why fair trade?

UnknownHave you read about the awful recent garment factory collapse stories in Bangladesh?  Do you know what fair trade coffee or what a fair trade banana is? Well, here it is.  According to Elizabeth Henderson, an organic farmer for 30 years who helped organize the Domestic Fair Trade Association, "a fair price is the right price with a triple bottom line people-profit-earth."

Unknown-2Fair Trade began with such crops as bananas, coffee and cocoa from South America because the local farmers were being exploited in the interest of a low sale price and the biggest possible profit for Dole or Chiquita or Chock-Full-O'Nuts or whoever else.  The idea of Fair Trade is a facet of the "new economics," the newly arising cultural paradigm of watching out for all of us, not just some of us  - the health of the farm worker, a fair wage for the farm worker, a sustainable agriculture that does not harm the earth, a healthy product for the consumer, and a fair profit for the banana exporter/importer or cocoa powder maker.  See WFTO and Fair Trade USA for more information.Unknown-1

Fair Trade is a win-win situation, all parties involved profit from it; non fair trade is win-lose, because only one side wins.  Of course this means that the end product costs a bit more.  But what's wrong with that if in the end we all profit from it?

The DFTA (Domestic Fair Trade Association) now promotes the same principles of health, justice and sustainability on a domestic level.  And, to complete my loop to the recent garment factory disasters, through all our awakening to these issues the beautiful win-win principles of Fair Trade will surely make a leap to the garment factories abroad so those workers can work in safe buildings and work for fair wages.

shark fin soup and hope

If the Chinese are back peddling on shark fin soup, so ubiquitous at all festive banquets of the past, there is hope for changes in our attitude about a lot of other things as well.  I am thinking of idling stances on such pressing issues as climate change, pollution, animal welfare, GMOs, child prostitution, and many other ugly realities.  It seems to me that ultimately our collective indecisiveness on these issues boils down to the hesitance of wrestling ourselves away from the profit-first model.  If we only realized that the wellbeing-first model benefits us all around. Bonnie Tsui wrote this week-end in the NY Times about the changing attitude of the Chinese on serving shark fin soup at important banquets, previously a sign of "honoring (and impressing) your guest."  I was served shark fin soup at several banquets in my company's honor in the late 1980s when we lived in Hong Kong, and was oblivious of the gruesome practice (which I can't bear to describe here, but you can look it up).    Because it has been such an inherent component of Chinese food culture I was really quite amazed to read that "last summer, the Chinese government announced that it would stop serving the dish at official state banquets."

Here's to change for the better, change towards wellbeing, change towards respect of nature and all living beings. 

food forests

Permaculture, although around since the 1970s in Australia, is still a fairly new idea over here.  The word is a contraction of the words permanent, agriculture, and culture (interesting that agriculture, which means cultivation of the land, is so tightly tied to culture - without agriculture there is no culture!).  The idea of permaculture is a completely sustainable agriculture, and more so culture.  Sustainable means that there is no "garbage," that everything we need to live on comes and goes in a permanent, circular, mutually beneficial and dependent, and therefore WASTELESS cycle.  The principle of agricultural permaculture is planting crops together that complement one another in a wildly complex and diverse composition that emulates nature, although it is man-made.  These food forests work at every stratum of the vegetation, from low down mushrooms, herbs and flowers, to the next level of berry and hazelnut bushes, to higher up fruit and nut trees.

This is not a new concept, though.  But then - sometimes we need to revisit old ideas from a fresh perspective and a higher perch.  Thanks to the suggestion of a friend, I recently read the book 1491 by Charles Mann and learned about milpas.  Milpas are South American planting compositions that comprise up to a dozen crops (maize, avocados, squashes and beans, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potatoes, jicama, amaranth, and mucuna), which all "complement one another nutritionally and environmentally."  Some milpas, I learned, have been in existence for four thousand years without depleting the soil!!!

One of the problems of our conventional farming methods, which is exacerbated in monocultures, is the lack of diversity in crops, because a lack of diversity in the insect/grub/bird population follows it.  This disconnect between agriculture and nature then depletes the soil on top of it all.

I am never advocating a return to the past!  However, new for the sake of new is often short sighted.  In this case we have two inspirational and sustainable agricultural models whose principles are worthwhile knowing about.  (please also visit a previous post on "spiritual farming.")

the meat quandary - in 2 more installments

DSC076982. on eating produce Will Tuttle in his World Peace Diet, and the China Study, among many, are fervently advocating vegetarian and even vegan diets.  The two main arguments are that the industrial meat industry's carbon foot print, in combination with continually increasing demand for animal protein due to a still growing (and ever more affluent) world population, is disastrous to our environmental health (which it is), and that  meat eating contributes to, or causes, cancer and other civilization diseases (which it only does under certain conditions, some of which I mentioned in my last post).

