How Much Water Does it Take to Make a Latte? A Lot

There's an interesting thread I blogged on over at Beyond Green about the amount of water in a latte. How much? Over 200 liters for one cup, according to WWF (via Marc Gunther's blog.)

Does this mean we should stop drinking lattes? No, but it does mean we should start thinking more intelligently about water usage. One commenter mentioned that the data requires no action. That's true on the consumer level perhaps, but awareness and knowledge breeds action upstream with producers.

Image source: Economist

White House Garden by this Summer?

Neil Hamilton, a law professor long active in the local food movement, predicts that the White House will have a vegetable garden by this summer.

"I believe that by this summer there will be a garden – another garden,a vegetable garden – on the White House lawn,” Hamilton said at a weekend legal seminar at Yale University.

If he's right, a lot of activists and foodies - from Alice Waters on down - will be quite happy. My only question is who the farmer in chief will be and whether the Obamas will upset the produce industry by going organic.

My guess: the garden will use "sustainable," low-input practices, but won't be fully organic to side-step the issue. But either way, it will be a boon for the community garden movement in this nation, showing that it ain't real hard to grow your own greens, tomatoes, peppers and okra.

So what unusual variety should the Obamas grow? My vote is for the long Asian cucumber and would suggest that Sooyow Nishiki variety sold at Kitazawa Seed Company. Sweet and prolific, one cuke can make a nice lunch salad.

A Quiet Wave Building -- Food Insecurity

Poverty hardly ever makes the news, though it's getting harder to ignore these days, with the rise in unemployment and loss of 1.3 million jobs in the first 10 months of the year. The national unemployment rate is 6.5 percent, though for people 25 and older without a high school diploma -- a heavily low income group -- it is already about 10.3 percent and economists talk about the jobless rate peaking a full year from now.

All of which means "food insecurity" is growing. That bland term describes people who don't have enough to eat, never mind the good healthy food the readers of this blog aspire to. In a good summary, the Nation's editor, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, writes:

According to the USDA's annual report on food security, nearly one ineight Americans struggled with hunger in 2007 -- which means "36.2 million adults and children... didn't have the money or assistance to get enough food to maintain active, healthy lives." 691,000 children "suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat" -- a more than 50 percent increase from 2006 and the highest number since 1998.

Now, non-profits are running thin on donations and food banks are getting low -- precisely the scenario food activist Mark Winne presented in his recent interview with me. He elaborates his position in a recent blog post, saying the solution is not a dramatic increase in charity but rather a dramatic decrease in poverty at the root of food insecurity.

Hopefully the stimulus program under discussion by the Obama transition team and on Capitol Hill will do just that -- create jobs not just bailouts -- and not a moment too soon.

Meanwhile, if you want to see what's happening to the white collar workforce check out this chart of fourth quarter layoffs over at the WSJ blog Real Time Economics.

- Samuel Fromartz

Cash from Fish Trash

A friend alterted me to this story about an organic fertilizer start-up, Pacific Gro, which was founded by Jim Brackins four years ago, when he was 67.

He gets fish waste from seafood companies in Seattle that typically utilize, at best, 52% of the fish carcass. The remainder -- the guts, gills, skin, bones, fat and scales -- goes into the garbage, but rather than waste them Brackins picks the stuff up. “The name of the game in the industry is 100 percentutilization,” he is quoted as saying. “Everybody wants and strives to use 100 percent of the resource so there is no waste."

The article explains how he processes the fish waste into fertilizer then sells it to organic and conventional farmers.

Pacific Gro’s wet organic fish fertilizer is being used on 70,000 acres of Idaho farmland and Brackins recently secured a contract with Horizon Organic Dairy, the country’s largest organic dairy, in Twin Falls, Idaho. In 2009, Brackins will process 6.5 million pounds of fish waste, enough for 650,000 gallons of fertilizer, and hopes to expand his acreage by 25 percent.

