1. Put all that water they already waste on vanity to good use

2. Reduce the number of times they need to drive to the store

3. Reduce the number of trucks on the highway bringing those same products to the store

4. Keep their staple costs sane

5. De-mystify farming for the average idiot who thinks it’s too difficult and keep the knowledge of food production methods circulating (and improving)

6. De-centralize everything so that an unseasonal freeze/rain/pest outbreak/commercial bee colony collapse doesn’t necessarily translate into lower availability and higher prices for everyone

7. Let evolution continue to give us the diversification we need rather than the homogenized clone orchards with multiple single points of failure we tend to produce

Don’t have time to tend your garden? Well then you probably didn’t have time to tend your pool, either. Hire somebody. Or better yet, give your kids something more productive to do than txt msgng lol and Warcraft. Your darling Logan and Dakota are probably not going to amount to much on their own regardless of which Montessori House of Learning you send them to, so they might as well do something useful.

I don’t want every meal to taste like it was cooked by Thomas Keller nor do I want to live on a smelly hippie kibbutz, but I would like to see small time street vendors replace a few Taco Bells wherever possible. Who cares if a small bag of Doritos costs $5 if you can get a sizeable portion of your produce from your own (or your neighbor’s) back yard? Junk food should be a luxury item anyway.

Bob Weir just did a peice on ABC World News that features fast food stats, slow foods, etc. and had Dan Barber with him at a local market giving info as well as stats. The cool thing is that you can go to the link to follow and ask him a question. I hope that some of you who were quite nearly verging on speaking for him and those who had questions about his financial info (farm based – industrial agro) email him the questions that you have. I know I already did.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=4865200&page=1

http://www.starchefs.com/chefs/DBarber/html/bio.shtml

If you didn’t catch his piece on Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations Holiday spacial you can watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKSRwueI6wg

If his Times article was taken as a stomp on commercial agriculture, well…who the hell wouldn’t do what he does with the chance? Broad generalizations of agriculture and food in general have become more and more prevalent in blogs and articles over the past few years. I’ll agree that some of Mr. Barber’s veiws are skewed (esp. since Parsons and Del Grosso weighed in with factual info) but his is a vision determined. As a chef that has bought the mass produce and protein for years – when you actually research how it is processed it starts to weigh on you. Even if he has never bought a 40# case of random chicken breast from SYSCO I’m sure he knows what he would be putting in peoples bodies. Do I still order thousands of dollars of this product a week to feed customers? Yes. Do I like it? No. He is doing something that chefs want to do, IMO, and I commend him for it. Some people call him arrogant and one sided – I call him lucky as hell to be able to do what he does.

I am lucky enough to use 2 organic farms for most of my home purchases. One is 5 minutes from my house and the other is an hour and a half. The one that is close I purchase eggs and goat’s milk (the farmer and I make fresh cheese together – he made a trade – I shovel shit on sundays and he let’s me make it with him)as well as whatever he decided to grow in season. The one far away is wonderful – I get produce from them twice a month…whatever is in season. What’s great about it is, as far as money is concerned, it is an event for me, my children and our future. As far as gas prices are involved you could call it a wash – but not really. We get 2 weeks of produce, a wonderful day playing in the dirt, a farming lesson, recipe swaps, a suntan, great stories etc. As for it not being a wash – organic produce lasts (in my history) 50% longer than store bought and we eat ALOT of veg.

As for organic meats, buy Michael’s book on charcuterie, buy the cheap cuts and improvise – no one says you have to have berkshire loin chops for dinner every night.

Industrializing food production will be needed worldwide to feed growing populations”

I don’t buy that. It increasingly seems like “industrially” produced food tends to have less nutritional value than food that isn’t raised with chemical fertilizers and isn’t varieties bred solely for quantity and shelf life.

Besides, so much of today’s food is so highly processed and marked up from the original ingredients. While the cost to the consumer has gone way down, the cost that the companies processing the food pays has gone down many times more. Ironically, the farmers are now making less than ever, the consumers are paying less than ever, and yet the corporations are still making more profits than ever.

And much of that is due to a completely screwed up system of subsidies. We simply don’t know what the true economics of the situation are because it’s nothing close to a free capitalist market. Not to mention that government regulation favors huge farms at the expense of small ones (not surprising since the big corporate farms are the ones lobbying to get the laws to say what they want).

Also, the main fertilizers are derived from petroleum – as the price of oil goes up, I would think that the financial advantage of chemical fertilizers is lessened.

