz vs. Aquabiz, and at the moment, the farmers are beating the waders off of the fishermen. Scientific American notes that “there are now 405 identified dead zones worldwide, up from 49 in the 1960s.” And once a marine habitat falls victim to hypoxia, i.e. oxygen deficiency, the outlook is grim:

How fitting! More toxic gas from the same chemical companies who gave the world Agent Orange. Except that in this case, it’s an unwelcome by-product. Oops! Sorry ‘bout that!

But don’t worry, Monsanto and DuPont are on the job. They’ve come up with a great new biotech solution to the mess they’ve made of our oceans; “NUE” crops, as in “nitrogen use efficiency.” These NUE crops are engineered to have roots that absorb more nitrogen, reportedly allowing farmers to “produce the same yield with half as much fertilizer."

I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we stop looking to the same corporations who have screwed up our environment to fix things? As Prince Charles told The Telegraph the other day, the multinational companies promoting the use of GM crops are conducting a "gigantic experiment I think with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong." Charles has predictably been labelled a luddite for daring to challenge "a system that is fundamentally flawed," as Grist puts it. But it's the Better-Living-Through-Biotech crowd who's just too blinkered to see the Big Picture--you know, the one where all their brilliant breakthroughs come back to bite us on the ass.

There’s the Roundup-resistant strain of super weeds Monsanto’s helped create, for example, and let’s not forget another great Monsanto innovation, Posilac, aka rBST, the bovine growth hormone designed to wring more milk out of our dairy cows. Unfortunately for Monsanto, cows are not sponges but, in fact, living, breathing creatures whose bodies aren’t equipped to cope with the stepped-up production induced by artificial hormones.

Consumer rejection of rBST-tainted dairy products finally forced Monsanto to admit that it’s looking to dump Posilac, but you can bet they’ve got any number of equally ill-conceived “breakthroughs” in the pipeline that promise to solve all the world’s food crises. In fact, the Agribiz apologists will tell you that industrial agriculture is our only hope.

But as Frances Moore Lappé wrote on Huffington Post last week, the notion that we should be looking to Agribiz to feed the world is pernicious propaganda spread with the aid—sometimes unwitting—of a lazy and uninformed media. The story that’s not getting out is the fact that farmers all over the world are finding new ways—and reviving old ones--to produce food without destroying our soil and water. As Lappé notes:

We managed to feed ourselves for centuries without relying on chemicals and we can do it again. As environmental journalist Claire Cummings writes in Uncertain Peril:

Limited, indeed. Who could have predicted that those amber waves of grain we grow from sea to shining sea would wind up destroying those seas—aside, of course, from the marine biologists who’ve been “sounding the alarm on hypoxic zones for decades”? Imagine this; if we don't take drastic steps to halt the growth of these dead zones, the question of whether to order the meat or the fish could become as obsolete as VHS vs. Beta. Better learn to love your veggies.

The New York Times giveth, and the New York Times taketh away. On the one hand, Nick Kristof’s eloquent plea to treat our farm animals more humanely moved me to tears. On the other hand, I’ve barely got enough digits to count the noxious “let’s not save the planet” columns that John Tierney, Stanley Fish, and Stephen J. Dubner have tossed off in recent weeks like rancid croutons.

John Tierney—the thinking man’s John Stossel--delivers his trademark contrarian drivel with 10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List, in which he gleefully skewers a whole herd of sustainable sacred cows: plastic bags, plastic water bottles, food miles, the Arctic meltdown, and so on. Treehugger tackled half of his half-assed claims, noting that:

Then Stanley Fish had to weigh in with a weary, Larry David-style kvetch in which his eco-freak wife sabotages his quality of life with recycled toilet paper, fluorescent bulbs, and grass-fed beef, of which he says:

Never mind that he can’t spell agribusiness and writes off a whole world of botanical bounty from amaranth to zucchini. I’d dismiss this as a tedious Andy Rooney-ish tirade, but actually, Andy Rooney gave a shockingly spot-on spiel last month about how Agribiz has spoiled our milk; it was a rant worthy of a raw-milk renegade. Fish, by contrast, comes off like just another tired, deflated geezer à la McCain mocking Obama’s call to keep our tires inflated. Hey, when Andy Rooney’s hipper than you are, maybe it’s time to retire.