This reminded me of another story I recently read that took a new look at China's oft-sited pollution troubles. It mentioned how greening is being viewed as a business opportunity and told the story of China's "Queen of Trash," Cheung Yan, reputed to be the nation's richest woman.

Ten years ago, when China stopped logging its own natural forests to prevent a recurrence of big floods, she anticipated a paper shortage. She went to the U.S. and drove around in an old pick-up begging municipal garbage dumps to sell her their waste paper. She was so successful that today her company, Nine Dragons, ships more than 6 million ton of waste paper a year into China, which she recycles into boxes for electronics goods that will be taking the next container ship back to Europe and North America. Nine Dragons is now the world’s largest manufacturer of packaging.

Talk about cash from trash. Notwithstanding the debate over packaging, the point is: there is no waste -- only a resource stream -- and to those that see waste as a resource belong the spoils.
- Samuel Fromartz

image: flickr photo

McKibben on Obama and Climate Change

Environment 360 has a provocative piece by Bill McKibben on Obama, politics, and climate change. Definitely worth a read. Here's the quick take aways:

What it all boils down to is: The bills are coming due. And not just, or even mainly, the bills from a failed Bush presidency, but the bills from 200 years of burning fossil fuel. Twenty years agowhen we started worrying about global warming, we thought we'd have a generation to pay those bills off. But we were wrong — the planet was more finely balanced than we'd realized. The melting Arctic is the call from the repo man.

Any hope of succeeding will require Obama to grasp, deep in his guts, the fact that climate, energy, food, and the economy are now hopelessly intertwined, and that trying to solve any one of these problems without taking on the others simply makes all of them worse....

....The political reality goes like this: George W. Bush was so terrible on this issue that the bar has been set incredibly low — Obama will get all the political points he needs with fairly minimal effort. Doing what actually needs to be done will be politically…unpopular isn't even the word. It might well wreck his political future, because it would involve — directly or indirectly — raising the cost of continuing to live as we do right now.

Thoughts on the President-Elect

I am extremely hopeful about the new presidency of Barack Obama. Hopeful, because the nation is fighting two wars that need resolution. Hopeful, because the economy needs stewardship to lead us out of a morass of debt and financial opportunism that reigned for a decade. And hopeful, because Obama has the promise of bringing together a nation.

Now this blog is about food, but what is food without culture, without polity, without a decent house and extended family around the table? Obama’s campaign more than anything was about how we relate to each other as a nation in order to make the promise of this nation work.

To be sure, Obama has challenges, major challenges, and like most candidates, we don’t necessarily know what he’s going to do to address them. Nor do we really know in our corner of the world whether sustainable agriculture, organic agriculture, farmers markets, healthy food, and food justice will now get the attention they deserve. But again, I am hopeful, because Obama is at least aware of these issues; he has read Michael Pollan, and presumably is aware of the folly of programs like ethanol subsides, as this industry implodes, despite his past support of them.

Government will likely take a bigger role -- it already has in the financial crisis-management of a Republican incumbent -- but it could also get smarter, far smarter. It could better harness markets so that they work towards social good, create incentives for clean energy and green jobs and green agriculture, and deal head on with the most fundamental issue facing the human race: climate change. In a more immediate sense, he could take leadership in a way that's been notably missing and begin to untangle the housing mess at the root of the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

The answer to all these problems isn’t just more government, as the Democrats have learned, but a government that sets the playing field, writes the rules and umpires the game as markets do their work. In the past administration, government was hands off in the most irresponsible fashion -- something that even Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted -- or hands-on in an unbalanced, even unfair way. What we need now is not a government that picks winners and losers and works for big lobbies, but rather sets the parameters for environmental goals and then unleashes markets to reach them. What Al Gore is calling sustainable capitalism. This is vital, because as he notes, nature does not do bailouts.

Will this happen? I don't know. But given Obama’s remarks, and perhaps more importantly, his bearing, I am more hopeful than I’ve been in any recent election. Let change begin.

