a 2 2 II a ) ) ) - 2 ltbI.hbbb t t ltt L. L. lrttt L. tD tr. t l'rD trr t L. tbt. [t f'-L [tbI. ID - - Jz=- }:a -The Transcontinental Lettuce" in Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, - lf-l lqi-igs. e 2004W.W.Norton&Co.. The T rqtt s c otr;t;inent;g.l Let,fl,Jce Nations will often go to extreme measures to move food into the global marketplace. Since 1992, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been developing plals to expand the network of locks and dams along the Mississippi River. The Mississippi is the primary con- duit for shipping American soybeans to the rest of the world- about 35,000 metric tonnes a day.l The Corps'plan would mean 57 A ur hauling in up to 1.2 million tonnes of concrete to lengthen l0 of the locks from 180 meters to 360 meters each, as well as to bolster several major wing dams, which narrow the river to keep the soy- bean barges moving. This construction would supplement the existing dredges, which are already sucking 85 million cubic meters of sand and mud from the rivert bank and bottom eachyear.2 Several different levels of"upgrade" forthe riverhave been con- sidered,but the most ambitious of them would purportedlyieduce the cost of shipping soybeans by 4 to 8 cents per bushel.3 Some independent analysts think this is a pipe dream.a Around the same time the Mississippi plan was announced, the five governments of South America's La Plata Basin-Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, fugentina, and Uruguay-announced plans to dredge 13 million cubic meters of sand, mud, and rock from 233 sites along the Paraguay-Parand River.s That would be enough to fill a convoy of dump trucks 16,000 kilometers long. Here, the plan is to straighten natural river meanders in at least seven places, build dozens of locks, and construct a major port in the heart of the Pan- tanal, the world's largest wetland.6 The Paraguay-Parand flows throughthe center of Brazil's burgeoning soybean heartland-sec- ond only to the United States in production and exports. Accord- ing to statements from the Brazilian State of Mato Grasso, this "Hidrovla" (water highway) will give a further boost to the region's soybean export capacity.T Lobbyists for both these projects argue that expanding the barge capacity of these rivers is necessary in order to improve comPet- itiveness, grab world market share, and rescue farmers (either U.S. or Brazilian, depending on whom the lobbyists are addressing) from their worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Chris Bres- cia, president of the Midwest River Coalition 2000, an alliance of commodity shippers that forms the primary lobblng force for the Mississippi plan, says, "The sooner we provide the waterway infra- structure, the sooner our family farmers will benefit."8 Some of his fellow lobbyists have even argued that these projects are essen- tial to feeding the world (since the barges can then more easily speed the soybeans to the world's hungry masses) and to savin.

1. a
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Jz=- }:a -The Transcontinental Lettuce" in Eat Here: Reclaiming
Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket,
- lf-l lqi-igs. e 2004W.W.Norton&Co..
The T rqtt s c otr;t;inent;g.l
Let,fl,Jce
Nations will often go to extreme measures to move food into the
global marketplace. Since 1992, the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers
has been developing plals to expand the network of locks and
dams
along the Mississippi River. The Mississippi is the primary con-
duit for shipping American soybeans to the rest of the world-
about 35,000 metric tonnes a day.l The Corps'plan would mean
57
A
ur
hauling in up to 1.2 million tonnes of concrete to lengthen l0 of
the locks from 180 meters to 360 meters each, as well as to
bolster
several major wing dams, which narrow the river to keep the
soy-
bean barges moving. This construction would supplement the

3. existing dredges, which are already sucking 85 million cubic
meters
of sand and mud from the rivert bank and bottom eachyear.2
Several different levels of"upgrade" forthe riverhave been con-
sidered,but the most ambitious of them would purportedlyieduce
the cost of shipping soybeans by 4 to 8 cents per bushel.3 Some
independent analysts think this is a pipe dream.a
Around the same time the Mississippi plan was announced,
the five governments of South America's La Plata Basin-
Bolivia,
Brazil, Paraguay, fugentina, and Uruguay-announced plans to
dredge 13 million cubic meters of sand, mud, and rock from 233
sites along the Paraguay-Parand River.s That would be enough
to
fill a convoy of dump trucks 16,000 kilometers long. Here, the
plan
is to straighten natural river meanders in at least seven places,
build
dozens of locks, and construct a major port in the heart of the
Pan-
tanal, the world's largest wetland.6 The Paraguay-Parand flows
throughthe center of Brazil's burgeoning soybean heartland-sec-
ond only to the United States in production and exports.
Accord-
ing to statements from the Brazilian State of Mato Grasso, this
"Hidrovla" (water highway) will give a further boost to the
region's
soybean export capacity.T
Lobbyists for both these projects argue that expanding the barge

