Food Readings This Week - March 31, 2010

From fair competition and market power, to finding out what’s really in our food, here’s what I read this week. The resounding message I hear is that this is an industry in flux. That makes it exciting as an entrepreneur but a bit unsettling as an eater.

“US to Enforce Antitrust in Farming, Holder Says” – Jack Kaskey, Bloomberg, March 12, 2010

“Is Organic Better? Making Sense of Organic Choices” – Julie Deardorff, Chicago Tribune, March 23, 2010

“Open Forum: Invest in the next generation of farmers” – Rebecca King, San Francisco Chronicle, March 23, 2010

“The Nutritional Superiority of Pasture Raised Animals” – Daivd Kirby, Huffington Post, March 29, 2010

“Cargill Adds Second Dairy Farm Methane-to-Power Digester" – Environmental Leader, March 29, 2010

“FDA Pressured to Combat Rising ‘Food Fraud’” – Lyndsey Layton, Washington Post, March 30, 2010

Starting the E-Food Revolution: Dispatches from SXSW Interactive

On Saturday, at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, a group of about 70 people gathered for “E-Food Revolution: Interactive Tools to Feed the World”. There were writers and activists, entrepreneurs and representatives of large companies in the group. It was great to see Cathy Erway of The Art of Eating In, as well as Leslie Hatfield and her group from GRACE Foundation who have already done a lot to bring food closer to the web. We had people from the Texas Department of Agriculture, National Geographic, and Feeding America. What a diverse and thoughtful group.

The initial discussion revolved around why food was even something we should consider at a conference about social media, entrepreneurship, and design. Concerns about hunger, food waste, and availability of healthy, fresh food were quick to hit the list of reasons. The need for education about where food comes from and what it takes to grow it, data regarding the source and practice behind our food, and the return of food to the home were also on people’s minds. The urgency of shifting a huge, entrenched system and the potential for interactive technologies to facilitate that shift illustrated the tie between the oh-so-21^st-century technology that we were immersed in all weekend and the terribly outdated food system we rely on every single day.

Why are these issues difficult to solve? The group touched on the relatively limited supply of low-impact food compared to highly processed products, the political barriers to making significant changes in crop diversity, the dependence of food production on oil (and whether peak oil also means peak food), questions about how widely sought after healthier options really are, and how necessary it is to reinstate the kitchen as the centrifugal force for a healthy lifestyle.

We also touched on the difficulty of defining the scope of this work. Is it possible to have a conversation about “the food system”, as though there is only one? I was heartened when one of the participants responded to a call for more gardening by pointing out that, while that might be good for people in the developed world, African farmers have no interest in being subsistence farmers; they want their basic needs met so that they can seek more fruitful economic opportunity. So, whose food are we really talking about – ours or everyone’s?

As the talk continued, we introduced a number of companies that are active in applying new technology to food systems. I presented SureHarvest, IBM, Earthster, and MIT-led NextLab and Sourcemap, and initiatives like Foodgeeks and Greenling all had representation in the room. These groups are using everything from software development for farmers, to open source product and supply chain mapping, to online marketplaces for sustainable food, to creative approaches to land use, as ways of promoting healthier food and agricultural systems. What I find most fascinating is that there is burgeoning activity in the food+tech field that, if it continues to grow and becomes increasingly coordinated, could have significant effects on bringing about positive changes in how we eat. As Karen Correa (with whom I am connected through both food and rock and roll) put it after the session, everyone’s just got to keep doing what they’re doing.

One of the greatest affirmations of the discussion we had came on Sunday afternoon, when Valerie Casey of the Designers Accord presented Designing a Movement: Integrating Sustainability Through Systems Thinking. She implored the audience of interactive designers and thinkers to turn their focus to the systems that are in need of change and revitalization, that human beings depend on, and that are bound to be in crisis if we continue to design around the symptoms rather than resolve the root causes of our problems.

Is technology the answer? Many in the group viewed technology as a vehicle for educating and empowering the movement. One participant described technology as being able to bring a virtual conversation to the physical world. I am intrigued by the possibility of merging the parts of the food system that are of the physical world – the ecosystems, the farmers, the soil and nutrients, with those of the digital world – the data that accompanies each decision, each crop, and each purchase. How will it be done? It’s hard to say, but the enthusiasm that this group of creative people has for reinvigorating how we eat could be transformative.

Kristof on Antibiotics

In his Op-Ed for yesterday’s New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote about the effect that antibiotics in mainstream agriculture have on human health. He cites the case of Thomas M. Dukes, who is thought to have acquired E. coli from tainted meat, and raises the flag about the dire consequences of using excessive antibiotics in raising animals for consumption. While I agree with Kristof wholeheartedly that we need to rein in our use of hormones and antibiotics in agricultural production, I believe a nuanced position is in order.

Our decisions about the food we eat would be much simpler if we could easily find out the conditions under which hormones and antibiotics were used to raise our meat. I have a really hard time accepting the argument for hormone use, but antibiotics might be a different matter. Were the animals given excessive amounts in order to promote survival under compromised conditions, or in doses that kept them well when they got sick, even though they were living on pristine pasture?

The problem is that it's hard to figure out where the threshold is between humane treatment of animals (if the cow is sick, do you let it die in the name of antibiotic-free meat, or medicate it?) and over-use in order to make more cheap meat. When the 2009 MIT Sloan Agribusiness Trek visited Missouri River Feeders in North Dakota last year, our host described why he doesn't do organic meat: if a cow isn't well, he wants to be able to use the resources he has to make it better. He wants to keep his costs as low as possible, so he makes a managerial decision about when to give an animal antibiotics (expensive stuff). Some would say he is limiting the use of antibiotics in his herd by using a cost-benefit analysis.

The other side of the argument is that because antibiotics can keep even sick cows alive, the supply of beef increases, driving down its price, and requiring feedlot managers and beef farmers to produce in greater volumes to make a profit. The picture might look something like this (note that the + and – indicate whether the variable moves in the same or opposite direction as the preceding variable, and not whether it increases or decreases).

In this depiction, when the use of antibiotics increases, animals are more likely to survive, which drives the farmer’s cost of production down, drives the price of meat down, and increases demand for meat. The increase in demand increases the farmer’s incentive to produce meat, and all else equal, increases the number of animals in meat production, which will in turn (again, all else equal) require even more use of antibiotics. In other words, by using antibiotics we may be perpetuating the market for inexpensive meat.

This isn’t the full story, though. As Kristof explains, the increased use of antibiotics is having a measurable effect on human health, creating another effect that balances demand for meat that might look something like this picture, in which the increased risk of disease associated with meat production decreases the demand for meat and reduces the incentive for farmers to produce greater and greater volumes of meat.

The point is that there is not a simple answer to whether antibiotics should or should not be used in raising animals for food, as the answer is specific to the conditions and to where the farmer and consumer fall on the spectrum of philosophies: use antibiotics to keep production up and prices down (I cringe at this one), use antibiotics sparingly and raise a healthy herd of cattle (I like this one for small producers who can’t afford to lose an animal to disease and also can’t afford organic certification), or avoid antibiotics altogether (I see this being appealing to larger producers who get a premium for their organic certification and can afford the risk of not treating sick animals).

There are market dynamics at play that help to balance the perpetual use of antibiotics to produce our food. In other words, a shift in demand for meat that is raised under healthy conditions (which in some circumstances could include use of antibiotics), could have a more sustained effect on shifting how we produce our meat than could legislation or making pat demands of large meat producers. That leaves the challenge of identifying whom we can trust to find the appropriate threshold, enforce it, and sell us beef.