- Samuel Fromartz

Now for your viewing pleasure, the Pointer Sisters, "Yes We Can Can"

Slow Food .... Slow Blogging

Photo: From Slow Food Nation page on Flickr

It's been nearly two weeks now since returning from Slow Food Nation in San Francisco and I haven't had a minute to digest my thoughts. The food, though, was long ago digested, pleasantly.

By now you've probably read the media (to pick just one article) and blogs (here, here, here and here) on the event, seen some of the videos of the panels, or just caught a passing reference to what went down in the city's Civic Center. It was quite a bash, crowded with people, food, and thought. I participated in a "changemakers day" session that brought non-profits, business people and farmers, many of them from California, to discuss altering the way food is grown, distributed, sold, and eaten.

Outside the auditorium and conference rooms, the action was unfolding on the plaza, with alluring aromas and a very wonderful garden. An official at the city's environment department told me that normally this was just a lawn, but repurposed into a garden, people were finally inhabiting the space. Yes, gardens are inviting. The city was considering keeping it there, if the idea could make it through bureaucratic hurdles.

There were food stands on one side of the plaza and an impromtu farmers' market on the other, with the garden inbetween. I scarfed down sausage and peppers (just shy of the requisite grease you might find in NYC), an Asian pork noodle dish, grass fed beef hot dogs, and fruit from the farm stands (one of the best peaches of the year). All of it tasty. Not frozen, packaged, or precooked, but the real deal. My only complaint was the lack of whole grains, beans or veggies. They seemed consigned to show off in the garden and farmers' market.

Another slight beef -- the pace of Slow Food. Spying a dish of hand pulled noodles, I asked someone where he had purchased it. He pointed to a stand. "We waited 60 minutes to get it, but it's very good!" he said optimistically.

Demand for this type of food, that is, good, home-made food, far exceeds the supply -- and that was evident even in these wonderful small food tents. But I feared that people unfamiliar with Slow Food would literally end up thinking that the term described the time it took to get the food rather than the values behind it. ("Oh, that's why it's called slow food!")

As for the public seminars, the ones I attended were quite good and thought provoking. The Slow Food movement is at something of a turning point, trying to redefine itself beyond the gastronomic ghetto which for too many just means rarified and expensive foods. That isn't what Slow Food is about -- it is a movement based on a political premise of good, clean, fair food -- but that political message at times gets lost in the very well-made sauce. Again, because the sauce is hand-made with love.

Eric Schlosser, the Fast Food Nation author, brought this up, when he implored the audience to recognize the workers in the fields and kitchens. Vandana Shiva, the Indian food activist, also repeatedly tried to draw the connections between what was happening in the wealthy northern hemisphere and what was happening in the poorer south. So the sentiment, the acknowledgment of the social dimension of food choices was clearly there, but it was a message brought up by “us” about “them” -- the "them" being those who did not appear at the gathering.

Could Essayist Wendell Berry’s call for a more “neighborly” approach, in which everyone in a community helps each other, widen the circle? Slow Food clearly had this issue in mind, as evident in this background essay by organizer Anya Fernald at the Slow Food Nation blog, but it still has more work to be done.

"We’re Eating Oil”

One theme that ran through the talks was the dead-end of the modern farm agro-economy. Michael Pollan, being Michael Pollan, distilled this thought by saying “we’re eating oil.”  The entire food economy has been built on cheap oil, and if that changed, so too would farming and food. Oil and natural gas are used to make the fertilizers, run the machinery and distribute food globally.

The other variable out there is global warming. Here, Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Kansas pointed out  that the rise in temperature might not be the biggest factor in climate change. Rather, it might be the unpredictability of weather. In the Midwest, it was the rains, which right now are coming very powerfully and washing away top soil and leaching fertilizers into the Mississippi river and the Gulf of Mexico. Rain might make the Dust Bowl look tame in comparison since water is a far more powerful in pulling away soil than wind. And wind, you'll recall, picked up top soil off the prairie and darkened the midday skies of New York City in the 1930s.