And then there’s Stephen J. Dubner and his Freakonomics blog, where he recently wrote a post entitled Do We Really Need a Few Billion Locavores? in which he recounts his family’s disastrous attempt to make homemade orange sherbet:

Dubner cites this sad saga as proof that when it comes to food, you’re better off leaving it to the professionals. This is just willful incompetence, and so lame that I hardly know where to begin. Homemade ice cream is truly one of the greatest pleasures in life; to claim that you could buy something “much better” at the store is absurd, unless the store in question is some sort of high-end gourmet grocer that sells the finest gelatos.

Besides, half the fun is making up your own flavors--we made a batch of burdock/dandelion/ginger last month that was wonderfully root beer-y; this weekend I’m adapting a Victorian recipe for cucumber/lemon verbena ice cream. And even our plain ol’ chocolate is special because we make it with the best bittersweet Callebaut chocolate chips and Valrhona cocoa powder from France (remember, we’re retrovores, not locavores.) Try finding that at the store.

I almost felt sorry for Stephen J. Dubner and his lousy overpriced homemade sherbet, until I saw the reader-generated Q & A he subsequently posted with agricultural economist Daniel Sumner. A reader asked:

Sumner responded:

Ah yes, the old greenhouse red herring. Locavores don’t advocate buying out-of-season lettuce grown in a greenhouse--the whole point of being a locavore is that you base your diet as much as possible on what’s in season in your region. As for inhospitable environments, is there a horticultural zone anywhere in America where you can’t grow lettuce in the spring or fall?

It’s absolutely true that if you’re looking to fight climate change by changing your diet, cutting back on your meat consumption is an even more effective strategy than buying local produce. And there’s no denying that some crops are grown more efficiently in far-off places. While the idea of food miles sounds deceptively simple, accurately assessing the true carbon footprint of any given item can be extraordinarily complicated.

But food miles are just one aspect of the eat local movement. Agribiz apologists like to focus on them because they can trot out industry-funded studies that purportedly prove that buying local generates more greenhouse gases. Another popular piece of propaganda is the mythical Prius-driving locavore who roams from one farmstand to another in pursuit of the perfect heirloom tomatoes, and then chalks up more miles tooling around for some artisanal cheese and bread (local, of course) to have with them.

Well, sure, this could be worse for the environment than simply heading to the nearest supermarket. But who actually shops this way? Most farmers’ markets are located in densely populated areas where folks can walk, bike, or take mass transit to do their shopping.

Besides, the increased demand for local produce is driving even the supermarkets to source their produce closer to home, as Marion Burros reported in Wednesday’s Times. A spokesman for the Hannaford Brothers supermarket chain told Burros:

While Fish and Dubner are busy lamenting the horrors of local cuisine, Burros and her Dining Out colleague Kim Severson have thankfully provided more favorable accounts of the eat local movement. But even some of that coverage has been a double-edged sword. Severson’s recent profile of “lazy locavores” played into the perception that fresh, local fruits and vegetables are a trendy affectation. Witness this quote from Corby Kummer:

Just ask the Hamptons socialite whose husband, a private equity fund manager, used to eat “a lot of expensive imported food with little thought about where it came from.” She gives Severson the perfect annoying analogy:

Oh, great, the populist peanut gallery groaned. Just what we needed--another article that frames the local food movement as some kind of elitist fad. More ammunition for the folks who like to promote the notion that a presidential candidate who eats arugula is somehow unfit to lead. Since when is liking leafy greens a character weakness?

But that Hamptons socialite is on to something. With the exception of a few palate-challenged columnists, nearly everybody—rich or poor, urban or rural, liberal or conservative—can taste the difference between a freshly picked, locally grown tomato and the wan, flavorless kind you find at the supermarket. Factor in rising fuel costs, food safety fears, and the yearning to preserve open space, and you’ve got a movement that’s picking up steam—and passengers. Rich folks are hiring edible landscapers, small-scale farmers are thriving , and the rest of us are flocking to greenmarkets and planting our own veggie gardens. A handful of knee-jerk naysayers at the Times can’t derail this local train.