4. capacity of these rivers is necessary in order to improve
comPet-
itiveness, grab world market share, and rescue farmers (either
U.S.
or Brazilian, depending on whom the lobbyists are addressing)
from
their worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Chris
Bres-
cia, president of the Midwest River Coalition 2000, an alliance
of
commodity shippers that forms the primary lobblng force for the
Mississippi plan, says, "The sooner we provide the waterway
infra-
structure, the sooner our family farmers will benefit."8 Some of
his fellow lobbyists have even argued that these projects are
essen-
tial to feeding the world (since the barges can then more easily
speed
the soybeans to the world's hungry masses) and to saving the
envi-
ronrnent (since the hungry masses will not have to clear rainfor-
est to scratch out their own subsistence).e
Probablyvery fewpeople have had an opportunity to hearboth
pitches and compare them, But anyone who has may find some-
thing amiss with the argument that U.S. farmers will become
more
competitive with their Brazilian counterparts, at the same time
that
Brazilian farmers will, for the same reasons, become more corn-
petitive with their U.S. counterparts. A more likely outcome is

5. that
farmers of theie two nations will be pitted against each other in
a
costly race to maximize production, resulting in short-cut prac-
tices that essentially stripmine their soil and throw long-term
investments,in the land to the wind. Farmers in Iowa will have
stronger incentives to plow up land along stream banks, trigger-
ing faster erosion of topsoil. Their brethren in Brazil will find
' themselves needing to cut deeper into thc savanna, also
acceler-
ating erosion.
That will increase the flow of soybeans, all right-both north
and south. But it will also further depress prices, so lhat even as
the farmers ship more, they will gct lcss incorne per ton. And in
any case, increasing volume can't help the farmers survive in
the
long run, because sooner or later they will be swallowed by
larger,
corporate, farms that can make up for the smaller per-ton mar-
gins by producing even larger volumes.
So how can the supporters of these river projects, who pro-
fess to be acting in the farmer's best interests, not notice the
illogic
of this form ofcompetition? One explanation is that from the
advo-
cates' (as opposed to the farmers') standpoint, this competition
isn't
illogical at all-because the lobbyists aren't really representing
farmers. They're working for the commodity processing, ship-
ping, and trading firms who want the price of soybeans to fall,
because these are the firms that buy the crops from the farmers.
In fact, it is the same three agribusiness conglomerates-Archer
Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Bunge-that are the top soybean

6. processors and traders along both rivers.l0
irrrttttlttttttllltttltllllltlltlt tltrrtrrl'r
[[frfI IUIIfffi Il I ll I I I I I l a.a. af f l.I
u
Welcome to the global economy. The more brutally the U.S.
and Brazilian farmers can batter each other's prices (and
standards
of living) down, the greater is the margin of profit for these
three
giants. Meanwhile, another handful of companies controls the
markets for genetically modified seeds, fertilizers, and
herbicides
used by the farmers-charging oligopolistically high prices both
north and south of the equator. In assessing what this proposed
digging-up and reconfiguring of two of the world's great river
basins really means, keep in mind that these projects will not be
the activities of private businesses operating inside their own
pri-
vate property. These are proposed public works, to be
undertaken'
athuge public expense.The motive is neither the plight of the
fam-
ily farmer nor any moral obligation to feed the world, but the
oppor-

7. tunity to exploit poorly informed public sentiments about
"farmers'
plights" or "hungry masses" as a means of usurping public poli-
cies to benefit private interests. What gets thoroughly Big Mud-
died, in this usurping process' is that in addition to subjecting
farmers to a gladiator-like attrition, these projects will likely
trig-
ger a cascade of damaging economic, social, and ecological
impacts
within the very river basins being so expensively remodeled.
What's likely to happen if the lock and dam system along the
Mississippi is expanded as proposed? The most obvious
effectwill
be increased barge traffic, which will accelerate a less obvious
cas-
cade of events that has been under way for some time, accord-
ing to Mike Davis of the Minnesota Department of Natural
Resources. Much of the Mississippi River ecosystem involves
aquatic rooted plants,like bullrush, arrowhead, and wild celery.
Increased barge traffic will kick up more sediment, blocking
sunlight and reducing the depth to which plants can survive.
Already, since the 1970s, the number of aquatic plant species
found
in some stretches of the river has been cut from 23 to about half
that, with just a handful thriving under the cloudier conditions.
"Areas of the river have reached an ecological turning point,"
warns
Davis.'This decline in plant diversity has triggered a drop in the
invertebrate communities that live on these plants, as well as a
drop in the fish, mollusk, and bird communities that depend on
the diversity of insects and plants." A2OO2 report from the Fish
and Wildlife Service said that the Corps of

