Denny's & The Farmers Diner: Agribusiness Gives Way to Local Food

From Adbusters #49, Sept-Oct 2003

Denny's (corporate headquarters: Spatanburg, South Carolina; annual sales: $30 billion) has long been the major player in America's "casual family dining" business. Other chains, like Applebee's, are gaining ground, but all operate on the same high-volume/low-price cookie-cutter model. Cracks are beginning to show, however. People are tired of eating crappy food, and the marketing execs know it - note the deluge of so-called "healthy alternatives" now on offer, including wraps, salads and fresh fruit. But calories aren't all that people are counting: there is also a growing concern about the cost of industrial food production to everything from our waterways to our sense of community. That's the new bottom line.

Meat: From the commercial feedlots of the southwest USA. Pinpointing the exact source is impossible; ranches were long ago surpassed by "confined animal feeding operations" - factory farms. You can bet the cow was raised on a steady diet of Roundup Ready Corn&153; - America's most chemically treated crop - and treated with Rumensin, Tylosin or similar antibiotics, along with hormones like Revlar to "encourage" rapid development.

Dairy Products: From the "confined dairy operations" of Central Valley, California, where cows are expected to pump out 100 pounds of milk a day. It's made possible with a high=protein diet and injections of bovine growth hormone (rBGH), a substance banned in every country except the US. The milk is shipped cross-country in rolling tanker trucks, burning millions of gallons of fossil fuels each year.

Vegetables: From agri-business suppliers in the California Sunbelt. Each slice of tomato or leaf of lettuce has traveled an average of 1,518 miles on the back of a truck to reach your plate. Then again, it's designed for the rigors of the road: irradiated, genetically modified, treated with chemical preservatives and/or picked green and left to ripen in the box.

French Fries: From the potato processing plants of the northwest USA. Odds are good that the fries arrived via one of McCain's 30 worldwide processing plants (company motto: "One World, One Fry"), which churn out a million pounds of frozen fries an hour. Once known for its diversity, American potato farming has been reduced to a monoculture of Russet Burbank potatoes.

The Farmers Diner, owned and founded by Tod Murphy in Barre, Vermont, has a simple motto: serve local food to local people. It's not just another back-to-the-land dream - it's a bona fide business with first year sales of $550,000. In real-world terms, that's brisk enough trade too keep 174 acres of farmland in production, pay eight farmers $50,000 each and create seven new farm jobs. Over the next five years, Murphy plans to open four new restaurants and a central processing plant in the area and then replicate the pod model in other parts of the country. Turning the high-volume/cheap food dining model on its head, he has created a new market for small farmers and provided 70,000 customers with "rich food for regular folks."

Vegetables: From Cedar Circle Farm, East Thetford, Vermont. It's owned and operated by longtime activists Kate Duesterberg and Will Allen. They bought the farm three years ago and converted it to an organic operation, selling most of their produce at their farm stand.

Dairy Products: From Rock Bottom Farm, Strafford, Vermont. The state has lost over 8,000 dairy farms in four decades since the mid 1950s when factory farms moved in. The second-generation Rock Bottom Farm is run by three brothers - Earl, berry and William Ransom - who ship organic dairy fresh to the diner.

French Fries: From the farms of Peasely, Chappel, Guildhall and Williamstown, Vermont. The Farmer's Diner cuts its fries fresh every day from potatoes grown in the state. They're never pre-cooked or frozen, and the cooks use every part of the potato.

Meat: From Montana Yankee Ranch, Starksboro, Vermont. Monty Adams bought Montana Yankee to get back to traditional pasture-fed cattle ranching after working for years on commercial feedlots. He happily meets the diner's specs: no hormones, no antibiotics and all livestock must have access to outside pastures.

The True Cost of Food

From Adbusters #55, Sept-Oct 2004

New Zealand is 7,500 miles from the Okanagan valley of British Columbia, Canada. So why are BC grocery stores flush with New Zealand apples when perfectly good ones are grown in the Okanagan? In 2002, BC apple exports totalled 77 million pounds, while apple imports from New Zealand and elsewhere ran to 111 million pounds. British Columbians need more apples than they produce, but wouldn’t it make sense to eat the apples their neighbors grow before bringing them in from the other side of the Pacific? What’s more, many of the Okanagan farmers who could have made up the difference have been driven out of the industry by cheap imports. With the flood of foreign apples, those who didn’t qualify for government assistance to upgrade their orchards or shift into different crops have had to tear up trees and sell their land.