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: My Screening Liberally colleagues have asked me to recommend "a nutritious alternative to popcorn" that Screening Liberally chapters could serve at their film screenings. But is popcorn itself really such a terrible snack? Obviously, if you drench it in butter or oil, it becomes a fat bomb, and then there's diacetyl--the "butter" flavored chemical that gives the workers exposed to it the debilitating illness called "popcorn lung." But if you start with non-GMO, organic popcorn, say, and you pop it in just a wee bit of canola oil and sprinkle it with nutritional yeast, the way they do in those hipster indie movie houses, haven't you got yourself a pretty healthy snack, provided you don't consume a Paul Bunyon-sized tub of it?

Dr. Nestle: Hey--this sounds like my new column in the San Francisco Chronicle in which I discussed, of all things, pizza. The editors wanted to know whether pizza could ever be healthy? Of course it can. Popcorn too. Popcorn has the benefit of being mostly air (it's popped, right?). Air has no calories. So a cup of popcorn is just 30 calories. Air doesn't have much in the way of nutrients either, so that cup of popcorn has a few minerals, a gram of protein, and a teaspoon of starch. Not much good, but no harm done either. BUT: nobody has just a cup and nobody just eats popcorn. Every tablespoon of fat--butter or oil--adds at least 100 calories and throw sugar on top of it and you've added some more. It's still a lot better than most things you get in movie theaters, but I want real butter on mine, not that phony stuff.

There’s an awful lot of b.s. being spread in this election year--thankfully, some of it’s actually being put to good use growing delicious, nutritious fruits and vegetables. The rising cost of food and gas is fueling a grassroots movement to uproot our grass and grow our own food instead. Once, throwing tomatoes was a form of protest. Now, growing tomatoes is the way to just say no to the status quo. Isn’t that a sad sign of the times?

If only we had a commander-in-chief who called on us to grow our own crops, instead of to shop! It sounds implausible now, but there was a time when our government actually encouraged us to get off our cans and get canning. The current administration is famously reluctant to encourage preserving of any kind, be it sweet or savory.

A couple of generations ago, our government championed home food gardening as a civic duty, a way for average Americans to help ease the food shortages we suffered during World War II. And the campaign worked; in 1943, we managed to grow 40 percent of the vegetables we ate in the U.S.

Our nation’s last energy crisis drove us into the dirt, too; in 1975, “49 percent of U.S. households were growing vegetables,” as Bruce Butterfield, the National Gardening Association’s market research director, told the Washington Post recently.

So as our current war drags on and gas prices rise, it’s no surprise that Americans are once again flocking to their local garden centers, snapping up seedlings, and supplanting Bermuda grass with Bermuda onions. But this time, we’re doing it without the inducement of any pro-produce propaganda from the White House. The folks at the helm of our sinking economy are too busy backing the lenders to rally the back-to-the-landers.

The call to tear out your turf and grow turnips comes, instead, from humble homegrown heroes like Roger Doiron, founder of Kitchen Gardeners International and the creative force—and face—of the Eat The View campaign to launch a new generation of Victory Gardens, starting with the White House lawn.

Alice Waters famously tried to persuade President Clinton to install a kitchen garden and compost pile on the White House grounds. If only she had succeeded--the Clinton legacy might be burnished with black gold instead of tarnished by dirt. But Waters, undaunted, continues to spearhead--along with Doiron and a small army of trowel-wielding terroirists —a visionary agrarian platform I call YIMBY-ism; the Yes, In My Back Yard! movement. Waters has helped created a stellar example in her own backyard by marshalling the forces that recently transformed the lawn in front of San Francisco’s City Hall into the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden. It’s a blueprint for greener grounds all around us, and a recipe for true energy independence. Calories, after all, are just another unit of energy. Grow your own, and you’re on the road to self-sufficiency. The Path to Freedom lies through the garden. So let’s get this presidential campaign out of the gutter and into the dirt!