Fish Fights, Goat Meat, And GMOs At The Sustainable Foods Institute

The second and last day of the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Sustainable Foods Institute, on Friday, May 17, was definitely land-based — with one notable exception.

The morning began with a visit to the Earthbound Farms 2 ½-acre showplace gardens and food shop in Carmel, just down the road from Monterey. Earthbound is the nation's largest producer of organic lettuces and other vegetables, most famously those various assortments of leafy greens in the clamshell packs in every supermarket produce section. Their farms, in California's Central Valley and in Yuma, Ariz., and their packing plants are strictly big business, but their Carmel property is an idyllic complex of herb and vegetable gardens, rows of heirloom berries  — appropriately, since the company started as a backyard berry farm in 1984 — and lavender hedges.

Here, after a California-healthy buffet breakfast that included peach, mango, and carrot smoothies; pomegranate roasted pears; brown rice pudding with strawberries and toasted pistachios; warm sweet potato and kale strata; turkey bacon, Swiss cheese, and apple panini on sourdough; and some local cheeses — alongside one of which I discovered a tiny scattering of shards of brown-sugar bacon, most of which ended up on my plate, we listened to dietician Ashley Koff and Kaiser Permanente Medical Center physician and activist Dr. Preston Maring talk about why we should eat the kale and the pears and not the bacon, though not in so many words.

Maring started what was probably America's first hospital-grounds farmers' market, in Oakland. He knew it would be a success, he said, when a woman came rushing up to him and asked how much longer the market would be open. About another hour, he replied. "Good," said the woman, "because I want some of those strawberries, but I have to take my husband to the emergency room first." Today there are markets at 52 Kaiser Permanente hospitals in nine states and the District of Columbia. Maring went on to decry the fact that only 11,000 acres in the neighboring 200,000-acre Salinas Valley agricultural area are organic, and he proposed that as a predictor of health for his urban patients, "It is becoming more and more apparent that your ZIP code is more important than your genetic code."

Perhaps referring obliquely to Maring's strawberry story, Koff said "I've noticed that fruit always sells out at farmers' markets, while the vegetable guys are sitting there with most of what they came with." People shouldn't have to be nutritionists when they go to the grocery store, she continued, so she likes to tell people just to "eat a rainbow every day" — that is, lots of fruits and vegetables of different colors. She warned, though, that "There are lots of really, really bad vegetable products out there. Some people have a veggie burger and french fries and think they're eating healthy."

The more formal aspects of the day's program, back at the Monterey Plaza Hotel, near the aquarium, began with British chef and food activist Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, of River Cottage. The previous evening, the aquarium had awarded him its Sustainable Seafoods Award as Educator of the Year. His current educational project, which he is pursuing with a broad-based campaign (fishfight.net) centered on a new TV series, is called "Fish Fight," and concerns sustainable fishing practices. His first target was discards. This refers to the fish caught in nets that are tossed back into the sea, usually dead, either because they are minor species not worth bringing back to land or because they exceed the daily quota for desirable species.

Fearnley-Whittingstall screened a viral video he'd made, along with excerpts from his broadcast on the subject. "Up to half a million tons of perfectly good, often prime edible fish are being thrown back every year," he said. He felt that he had to focus on a single issue to get the TV audience's attention, and this was something easy to understand, he felt. A scene on a fishing boat showed fishermen gazing in dismay at some 20 baskets of healthy-looking fish — big, beautiful ones that you'd happily pay $30 or $40 for whole at a fish market — on deck waiting to be returned to the ocean. And this, he noted, represented just one of 25 to 30 hauls the boat might make in a single day. "It's terrible," said one fisherman, with a thick Scottish burr, "it's a damned disgrace." The good news is that a new common fisheries treaty, to be ratified by the European Community in the next few months, will ban most discards. Some of the bycatch brought on board will be used to produce fishmeal for animal feed, he added, but at least some of it will go to public sector feeding — food banks, soup kitchens, and the like.

A tougher fight for Fearnley-Whittingstall, he admitted, was the issue of marine protected areas, or MPAs. Scallop dredges and trawl-net chains tear up the ocean floor, he said, destroying more than 90 percent of Britain's sea bottom. Areas designated as MPAs would be closed to these fishing practices. "Whereas many fishermen support me on the discard issue," he admitted, "that's not so with MPAs, and when I read on Facebook that I'm a public enemy, and fishermen say I'm trying to take food off their family tables, it becomes a different conversation, a more difficult one. But I make no apologies at all for being interested in behavior change, and stirring up big conversations, because that's what gets me out of bed in the morning. I find behavior change quite exciting."

Some highlights of the ensuing programs:

Elizabeth Meltz, a onetime Del Posto line cook who created her own position as director of food safety and sustainability for the Batali/Bastianich Hospitality Group, maintained that one of the accomplishments she was proudest of was moving the company's restaurants away from bottled water. Kathleen Frith, president of Glynwood, a nonprofit working to build a sustainable food system in New York's Hudson Valley, predicted that goat meat would be the next big thing, at least from her corner of the country, and drew laughs when she talked about trying to help revive the region's production of hard cider and being told that she couldn't serve the cider at an event because she didn't have a cider license — but that there was no such thing as a cider license, because nobody made cider anymore, so it wasn't covered by New York law.