In the USA at least the biggest food problem facing most people is oversupply to the point of gluttony. Most people are overweight, they eat too much, get too many calories. Maybe if food prices went up it would force some to eat less. Dare I say it, but if some people took the money they were spending now on the cheapest available food and spent the same budget on healthier things, they wouldn’t be able to afford nearly as many calories…but they’d lose weight, which they badly need to do. Along the same lines, the amount of meat americans eat is extremely high and still rising. Americans could live on less acres of farmland if people would just eat more vegetable products instead of growing corn and feeding it to animals. And people can do more gardening even on even the smallest yards. While it won’t replace buying food bought from farms, it will save some money and provide some quality edibles.

While organic or small farm isn’t always necessarily better, there do seem to be ways of farming that are better and ways that are worse. I don’t believe the bad ways are a necessity to get people fed, that we can’t aspire to more beneficial means of farming and still produce enough for everyone.

I am one of those Cooks/Chefs who loves to be involved in his community teaching and writing in the local newspaper. I have over the last little bit heard so many people say they don’t understand how it’s possible for us to eat well, local and fresh, without spending an arm and a leg. (I’m getting to my point Kelly, promise)

Even as a chef, I have the same challenges. If anyone knows the wage of your every day cook, you know I can’t be spending 35$ on a pound of organically grown local spanich. I do however, choose my battles.

My fiancé and I, have over the last 2 years, eaten only local produce. We no longer go into our produce section at our massive supermarket and look at the counter. In fact, I haven’t seen a full-out counter in months! I look above the produce, where all the signs are, describing the products and where they come from. If I read Canada, then I read the name, and onyl then will I look at the actual product. This is how we are doing our part.

On the Industry side of things: we decided to plant our own garden. We have dug up about 625 square feet of land and have tilled and are getting it ready to plant a slew of root vegetables, tomatoes, peas etc.. All things are heirloom and will be used in our store for production. This permits us to make things more accessible to our client and helps us get a sense of what is involved in getting things from our farm, to their tables.

Enough babbling. Anyone wants to check it out, we have decided to blog about the experience. Its been great so far and I can’t wait for things to start growing!

On the one hand, I keep hoping small farms WILL be fully supported the way we should and we’ll never see, say, crappy CAFO supermarket proteins, again – but on the other, I’m just about ready to strap on the old snorkel and join Cliff in spear-fishing dinner (if I wasn’t likely to die from one bite of New York harbor seafood.)

[You know, those grey squirrels are beginning to look good . . . I need to look at the Ruhlman squirrel-cooking video from last year again . . . (!)]

Still, a well-written and thoughtful piece by Barber and glad you posted it, Michael. Thought-provoking in the extreme.

As others have pointed out, he plays the small farm vs. big farm card ineffectively. Is he talking about produce and animal farms entirely, or is he lumping them into the same pot with commodity crops? Why is he using dollar values (rather than yields) when asserting that small farms are “the most productive on earth?”

And something that troubles me (both in his op-ed and increasingly in the media) is the oversimplication of “Big Agriculture.” The number of acres a farmer manages isn’t indicative of his/her environmental stewardship or energy efficiency or care of the land. Barber seems to put the 4-acre farmer on a pedestal, while villifying the 1,364 acre farmer. Why? A farmer with over 1000 acres of land (whether it’s owned or leased) isn’t a “Big” farmer by any means, especially if you’re including commodity crops in the mix.

And the part of his article that I took biggest issue with is this: “Land-grant universities and agricultural schools, dependent on financing from agribusiness, focus on maximum extraction from the land — take more, sell more, waste more.”

Wow. What a bizarre, mis-informed statement. Does Barber really think that agribusiness is brain-washing everyone but chefs and gourmets out there? Is he really serious (I had to re-read his concluding sentence multiple times) that the “future [of agriculture] belongs to the gourmet?”

Sure, I want chef voices to be heard (which, to be fair, is what I think Michael’s original post was all about), but I also want a whole lot of other stakeholders at the table.

City Council reverses foie gras ban

Posted by Dan Mihalopoulos at 2:05 p.m.

With Mayor Richard Daley running the vote, the Chicago City Council on Wednesday repealed its controversial ban on foie gras.

Over the shouted objections of Ald. Joe Moore (49th), the ban’s sponsor, the council used a parliamentary manuever to put the ordinance on the floor for a vote.

The council voted 37-6 to repeal the two-year-old ban, which critics argued had made Chicago–and the City Council–a national laughingstock.

Ald. Thomas Tunney (44th), a restaurant owner,forced the vote on the measure that prohibits restaurants in the city from serving the delicacy made from the engorged livers of ducks or geese.

Moore, whose pleas for a debate were ignored by Daley, warned fellow aldermen “tomorrow it could happen to you.

http://tinyurl.com/6ove4p