Not a happy thought. But I'll leave you with this, the flip side of Slow Food that is very easy to digest. I think I might have had the best pizza I've ever eaten over at the Taste Pavilions. And ditto for the ice cream. I think the idea here is that the same values producing this food are the ones that will keep food production close at hand, working with taste and nature, and preventing the dust (or rain) bowls of the future. I'm not sure that message came with the ice cream but it was there if you took in the full circle of the experience.

- Samuel Fromartz

3 Steps Toward Sustainable Food

I wrote this piece for the premier issue of Edible Los Angeles, which debuted this summer. It's long but relevant to this weekend's Slow Food Nation celebration in San Francisco. Hope to see you there.

By Samuel Fromartz

It was fall, the weather was turning cool, and I was getting desperate. I called around, quietly looking for a dealer. Then one Sunday, I ran into Eric over at the farmers’ market in Dupont Circle.

“So, you got any good shit?”

“Sure, but you got to come get it.”

The old story. The dealer never came to you. You had to go to the dealer.

But, then again, we’re talking about a lot of shit. A pick-up full, in fact. For if my community garden plot in the city was going to perk up in the spring, if I was going to get those fist-sized Chiogga beets and tender Russian kale, I had to work a pile of well-aged manure into the ground. And yes, this would be good, mind-blowing stuff, not skanky shit in a plastic bag. It was from a real farm, with real animals that ate real grass, and then sat, like fine wine, as it mellowed. Eric had it. In fact, he had so much he was willing to give it away. As long as we could come in a truck and get it.

I felt like I was working the back channels to keep my garden going, but then it’s not easy growing your own food in the city—as so many locavores are now finding out. Still, it was well worth it, because by going local, as in six-block-local, I was completing the third step in forging a connection with my food.

Over the years, organic wasn’t enough. Local wasn’t enough. I had to get my hands dirty and grow my own.

It wasn’t as if I set out with a plan, or a program, though I now realize it’s all part of a natural progression (I won’t go so far as to say “purpose,” but maybe it’s that too) from Whole Foods to the farmers market to the garden.

The initial spark came when I found myself routinely jockeying for a parking spot in the Whole Foods parking lot. Consumers like me were clearly responding to something being sold here and I wanted to find out what it was. Sticker shock did nothing to dissuade my purchases— if anything, it enhanced them because I saw real value, not cost.

And from there, in search of ever more quality local and organic produce, I ended up at the farmers’ market and quickly became a devotee.

Looking into the evolution of my personal impulses, I saw I wasn’t alone—like others, I was responding to something in the air that morphed good food, fresh produce, organics, and the farmers’ face into a movement and an industry. That became the focus of my book, Organic Inc., but flying around the country visiting farms just whet my appetite.

Seeing so many people grow so much food in so many places made me think, “I could do this!” I signed up for a plot at a new community garden inWashington, D.C., just as I was wearily finishing my 300-plus page manuscript.

With farmers’ markets bursting with seasonal produce, you might rightfully ask, “Why even try?” I mean, local and organic seem to be everywhere. There are many reasons not to, especially in the city. I could list what’s going against you, from getting a garden plot itself (which, in one of my two locations, took 8 years), to preparing the tired soil littered with brick and concrete, to battling wire-like weeds, to engaging, in near hand-to-hand combat, the counterinsurgency of rats. Then, you must be Zen about food theft.

Plus, it takes time. I’m not a trustifarian. I’ve got a real, if self-designed, job, with too many projects, and a demanding family life, but I take the time to grow food because it feeds me in a lot of ways. In fact, I don’t even view growing food as “food production” per se but rather as a way to take my hands off the MacBook and put them in the soil, to spend precious time with my daughter, and while away the twilight hours as the cars whiz by over the nearby freeway. By doing this, you opt out of any food “system,” whether industrial, or agrarian. You become your own food system (as least so far as your veggies go).