Craig McNamara, who grows organic walnuts at his Sierra Orchards, west of Sacramento, and trains would-be farmers through his Center for Land-Based Learning, warned that the big danger our country faced wasn't a fiscal cliff, but a food cliff, the result of global climate change, global food insecurity, and depleted global resources. His farm is aggressively organic: he plants vetch as ground cover instead of fertilizing (it deposits nitrogen into the soil), doesn't break the soil mantle through cultivation, and controls a walnut pest called the coddling moth through pheromone release, not pesticides. He offered some sobering statistics: Some 50 million people in the U.S., mostly children, are "food insecure," meaning they don't know where there next meal is coming from. At the same time, about 40 percent of the food we harvest is wasted — around 600 pounds of fresh food per grocery store per day nationwide.

In a panel focused on the Salinas Valley — the 75-mile-long, 300,000-acre "salad bowl of the world" — Jeff Dlott, president and CEO of SureHarvest, which consults with growers on sustainability strategies, proposed that it was a least possible for an organic farmer to use more water and have a larger carbon footprint than his conventional counterpart. "We tend to judge the input, but not the output," he said. Joe Pezzini, COO of Ocean Mist Farms in Castroville, the largest grower of artichokes in North America, told of the time one of his buyers was touring his farm, and clearly appeared to be uncomfortable. When he asked her what was wrong, she said, "Well, it's very nice here, and all, but there's so much dirt here." Another good laugh line.

When the panel moderator, Marc Gunther of Fortune and Greenbiz.com, asked another panelist, Samantha Cabaluna, vice president of marketing and communications for Earthbound Farms, if she could state categorically that there was a nutritional difference between organic and non-organic produce, she equivocated, finally saying, "There may be certain nutrients that are greater in certain crops..." Then Gunther asked her what he really wanted to know: "My wife says when we buy your greens in those plastic boxes, which are labeled 'pre-washed,' we should get out the salad spinner and wash them again. Is that really necessary?" No, said Cabaluna. "If you saw how we wash and package them, you wouldn't worry."

The final panel of the day, "GMOs — Bad Reputation or Good Solution," was the most surprising, especially in the context of the rest of the conference. It was not at all, that is, a wholesale condemnation of genetically modified crops.

Jason Clay, senior vice president for market transformation at the World Wildlife Fund U.S., set the tone for the discussion by proposing that "GMO isn't one of the top environmental issues we face. Biodiversity loss, greenhouse gases, pollution, habitat loss, all kinds of things are more significant. When the European Community decided not to buy soy from us because it was genetically modified, they bought non-GMO soy from Brazil instead — and the demand resulted in the highest deforestation rate in the Amazon ever. I think you have to ask which is worse, GMO or deforestation? We should be very concerned about GMO seafood because there's no system that exists with no escapes into the general population, but if we could produce fishmeal and fish oil from a closed system with genetic modification, isn't that better than depleting the ocean by catching fish for the purpose? The reality is that in the next 40 years, we are going to have to produce as much food as we have in the past 8,000. To meet this demand, we have to look at water, energy, nutrients, soil per unit of output. We can't just maximize one of these. We have to decide where we stand on GMOs." He went on to point out that food production is a comparatively minor part of genetic modification. At least half of all GMO patents, he said, are in the health area. All the insulin in the U.S. today is genetically modified. The next largest category is microorganisms used in fermentation, or yogurt, wine or beer, to substitute for rennet in cheese, for sauerkraut in Germany. "In some ways," he said, "the GMO horse has left the barn."

He went on to talk about Mars, the candy company, which realized that some 20 percent of the cocoa trees in Africa produced 80 percent of the crop. They thought that if they figured out what made that 20 percent so productive, they could produce cocoa much more efficiently, so they set out to map the cocoa genome. When the company realized that 40 percent of the children in the cocoa-growing areas were poorly nourished, they went further, and identified the 90 most important food crops in Africa and began mapping those, too. The project is ongoing, and the good news is that the genome maps will be in the public domain, so anyone can utilize them. "The idea is to take pressure off the habitat in Africa," said Clay. "We don't want the Serengeti to become a farm."

Mitch Tuinstra, a professor of plant breeding and genetics at Purdue University, talked about something called zinc finger technology, which binds to DNA and can be used to massage the genetic sequence, adding or removing nucleic acids. "At least one of these technologies," he said, "has actually been able to get a letter from the USDA saying that if the process involves deleting something rather than adding it, it can be called non-GMO."

Aquaculturist Scott Nichols of Verlasso told the audience that he spends a lot of time talking to people about GMO, what it is, what it means. "It's not necessarily the technology that's bothering people," he believes. "Nobody says, 'Don't give me the insulin' because it's GMO.' They see the benefit. The disconnect is that they don't see the benefit in GMO salmon or corn. There's nothing in it for them." He added that it's extremely unproductive when people whose ideas on GMO are data-based argue with those whose perceptions are "heart-based."

Calling GMO "the Syria of food politics," Frederick Kaufman, a professor of English and journalism at City University of New York and the author of Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food, said, "The elephant in the room, of course is Monsanto, Dow, companies like that. How can we separate the technology from the elephant? How can we take it out of the hands of the Foodopolis?" Tuinstra added, "My students have a very strong emotional response to Monsanto. They say, 'We can't trust them with our food.'"

Kaufman told of meeting a woman who was working with shape genes. "She wanted to make square tomatoes. They would take less room to pack. People are doing things like this because if they get a patent, they can make a lot of money. Why not open-source bio-engineering? If all of a sudden we did that, we might be able to completely take out the profit stream from large companies like Monsanto, and might be able to make room for more creativity. There's this idea that patents create innovation in food, but in fact that's not true. These clusters of patents keep people out and stifle creativity. We shouldn't have these kinds of patents connected to our global food system. It's outrageous, and it's ridiculous."