Free-market enthusiasts argue that consumers deserve the lowest price, and if New Zealanders can provide better value, good for them. But what is the true cost of shipping an apple from one hemisphere to another? What are the true costs of production, processing, packaging, and transportation with the standard food delivery system as compared to a local one? A 2001 Iowa State University study showed that through the conventional food delivery system, the average apple in that state travels 1,726 miles to get to the consumer. Compared to Iowa-based regional and local systems, the conventional system used far more fuel, and released five to 17 times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In the US as a whole, food accounts for over 20 percent of all commodity transport, resulting in 120 million tonnes of CO2 emissions every year. Every day, planes, long-haul trucks, and container ships criss-cross the globe to ensure that Western palates are properly satisfied. With the current system, green beans grown in Africa can be picked in the evening, loaded on the overnight flight to Heathrow airport, and on shelves of London greengrocers by 11:00 the next morning. But even the British government recognizes that this is problematic and wants to ensure “that aviation meets the external environmental costs for which it is responsible.” A good start would be taxing aviation fuel, which currently pays a zero rate, that leaves airline travel incredibly cheap compared to its true cost. So the UK Department of Transport commissioned a study of air travel that pegged the environmental costs every time a Boeing 757 takes off at £5,140. How long until that cost is internalized? How cheap would the New Zealand apple be then? And how many apple orchards in the Okanagan could
be saved?

True Cost Burgers

American insurance companies and employer health plan administrators know that obesity costs money. The bill for the average stomach shrinking surgery is $25,000 and every year there are 10 to 12 percent more people eligible for the procedure. Meanwhile, the US Department of Health has determined it takes $120 million to treat obesity annually.

Add that to the cost of treating the thousands of Americans each year who catch E. coli poisoning from hamburgers, thanks to industry shortcuts that result in meat covered with fecal matter and pathogens. Manure doesn’t have to be on meat to cause problems. It also releases smog-forming emissions and contaminates water. In 2000, seven people died in the town of Walkerton, Canada, when farmland runoff polluted the town’s water-supply with E. coli. The subsequent crisis cost at least $64.5 million cad overall and individual households had to spend about $4,000 cad on average. Two years later, agribusiness giant Cargill dumped hog waste into Missouri’s Loutre River, contaminating a five mile stretch and killing 53,000 fish. In the UK, a 2003 report from Essex University calculated that British taxpayers spend up to £2.3 billion every year repairing the damage that industrial farming does to the environment and human health. So what would a Big Mac cost if its true production costs were included?

Mad Cow

Canada’s Agriculture Minister was emphatic: “I want to stress from the beginning this is one cow.” But all it took was one positive test for mad cow disease in May 2003 to send Canada’s beef industry into a tailspin. Export markets were closed off immediately, and by the end of the year, industry analysts calculated the economic cost of the positive test at $3.3 billion cad. Then, just before Christmas, the industry suffered another jolt thanks to a single case of mad cow in the US. By February 2004, Agriculture Department officials in that country told Congress that the epidemic had cost $6 billion. Europeans watching all this must have scoffed at the North American figures. Their mad cow crisis has cost more than $100 billion.

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic have dutifully compensated the farmers and meat packers affected by the outbreak. And they’ve done the same after outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease and avian flu. So even if meat has never touched your lips, you pay.

Nicholas Klassen

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School's Out

From Adbusters #57, Jan-Feb 2005

I recently helped a kid who had never been to school get into a college kinesiology program. Shortly into my pitch, the admissions counselor stopped me and said, “She’s 19 right? Everyone over 19 is a mature student and accepted regardless of their academic background. Then it’s just sink or swim.” I paused: “You’re telling me you don’t need high school to get into college here?” “That’s right.”

I’m fond of this story because it underlines the point that a high school diploma – or a university degree for that matter – isn’t essential to pursue a dream career or enjoy future success. And personally, I see the compulsory state schooling paradigm collapsing in on itself. First described by Plato, but never attempted until the 1800s in Prussia and arriving in North America in 1852, compulsory schooling is tightly bound with the rise of the modern nation state. So, in changing how we understand schooling, we are necessarily changing our understanding of social organization and citizenship.

Schools are sites of both social replication and creation: that is to say, they reflect and define how we organize and understand ourselves. If children spend the vast bulk of their lives in anti-democratic institutions where they have little opportunity to make real choices, direct their learning, spend time doing things they value, or take independent initiative, how can we expect anything other than a docile and compliant citizenry?

I think the real question is this: is spending six hours per day, five days a week, ten months a year for twelve years, confined to an institution in groups of thirty the optimal way for children to thrive? If not, then what the hell are we doing?

Yet we can’t just retreat into individualist, everyone for themselves answers. Schools are a social problem that demand social answers and social institutions in their place: we have to build better places for kids and better conceptions of childhood. But there can be no systemic answers. Like Colin Ward said "We need a mass of answers, not mass answers."

Kids grow up right and thrive according to an infinitely complex and constantly shifting response to culture, time, place, predilection, circumstance and thousands of other local and individual factors. It is crazy to attempt to describe what all kids need, or how all kids learn best. We have to respond to the kids in front of us, not the abstract kids of theory: our children, our neighbors, our friends, our community. our community.

Home learning is great and I do think that encouraging everyone to simply drop out of school is excellent advice, but it can only be part of the solution. We need to build new institutions that are commonly available, especially for the least privileged in our neighborhoods. We need to take what is available and use every possible resource.