The only downside of this ultra-local move is that it produces an ensuing syndrome, which I call Farmers Market Guilt. I depended on farmers who were my friends—who I once bought copious amounts of food from, to the tune of $50 a week—for advice to grow my own.

They willingly emailed local planting schedules and tips on beating bugs, preparing the soil, building a compost pile, growing seedlings and all the rest. In fact, their advice proved so profitable that I no longer visited them at the farmers’ market! When I admitted my guilt about that, one of my farmer friends said simply, “I’ve got a lot of other people to buy my vegetables” and left it at that. He knew most people weren’t going to get down in the dirt.

Which is okay. Because sustainability is not a series of steps, or a program or list of procedures. There’s not one way to get it right. Fred Kirschenmann, a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Iowa, speaks of sustainability as a philosophy or consciousness. Local may be a part of that; so too organics.

And people enter the continuum at various points: whether buying a few organic food items at the supermarket, becoming a regular at farmers’ markets, or looking for a well-aged pile of shit for their garden.

What’s next? I’ve been intrigued by the way Alaska has managed its fisheries, so that there’s a plentiful and sustainable supply. Maybe it’s worth a visit up there. I’m also curious about the way oyster farms actually filter and clean seawater and provide a stellar seafood product. “Maybe we should start an oyster farm,” I said to my wife the other day as we finished up dinner. She just looked at me, as usual, amused. 

© Samuel Fromartz 2008, reproduction for personal or non-commercial use only

Will the Economic Bust Stifle Organic Food?

By Samuel Fromartz

When the commodity boom and rising food prices took hold last year, optimists argued that this might cause people to switch to organic and sustainable foods, because the premium was no longer so high compared with mass market fare.

I was skeptical of the argument then, and even more so now. There are ample signs that consumers are cutting back in the face of a slumping economy and if anything, downsizing to discount retailers that skew towards cheaper food. Sales of Spam are growing. The more committed organic food shoppers will always be there, but much larger number of dabblers are scaling back, unable to see the real value above the cost. 

At Whole Foods, which has built a business on sustainable, organic and high quality perishable foods, sales growth is at a historic low, leading the company to cut back on new store openings and eliminate its quarterly dividend. Executives are emphasizing its value products, many sold under the 365 store brand, and trying to shake its Whole Paycheck image.

I can see why they are concerned. I was shopping in the Whole Foods store in Denver last Sunday in the middle of the day, before heading up to the mountains with the family. Last year, when I was in the same store in Cherry Creek on the exact same weekend, I recall it was bustling. This year, there were fewer shoppers, the aisles sparse.

In contrast, the Whole Foods Markets in Washington, D.C., are still crowded on the weekend to the point of discomfort. But DC or New York City -- where a high number of shoppers don’t drive at all -- might be the exception.

In an interview in May, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey pointed out that people were driving less, which meant fewer trips to the store. What shoppers seem to be maintaining, or even increasing, are buying trips to discounters -- hence the single-digit sales gains at big box retailers like Costco. (Wal-Mart, which has cut food prices in the face of the slowing economy, is also doing well, though I don’t view them in the same retail universe as Whole Foods. Costco likely has greater overlap).

Whole Foods is not unusual on the retail landscape since many companies are experiencing a sales slowdown, or worse. But the more interesting question is what this means for all the grass-fed beef ranchers, artisan cheese makers, organic produce farmers and even organic dairy farmers. Are their products now viewed as a “luxury” that must now be economized out of the family budget? Is this a road bump in the real food movement, or a more fundamental end of the road?