Yet, the fact that the vegetarian/vegan movement is becoming so prominent points to a shift in awareness (of the abominable industrial meat industry, its contribution to global warming, and of the unhealthiness of industrial meat and cornfed beef).  Michael Pollan's famous advice to  "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" is good advice for most of us, indeed.

On another vegetably note, the basis for our existence is light, water and soil.  Produce is closer to light energy than meat is.  As we all know, plants grow through direct conversion of sunlight to energy.  When we eat plants we take in sun energy just one step removed.  When we consume meat, we are one step further removed from that light energy because we eat the animal that fed on plants that fed on sunlight.  And incidentally, humans don't usually eat predator meat because that is yet one step further removed from sun energy than meat from vegan animals.

However, as long as we keep subjecting our crops and soil to synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides (and killing the bees along with the birds in the process), and monoculturing our produce crops, and not demanding GMO labeling (which has already happened in Europe, Japan, Russia and many other industrialized countries), we are not achieving that much with vegetarianism/veganism.  We'll keep subjecting farm workers to the health dangers of working in chemically laced fields, big-ag will keep doing its thing with produce, Monsanto & Co. are still on the loose, and we are still ingesting mineral poor and poison sprayed food grown in depleted soil that had to be artificially enriched.  So, going vegetably must mean going organic/sustainable/biodynamic to have meaningful impact on body and environment.

to be continued...

the meat quandary - in 3 installments

DSC076951. on eating meat Humans have been eating protein forever, some ethnicities more of it, some less of it, depending on geographical circumstances.   Sustainable farming and animal husbandry have been practiced in conjunction since we humans became sedentary, using the animal manure as fertilizer for the crops, feeding the animals leftovers and scraps, and eating some (not lots!!) of them, all in a pretty balanced cycle.

The picture only became horrific in the last 50 years or so when we began to produce (!!) meat.  The plight of the animals in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), modern breeding aberrations, the realities of modern abattoirs and subsequent meat processing practices (documented ad nauseam (literally) in Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals) are nightmarish. One would not want to eat such meat!

The other problem is that the percentage of meat in our diet has reached addictive proportions with the decrease in meat prices, something that is not good for our body either (unless you were Inuit or Maasai, and then you wouldn't eat industrially produced meat).

Lastly, from an evolutionary perspective, increased meat consumption has been linked to increased brain growth (although I am thinking that our brains may not have grown in proportion with the increased meat consumption of the past 50 years, otherwise we might not be where we are at environmentally).

Dirt Magazine has a brief presentation on meat vs. produce in their May-June issue (article not yet online).  However, the two opinions are too simplified.  So please reserve judgement until you have read all 3 installments.

to be continued...

happy earth day

It does look like “…the economy provides us with all of our products…,” as environmentalist David Suzuki writes.  However, that is simply a belief, and an erroneous one at that. Suzuki clarifies that “This is nonsense, of course.  Everything we depend on….comes from the earth and will eventually end up going back to it.”   Whether it is paper, glass, steel, fiber, or even plastic, it helps to remember that those are all made from natural materials.  But we have lost the connection to where those things really come from because our lives have become so abstract, so removed from nature. Because of the separation in our mind between man and nature, we separate ourselves literally from nature altogether, we eliminate it downright from our lives (and we tend to forget that our garbage ends up there as well - see my recent post on that subject). So here is my Earth Day thought-of-the-day:

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spiritual farming

Huh, you might ask?  Yes, there is such a thing, and it is called biodynamic farming.  The Biodynamic Farming & Gardening Association’s website defines it as a “spiritual-ethical-ecological approach to agriculture, food production and nutrition.”  Fred Kirschenmann, author of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience, explained in his 2010 keynote address at the conference of the association, that the present big-ag paradigm of maximum efficiency is geared towards short-term gain, and is only possible through specialization and simplification (the small picture, immediate gratification).  However, he says, farms need to be run more like organisms (the Gaia principle), in sync with nature.