These places will, and should, be profoundly different from one another: reflecting and recreating the local diversity that economic and cultural globalization is so eager to extinguish. Learning centers, small schools, free schools, community centers, homeschooling can all be part of the answers: the key is locally-controlled, democraticallyrun institutions that respond to the needs of participants, not the reverse.

Let’s look to libraries and community centers and parks for inspiration. Schools would do well to reconstruct themselves with these in mind: genuinely public, voluntary, non-coercive, commonly available for a wide array of uses, and sitting at the heart of healthy community life.

We have to start with the idea that no one wants to grow up to be stupid or ignorant: everyone wants to be smart, competent and skillful. Begin with people’s exuberance and desire to learn, their passions and interests and go from there. Trying to force a person to learn something they don’t care about is futile.

Look to the community and make institutions semi-permeable. We need local institutions: individualist answers fall short. People require places to gather and to generate culture. If we do not pose counter-institutions in opposition to what exists, dominant culture will flow in: TV and shopping, video games and virtual life. Most kids need places to go during the day, and those places have to be building something new. People are capable of so much even with severely limited resources. Let’s free the unbelievable amounts of money and resources that state schools are hoarding/wasting and return them to communities and families.

Matt Hern runs the Purple Thistle Centre and edits Crank magazine. His new book is Field Day: Getting Society Out of School.

Life as Play

From Adbusters #57, Jan-Feb 2005

There are forces in informational capitalism that are undermining the current social contract, argues Scottish musician/theorist Pat Kane. The rise of open networks has led to open source, peer-to-peer networking and file sharing, and a new way of living, he says, in which we live to play, not to work.

Kane says that people – he calls them ‘soulitarians,’ hackers and independent young creatives in IT – are beginning to find the space to realize themselves as creative individuals. He explains: “Given how digitization, networks, computation and mobility both empower us as individuals, yet place us in a much less stable and dynamic world, the ‘work ethic’ seems a woefully cramped and inadequate mentality for these times. Why tie our identities to duty and survival, when our connected technologies compel us to live creatively?”

In The Play Ethic, his self-styled “manifesto for a different way of living,” Kane mixes reportage (on how soulitarians approach jobs as an extra opportunity for passionate play) with a political program (reducing the working week to 30 hours). He examines the idea further on his blog.

Kane’s overall argument is that play (“one of our enduring human capacities, one that explicitly embraces change and possibility”) is a powerful alternative to work, as a measure of human worth and value. A worker “accepts that their public and productive activity will only ever partially express their passions,” says Kane. Instead, players strive to align these two realms.

“Play allows imaginative headroom to imagine what kind of lives we would lead if we eventually constructed our benign, peaceful global system,” he suggests. “The play ethic, at least in the West, is about keeping societies liberal and complex. We need it so that citizens, consumers and producers can have enough consciousness to impede our political elites from doing the kind of harm to the world they’re doing at the moment.”

Kane isn’t indulging in old hippy ideas and doesn’t sentimentalize play. Instead The Play Ethic belongs with other ‘slacktivist’ initiatives like the Italian Slow Movement. It’s about helping individuals and societies to step back from free market frenzy and create new more creative, independent, appropriate ways of living.

Jim McClellan is currently interactive writer-in-residence at the BBC and writes for The Guardian.

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slow is not the same as lazy

Slow down and get there faster

That’s the premise in this post from Carmine Coyote, the prolific author of Slow Leadership. Here is a good example of why slow is not the same as lazy. But I have to ask this question, do we want to get there faster?

My first reaction to a comment like “It may seem counter-intuitive” [ to slow down in order to get there faster], is to object. But I, and probably you, dear reader, are slow.

However, Carmine is right, about counter-intuition in this case. Our biology impels to to act quickly in an emergency. We are filled with adrenaline (and who knows what other chemicals) when we need to react quickly.

But most of the time, we are not in a life-threatening situation. Sometimes, you have to go in the wrong direction to get to where you want to go. Think about the freeway on-ramp. Sometimes you have to go north if you want to go south.

Rushing is of course a revolting subject, but it must be discussed. Rushing is a reality, and there is much time abuse in the world. Slow Leadership is about management. Here is a quote:

One of the worst aspects of today’s macho management is that it encourages decision makers to operate with a minimum of input. Haste forces them to work with summaries and headlines prepared by others. They rarely have the chance to explore the options for themselves. Even choices that might involve massive costs and huge potential profits or losses are taken on the basis of headline figures summarized on a single sheet of paper or a few PowerPoint slides.

I am sorry that this quote mentions the word PowerPoint which may be offensive to readers. I know many have suffered through such presentations, and I don’t want to cause anxiety.

I am all for simplicity, but I am with Carmine, rushing leads to oversimplification. That’s a problem.

This post is from http://www.blog.slowdownnow.org/

SlowDown Life in Thailand

This blog is for Slow Down Life in Thailand Campaign.

WeChange group and ally will begin Campaign for Slow Down Life in Thailand on 2007.
But now we have a few information of it.

This blog will collect information for that campaign.