Making Hay

Alexandria the Green!

 

by Gene

This week, Alexandria, Virginia became the second U.S. city to enact a Green Foods Resolution, which promotes the consumption of more healthful, plant-based foods, grown locally and sustainably. Given Alexandria’s proximity to Washington, D.C., its action could help raise awareness and advance the thinking of federal policy makers. Across the U.S., citizens are beginning to recognize the critical importance of making more thoughtful and sensible food choices, and Green Foods Resolutions are a positive result of that awareness.

The factory farming system thrives as long as our nation continues its atrocious eating habits, which are laden with meat, dairy and eggs. Our food choices have profound impacts, and the deleterious consequences of eating so many animal products are becoming increasingly clear. The risk of succumbing to the top two causes of death in the U.S., heart disease and cancer, can be lowered by eating plants instead of animals. And eating whole plant foods, including fruits and vegetables, can help combat obesity, which has become epidemic across the U.S. In addition to threatening our health, factory farming subjects billions of animals to intolerable suffering, depletes scarce natural resources, pollutes the environment and destroys the well-being and integrity of rural communities.

It is critical to push for food policy reform in our nation’s capitol, but congressional action often follows movement at the community level, and that’s why I’m so hopeful about the impacts of Green Foods Resolutions. Concerned citizens and policy makers in Alexandria are to be commended for taking action and calling for a more sustainable and healthful food system. You can follow suit by introducing a Green Foods Resolution in your local community today!

Moving Forward Into the Past

By Gene

 

Last month I had the opportunity to speak at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. I enjoyed my time there with professors and students who are exploring positive changes in our food system, and it was also great to visit with dedicated activists and Farm Sanctuary supporters in the area. I had amazing vegan meals both on campus and off, including at a restaurant called Tofu House. Given its name, I assumed this was a vegetarian restaurant, but I saw dishes with beef, pork and chicken on the menu. I asked if these were veggie meats, but was told they were not. I almost walked out, but ultimately decided to stay.

It turned out that Tofu House was a Korean restaurant. Before the main course, I was served several bowls with kimchi (a traditional Korean dish), bean sprouts, vegetables, grains, and legumes. I thoroughly enjoyed the meal, which was very healthy and reminded me about the wisdom embodied by traditional foods. For millennia, civilizations around the world have survived and flourished on plant foods.

In recent years, citizens in affluent countries like the U.S. have been eating too many animal foods, and we are now seeing the resulting health problems, including higher rates of heart disease, cancer and obesity. Now, there is a growing interest in eating better: Fast food restaurants are offering salads and at least one (Burger King) sells a veggie burger. The meat and dairy industries’ influence on the National School Lunch Program is starting to be questioned. Farmers markets, community gardens and home gardens are sprouting up everywhere. We are in the midst of a burgeoning food movement.

It is common for people to incorrectly assume that eliminating animal products from their diet will limit how they eat. However, when people choose to go vegan, their food options typically expand and include many international foods that they hadn’t tried before. That was certainly my experience. In the U.S., groups of immigrants have brought interesting and varied food traditions from every corner of the globe, and most of them are centered on plant foods. Along with a vegetarian restaurant, there are a number of establishments, including Japanese, Indian and Lebanese ones, with many vegan options within walking distance of my house in College Park, Maryland. Eating vegan is easier than ever.

As we choose foods that nourish our bodies, we often find ourselves returning to dishes that have sustained humans for generations. As we go forward, there is much we can learn from our past.

A New Decade and Reason for Hope

By Gene

 

The first decade of this millennium has been marked by stark contrasts. Industrialized animal farming continued to expand and gain control over an ever greater share of the marketplace, and the number of animals exploited for food in the U.S. increased steadily, reaching 10 billion per year. At the same time, there’s been growing public awareness and unprecedented opposition to the waste, inefficiency and abuses of animal agriculture. While agribusiness spends billions of dollars to sell its products, bestselling books like "Skinny Bitch" and "Eating Animals" have exposed millions to the harms of factory farming for the first time.

At the beginning of the last decade, no U.S. law existed to prohibit cruel confinement systems, like veal crates, gestation crates and battery cages. In fact, most state anti-cruelty laws exempted farm animals from basic humane protections. But, over the past decade, some states took action to outlaw common factory farming cruelties. Two states passed laws to ban battery cages (CA, MI), five passed laws to ban veal crates (AZ, CA, CO, ME, MI), and seven passed laws to ban gestation crates (AZ, CA, CO, FL, OR, ME, MI). Responding to growing public pressure, Smithfield, the world’s largest pork producer, pledged to phase out gestation crates (2–foot-wide metal enclosures where female breeding pigs are confined for years). We have a long way to go, but as the new decade dawns, we are poised to see additional laws and policies enacted to prevent cruel factory farming practices.

The last decade started with Farm Sanctuary suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to compel the agency to prohibit the marketing and slaughter of downed animals (animals who are too sick or injured even to stand) for human food. By the end of the decade, the Obama administration had locked in a federal ban on slaughtering downed cattle for human food. A similar ban should be enacted to apply to pigs and other species.

The Obama family recently planted an organic vegetable garden at the White House to encourage children to eat more fruits and vegetables, and the USDA established a community garden, dubbed "The People’s Garden," at its headquarters in the nation’s capital. I recently moved to Washington, D.C. to further our work with policy makers to protect animals, consumers and the environment, and promote plant-based agriculture.

We are in the midst of a growing food movement, and I am optimistic about the coming decade. As agribusiness interests convene for meetings to discuss ways to defend their practices, compassionate citizens are picking up steam. Scientists and researchers at leading universities and institutions are issuing reports that decry the many harms of animal agriculture.

At the end of the last decade, for the first time in generations, the USDA’s year-end records showed that the number of animals killed for food in the U.S. dropped. Let’s hope that this is the beginning of a solid trend, along with the increasing number of farmer’s markets, community supported agriculture programs and community gardens across the U.S. We have a long way to go, but there is definitely reason for hope.