Right now, I’d argue it’s a road bump, though it's uncertain how long or how big the series of bumps will be. The length, depth and vast impact of this current credit-infused economic downturn is unknown. The wisest assessment I’ve heard is that no one knows, because the financial engine of the economy -- banks, insurance companies, mortgage companies, and the like -- keep surprising on the downside with ever increasing credit losses. If the finance companies don’t know the depth of their losses, evident by the repeated quarterly write-offs they take, how can anyone pretend to know when the worst will be over? Or to put it in simple turns, how can anyone predict how large the mortgage bust will be and what will be left when it's over.

This is a horrendous climate for any company but look at the long-term trends. I’ve repeatedly stated that organic foods, sustainable foods, farmers’ markets, and the like, are not a fad. They have only been growing against a troubling drumbeat of news about food safety and health. There is ever growing awareness about rising obesity, tainted food, and what we’re actually putting down our gullets. This supra-economic food trend is evident in everything from the nutritional information now demanded on New York City menus to the fear of imported food from China. Cheap, we know, has a price, and more than a few of us are unwilling to pay it regardless of our shrinking family budgets.

Do you think the questions about where food comes from, how it’s produced, and what it’s doing to our bodies, or more importantly, our kids bodies, will suddenly disappear because we are now more budget-conscious?

You can actually make a convincing counter-argument that values become more important in tough economic times. You jettison the superfluous in favor of what’s really important -- and for some, that might be humanely raised meat rather than premium cable-TV. If you must economize, you might peruse 101 Cookbooks for a great tofu or soba noodle recipe rather than throw in the towel and buy industrially raised meat or pesticide-laden foreign farmed shrimp. 

Local foods present a good case. As consumers grow more concerned about the economy and the foreign provenance of foods, local will become more pertinent. Just as in 9/11, when restaurant sales dipped in favor of home-cooked meals, local food might well see a long boom in the face of growing economic pressures. In tougher times, sure, people want to economize but they also huddle closer to one another, want to connect to and help their local communities, and support their farmers. Community provides solace, and what better way to define community than around food.

In an interesting case in Petaluma, California (about 90 minutes north of San Francisco), an inventive non-profit called Petaluma Bounty started an urban organic farm and a series of community gardens to produce food for low-income people. Now it is gleaning fruit from trees growing in people’s backyards -- 20 tons of it that would have rotted on the ground -- and distributed it to food pantries. This work connects locally produced organic food with a larger social mission in tough economic times.

So sure, in a tough economy, consumers will scale down and look for ways to save money. They might cut out superfluous purchases, like the $4 afternoon latte, $5 chocolate bar, or grass-fed T-bone steak. They might spend more at big box discounters. More recent dabblers in organic and sustainable foods -- who don’t really get the compelling reasons for buying this food -- may decide it’s an unafforable luxury.

But the worst mistake retailers and sustainable foods companies can make right now is too lose their sense of their mission and alienate the core customers who do get the argument, who do find real value in this food and who are economizing  in other areas of the household budget in order to buy it.

These core shoppers, many of who are young, well educated, but on tight budgets, are looking for ways to save money too. Who doesn’t like a sale for organic or grass-fed ground beef or a 79 cent can of organic black beans? But they are not going to economize at the expense of deeply held values. The case for sustainable food is simply too strong. They might look for more affordable options, but they are not jettisoning their deeply held values.

Neither will the smarter companies in this business as they batten down the hatches and ride out the storm. They will stand out from the perhaps less-committed companies who got in, like so many companies nowadays, for a touch of the green aura. Those wannabes will be the first to exit, concerned about a shrinking consumer base and fears about fading fads. Let them go. They never understood what this was all about in the first place, which is about changing the food we eat and the way it's produced.

Those values -- and the trends driving them -- will be around long after this shake out is over.

Doing Slow Food Nation

The Woodstock of food? For those who will be at Slow Food Nation in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend, I will be conducting a panel on Friday in the Changemakers Day series. This high-level, engaging event will focus on money and change: what food business brings to the sustainability table.

