Organic farmers celebrated 25 years of camaraderie recently at
the annual Eco-Farm Conference in Pacific Grove. The conference
brings together big and small growers, distributors, packers,
scientists and marketers in the organic foods industry.
”
It’s all about how the food choices we make affect both our
bodies and the world as a whole,
”
said Conference Coordinator Zea Sonnabend.
Organic farmers celebrated 25 years of camaraderie recently at the annual Eco-Farm Conference in Pacific Grove. The conference brings together big and small growers, distributors, packers, scientists and marketers in the organic foods industry.
“It’s all about how the food choices we make affect both our bodies and the world as a whole,” said Conference Coordinator Zea Sonnabend.
Put on by the Watsonville-based Ecological Farming Association, Eco-Farm is the largest sustainable agriculture conference in the west. The four day event draws more than 1,200 people from all over the world. This year’s event kicked off with farm tours to several San Benito County farms, including Paul and Leticia Hain’s organic walnuts and chicken farm in Tres Pinos and Dale Coke’s organic row crops in San Juan Bautista.
Food choices: we make them every day. Thursday’s keynote speakers, New York Times journalist Michael Pollan and ecologist Sandra Steingraber, gave talks on how the food choices we make affect not only our own bodies, but those of developing fetuses and ultimately the whole community. The session, titled “We Are What We Eat,” was a wake-up call.
Pollan pointed out that for most consumers, their involvement with agriculture is on the eating end. “Food is our most profound connection to the natural world,” Pollan said. “Our role in nature is defined by what we eat.”
As an investigative journalist for the New York Times, Pollan has written extensively on the food industry, following a steer from birth to slaughter and exploring the life cycles of plants.
“It wasn’t so long ago that you didn’t need a journalist to tell you where your food came from,” he quipped. “If you follow the nutrients back to the farm, you’ll end up in a cornfield in Iowa.”
Pollan described the increasing role that industrial corn plays in Americans’ diets. Corn – or some form of it – is in just about everything we eat. Not to criticize the plant – he extolled its virtues, in fact. Pollan’s point was to show that our food choices are heavily influenced by federal food policies that pay $4 billion a year in subsidies to grow huge amount of corn. The plant is processed into everything from corn sweeteners – read the label on anything in your refrigerator and you’ll see ‘high fructose corn syrup’ listed – to feed for livestock and ethanol.
The French fries at McDonald’s are cooked in corn oil, which accounts for half of their fat content. Pollan went on to link the overproduction of corn to the overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, which seep into our waterways, polluting groundwater and eventually the Gulf of Mexico.
His solution? Change federal farm policies to encourage the reduction of corn consumption. Convert the 80 million-acre corn monoculture of the Midwest into a diverse patchwork of well-managed pastures for livestock and other crops. The country would be healthier for it and save itself billions in subsidies paid to farmers.
Ecologist, author and mother Sandra Steingraber picked up where Pollan left off and described how pesticides and the overuse of fertilizers have threatened the most vulnerable members of society: developing babies. A cancer survivor herself, Steingraber has done extensive research on the environmental links to cancer and reproductive health.
“A mother’s body is the first environment,” Steingraber said. Her talk was a beautiful tribute to her father, who died last week. She missed his memorial service to speak at the conference, assuring her audience that he would have expected her to keep her commitment. A staunch Republican with whom she differed on many issues, Steingraber’s father and she found common ground in their love of gardening. Their mutual respect and support for the organic food movement was a bonding force between father and daughter.
Steingraber’s eloquent description of her own experience as a new mother summed up, for me, the connection between responsible land management and community health. As ranchers, my husband Joe and I manage watersheds crucial to the health of this community.
As she was leaving her obstetrician’s office after examining a vial of her amniotic fluid, Steingraber recalled being told to “Drink plenty of water.”
“Drink plenty of water. Before it is baby pee, amniotic fluid is water. I drink water, and it becomes blood plasma, which suffuses through the amniotic sac and surrounds the baby – who also drinks it. And what is it before that? Before it is drinking water, amniotic fluid is the creeks and rivers that fill reservoirs. It is the underground water that fills wells. And before it is creeks and rivers and groundwater, amniotic fluid is rain. When I hold in my hands a tube of my own amniotic fluid, I am holding a tube full of raindrops.
“Amniotic fluid is also the juice of oranges that I had for breakfast, and the milk that I poured over my cereal, and the honey I stirred into my tea. It is inside the green cells of spinach leaves and the damp flesh of apples. It is the yolk of an egg. When I look at amniotic fluid, I am looking at rain falling on orange groves. I am looking at melon fields, potatoes in wet earth, frost on pasture grasses. The blood of cows and chickens is in this tube. The nectar gathered by bees and hummingbirds is in this tube. Whatever is inside hummingbird eggs is also inside my womb. Whatever is in the world’s water is here in my hands,” Steingraber said.
