pigs

A Delicious Sampling of Great Green Food Stories of 2008

scleaver — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The holidays are behind us now, and reflecting on 2008 (and what a year!) here are my top ten headlines from the RiverWired food blog (posted in order of appearance, starting in January):

1. Creative and ultimately delicious, Apple Farmer Uses Pigs Instead of Pesticides in January.

2. At last, help at the grocery store in Finally! A Guide to Eating Green.

3. The downer cow scandal breaks as Hallmark/Westland Goes to Congress.

4. Fish headlines started with Where Have All the Salmon Gone? back in March. The headlines continued in June (SOS: Save Our Salmon) and October (Seafood Delight).

5. Looking to the future, in the spring we were Building The Doomsday Vault -- Seeds to Save the Human Race. The seed bank is still growing and, according to the Chicago Tribune needs help with funding heading into 2009.

6. You know green is big when fast food companies join in: The Golden Green Arches?

7. This year, we learned about the impact of our food choices, from soup to nuts: Saving The World One Plate At A Time.

8. From organic to hormones in milk to hamburger meat, labels were big this year (see September’s: A Real Hamburger Helper).

9. But, once the bad financial headlines started rolling in, saving money at the grocery store became increasingly important. Hence November’s The Economics of Organics

10. And, our opinion was solicited again and again this year, on milk, corn, and more. The latest: The Department of Ag Wants Your Opinion on GE corn.

What headlines do you think were most important? Did I miss any?

Image from Stephanie Cleaver.

The Whole Hog

scleaver — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:04:19 -0400

The blog post about Pigs As Pesticides has gotten quite a response. So, in the spirit of Porky, Babe, Wilbur, here’s more news in the world of pigs.

Handel’s Hog Heaven

Pigs, it seems, are not below a dose of culture. Nguyen Chi Cong plays classical symphonies and sonatas on his pig farm every morning and afternoon, first for the workers, now for the 3,000 pigs. Cong has raised pigs outside of Ho Chi Min city in Vietnam for 22 years and is convinced that the music soothes the pigs, which means they eat more and gain weight faster. “I think I am the first farmer in Vietnam to apply this technique,” he told PigProgress.net an international pig farming organization. Considering that we’re using growth hormone to get cows to do the same thing—namely fatten up—perhaps pig farmers (and dairy farmers for that matter) should take note.

Pretend Pork

In the future we may not be eating pork, ham, pig, at all. New York Times recently reported that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has put up $1 million for the person who can figure out how to make “commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.” The scariest part of this challenge isn’t what might come out of those test tubes and Petri dishes but the fact that, according to New Harvest, a non-profit “dedicated to advancing meat substitutes,” said “because meat substitutes are produced under controlled conditions impossible to maintain in traditional animal farms, they can be safer, more nutritious, less polluting and more humane than conventional meat.”

Hold on—test tube pork chops are healthier than those that were raised on a farm? Maybe we’re addressing the wrong problem here. I know this is from PETA and an advocacy organization, but when someone can reasonably say that scientifically produced meat is healthier than farm raised because of pollution and farming practices, it seems like it might be a bit easier to change how we do our farming (let the pigs root in the mud instead of keeping them stuck in tight pens, use environmentally friendly waste management, etc) than running to science.

Image from the News section of PigProgress.net

Apple Farmer Uses Pigs Instead of Pesticides

scleaver — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Jim Koan is doing something revolutionary on his Flushing, MI farm. Or, is he? Instead of using pesticides to rid his orchard of a pest, Koan is going old school and using pigs.

Koan’s 120-acre apple farm in has been plagued by the Plum Curculio Beetle that lays its eggs in apples and makes the fruit drop too early from trees. He could have used frequent sprays of pesticides for years to get rid of the beetles, or he could use pigs. (He tried chickens and guineas, but they weren’t hard enough workers and the guineas were taken away by hawks. He contemplated sheep, too, but in the end hard-working pigs, too big for any hawk or coyote to steal, were the best bet.) Now he has a group of pigs who shuffle through the orchards when the apples infected with beetles start to fall. They eat the apples and the eggs that would have spelled disaster for next year’s crop, and clear the ground and eat weeds in the process. The pigs make short work of an apple orchard, eating every last contaminated apple. And, bonus: once the pigs have solved the beetle problem, Koan plans to sell them as organic pork.

The Detroit Free Press reported on Koan’s farm on January 28, 2008. I like this story for a few reasons. First, I like the image of pigs rooting around apple trees in Michigan, especially when juxtaposed with the image of tractors driving through the same field spraying pesticides on low-hanging Golden Delicious fruit. And, I like the idea of using pigs when it comes to my own health and the nutrition in my food.

To give you an idea of where pesticides fit into life today: in a 2005 report, the Centers for Disease Control found that toxins used in pesticides (neurotoxic pyrethroids) were found in people’s blood and the Environmental Working Group discovered that developing fetuses are born with an average 200 toxic chemicals inside them (taken from The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved by Sandor Katz). Some of theses toxins ended up in bloodstreams, not because anyone was chugging chemical waste, but because they were eating apples, pears, lettuce, and other fruits and vegetables that had been coated with pesticides as part of the ‘growing process.’

So, revolutionary or not, pigs are a refreshing idea.