On board for the panel are Rick Schneiders, CEO of Sysco Food; Walter Robb, President of Whole Foods Market; Fedele Bauccio, CEO of Bon Appetit Management Co; and Woody Tasch, chairman of Investors Circle. Although not up yet on the Web site, it's being held Friday, August 29, from 1-2:30 p.m. Although this event is reserved for practitioners, there are limited public tickets available too.

- Samuel Fromartz

Behind the Green Chef

When I interviewed Michael Oshman of the Green Restaurant Association (GRA) recently for a Wall Street Journal story, he mentioned that the restaurant industry is the largest consumer of electricity in the U.S. retail sector. It also accounts for half the food budget of the average American. No doubt that's a hefty footprint, but good restaurateurs are known for being nimble, and can adapt changes quickly.

While menu-boasting of shade grown organic coffee or juicy grass-fed burgers topped with local artisanal cheese is often the easiest way to identify a restaurant that’s going green, the real impact comes from changes in the back of the house.

Oshman estimates that the installation of two high efficiency hand dryers – one each restroom – will cost $1,415, but can provide an annual savings of $2,651 and reduce 1,620 pounds of paper towels waste. The installation of a high-efficiency gas-fired charbroiler vs. a conventional one can save 10 metric tons of CO2 equivalent.

Chef Jose Duarte, of Taranta in Boston, recently embraced his inner greenness and certified his restaurant in October 2007. Since then, he’s converted his truck to run on fryer oil, offers a wine list that’s organic, biodynamic and sustainable, composts food scraps, and has a full-scale recycling program. Duarte estimates that he’s reduced 80 metric tons (176,370 pounds) of carbon dioxide a year by making changes to his operations. That’s roughly equivalent to taking 180 cars off the road annually.

But what’s interesting -- with all the changes he’s made, he’s just now starting to look at sourcing his food locally. It’s not easy to do year-round in New England, but I would have thought that would be higher up on the to-do list, since it’s a change that’s so visible to customers. But then again, maybe it’s not all about the marketing.
– Clare Leschin-Hoar

Agriculture v. Oceanculture

Bonnie Powell had a great post at Ethicurean summing up the sustainability theme at the Cooking for Solutions conference we attended last week, and rather than regurgitate it (really, it's worth reading), I want to make one more point that my ocean conservation friends might chime in on.

And that is the difference between harvesting oceans and growing food on land.

Steven Palumbi, a pony-tailed marine ecologist and the Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation at Stanford University, gave a closing keynote at the conference, touching on this difference.

For oceans to be healthy, the entire eco-system of the ocean needs to be healthy. On land it may be easier to control all those variables -- making sure you have biodiversity in the crops you plant, taking into account water usage and quality, chemicals, mixed farming systems with animals, etc.

And yet, in our interactions with the oceans, we focus on only the species we're harvesting. One problem (alluded to earlier in the conference) of this focus is that it doesn't account for all the rippling effects of this harvest. By-catch, for example, is a huge problem (depleting juvenile red snapper when taking shrimp) or bottom trawling (that damages the seabed). If you simply look at the population you're fishing for you may miss these other effects.

Finally, since we're not actively living in the ocean, we might arguably have a greater impact than on the land. For these are still wild places, not like agriculture. We have to work within the diversity of the ocean, not create it anew on a farm.

Fred Kirschenmann, the Godfather of sustainability (and distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center of the University of Iowa) , talked about this interaction - that we shouldn't necessarily view nature as something apart from ourselves, off in the distance. That's true, we are nature too, but perhaps we're less attuned to a "whole systems" view of the sea than we are of the land.

How can we interact with it -- that is, take fish -- without screwing up? We can always plant more crops, if we care for the soil. We can't plant more fish. So, as Palumbi said, don't eat those "older than your grandmother." 

Obviously this is an area that I'm just starting to think about. But I'm curious about it, looking wider, at distant impacts, rather than drilling down too narrowly.

- Samuel Fromartz