We need a new agricultural paradigm, what with the bees dying, crop varieties diminishing (Tom Standage reports that “of the 7,100 types of apple (!!!) that were being grown in America in the 19th century…6,800 are now extinct.”  WOW!), monocultures that discourage insect and bird variety and promote disease, and GMOs and pesticides as misguided solutions to increasing production with short-minded profit in mind.  While there is so much more to say about the deficiencies of the present paradigm, I’d rather look towards the future and better solutions.

Organic agriculture, sustainable agriculture,permaculture, and biodynamics are all promising alternatives, of which the first is the most profit and least nature oriented (yep).  The term permaculture comes from the contraction of permanent and culture and agriculture (there is indeed no culture without agriculture).  Permaculture is a completely sustainable agri/culture practiced in symbiosis with local nature and without waste.  Biodynamics incorporates more lofty principles.  Just like permaculture it works with the farm in a symbiotic wasteless cyclical organism-like relationship.  In addition, though, it takes into account our embeddedness in the larger cosmic picture, and considers the planetary influences on seeds, crops and soil, and works with “homeopathic” soil enhancements since the health of the soil is first and foremost in growing minerally rich produce, the ultimate aim of agriculture.

healthy soil = healthy food = healthy body

voting with your $

DSC07680When you pay for something you not only send dollars but also energy its way, you vote for it, you strengthen it and its cause.  Say you shop at Walmart, or Whole Foods, or Amazon, or your local farmer (I know these are opposites in a way, that’s on purpose), you literally fill their pot with money. While it may not be immediately evident, remember that there is strength in numbers.  When a few thousand people take their food dollars away from Tyson and send them their local farmer’s way, it does make a difference.  When thousands of people become tired of built-in obsolence and take their household dollars away from shoddily made appliances and buy something well engineered that lasts, it does make a difference.  Why do you think big-ag and big-food businesses are so afraid of GMO labeling?  Because we make a statement with our money.

Today, a friend mentioned that it wasn’t necessary to buy organic avocados because they are not on the Dirty Dozen list of produce most contaminated by pesticides.  I explained that not only was the price difference only slight, but more importantly that I voted for a healthier environment and farm workers' health by buying the organic kind.

So next time you open your purse or your checkbook, remember it's a two-way street. It's not just about saving a few bucks, it's also about the cause you support.

stuff, stuff, and more stuff

  reduce, reuse, recycle

Not sure whether you have ever given trash, your’s or that of others, much thought. But here are some statistics.  The average amount of waste each person generates has increased from 2.68lbs in 1960 to 4.5lbs in 1990.  Luckily that number has held steady due to recycling efforts.   However, it still totals about 1.35billion lbs/day or 251 million tons per year!!! Now wait - this is only personal trash, which constitutes 2% of the waste stream – yikes for the industrial waste stream!  But let’s stay with our personal garbage, because that's where we can make a difference.

The first rule of thumb is that recycling and composting are good, but buying less stuff is better.  Besides, it’s been documented that we can’t gain happiness through consumption.  Elizabeth Royte, who wrote a very enlightening book on garbage, says that “We don’t need better ways to get rid of things. We need to not get rid of things, either by keeping them cycling through the system or not… desiring them in the first place.”

sponges made from plant materials

But once we have garbage, what are our choices? They are dumping, incinerating, and recycling.  FYI - in untreated landfills waste can take 40 to 50 years to decompose, in treated landfills between 5 and 10 years.  Yet, plastics may take hundreds of years to decompose!   And there are other problems with landfills: their toxicity (supposedly landfills are the largest source of human generated greenhouse gases, although CAFO’s, those enormous industrial animal feeding operations that make supermarket meat are also huge culprits), and the ever increasing amounts of garbage and landfill space needed (1.because of population increase, and 2.because our consumer society model is based on ever increasing consumption– the system breaks down if we stop consuming, and then the politicians scream “recession” - stop screaming with them).

compostable garbage bags

So, what can you do?

  • Don’t pick up any more plastic bags from the supermarket, bring your own cloth bags
  • Consume less, recycle and compost more
  • Use compostable garbage bags, recycled paper products, and products made from recycled plastic
  • Buy more groceries and cleaning supplies in bulk, reuse your glass jars and Chinese takeout plastic containers (I wish they would take them back, since I don’t like plastic in the first place), reuse your Ziplock bags a few times
  • Subscribe to Freecycle (they are all about giving and getting for free)
  • Donate your gently used unwanted stuff instead of throwing it away
  • Buy clothes at 2nd-hand stores (I am a huge fan)
  • Most of all – stop wanting, wanting, wanting stuff.