8. Engineersprojectwould
threaten the 300 species of migratorybirds and 127 species of
fish
in the Mississippi river, and could ultimately push some into
extinction.l I "The least tern, the pallid sturgeon, and other
species
that evolved with the ebbs and flows, sandbars and depths, of
the
river are progressively eliminated or forced away as the
diversity
of the river's natural habitats is removed to maximize the barge
habitatJ' says Davis. 12
The outlook for the Hidrovla project is similar. Mark Rob-
bins, an ornithologist at the Natural History Museum at the Uni-
versity of Kansas, calls it "a key step in creating a Florida
Everglades-like scenario of destruction in the Pantanal, and an
American Great Plains-like scenario in the Cerrado in southern
Brazil." The Paraguay-Parand feeds the Pantanal wetlands, one
of the most diverse habitats on the planet, with its populations
of woodstorks, snailkites, limpkins, jabirus, and more than 650
other species of birds, as well as rnore than 400 species of fish
and hundreds of other less-studied plants, mussels, and marsh-
land organisms. As the river is dredged and the banks are built
up to funnel the surrounding wetlands water into the naviga-
tion path, bird nesting habitat and fish Spawning grounds will
be eliminated, depriving the indigenous societies that depend
on these resources. Increased barge traffic will suppress river
species here just as it will on the Mississippi. Meanwhile, her-
bicide-intensive soybean monocultures-on farms so enor-
mous that they dwarf even the biggest operations in the U.S.
Midwest-are rapidly replacing diverse grasslands in the frag-
ile Cerrado. The heavy plowing and periodic absence of ground
cover associated with such farming erodes 100 million tonnes
of soil per year. Robbins notes that "compared to the
Mississippi,

9. this southern river system and surrounding grassland is several
orders of magnitude more diverse and has suffered considerably
less, so there is much more at stake." t3
_..__ -."-__l
2928 Eat Here
From Embalmed Foods to Indestructibte Sandwiches
Despite fierce resistance from environmentalists, hunters,
kayak-
ers, taxpayers, and farmers who live and work along the Missis-
sippi-and a multibillion-dollar pricetag-several midwestern
U.S. senators are pushing the project towards approvalla Sup-
porters of massiveprojects like the reshapingof the Mississippi
and
Paraguay-Parand Rivers argue that they are justified because it
is
the most "efficient" way to do business. The perceived
efficiency
depends partly on ignoring certain long-term impacts-deterio-
rations of tnt o massive rivers, the dislocation of rural cultures,
the
loss of the genetic diversity that underpins agriculture. In this
sense, the perceived efficiency might be compared to the
perceived
efficiency of an energy system based on coal; it looks very
efficient

10. if you ignore deteriorating air quality and climate stability.
This "efficient" way of doing business is also a wholly new phe-
nomenon. For the better part of human history, and even as
recently as several decades ago, most people obtained their food
from local sources. Of course, even in ancient times, nations
shipped food for exotic flavors and to supplement what could be
produced nearby, In the volume on ancient Ronre in his I l-part
Story of Civilization,the historian Will Durant writes that
"delica-
cies were imported from every part of the Empire and beyond:
pea-
cocks from Samos, grouse from Phrygia, cranes from lonia,
tunnyfish from Chalcedon, muraenas from Gades, oysters from
Tiu-
entum, sturgeons from Rhodes," in addition to "extorted wheat
from
Spain, Sicily, and Africa," spices from India and China, and
"deli-
cacies of half the planel."ts As the empire grew in wealth and
power, "the old simple diet gave way to long and heavy meals
of
meat, game, delicacies, and condiments." 16 As in most
civilizations
until modern times, the wealthy shared most of this bounty.
"Exotic
foods were indispensable to social position or pretense," 17
Durant
writes. "Food produced in ltalywas considered a bit vulgar, fit
only
for plebians."ls (Durant did not miss the opportunityto note that
this growing dependence on trade, combined with wars that rav-
aged the countrpide and conscripted legions of farmers,
"produced

11. The Transcontinentat Lettuce
a debt-ridden tenant class in the countryside, and in the capital
a
propertyless; rootless proletariat whose sullen discontent would
destroy the Republic that peasant toil had made.")te
In the modern era, of course,locallyraised foods playan even
smaller role in our collective diet and exotic foods have become
available to a larger and larger segment of the public. Statistics
on
how far food travels are not available for most nations.
Nonethe-
less, a survey of trends from a nuniber of countries and regions
clearlyindicates a growing distance between the fields and
pastures
where most food is grown and the mouths it feeds.
Food trade has grown nearly threefold since 1961. Countries
shipped $442 billion worth of food and agricultural goods
around
the globe in 2002.20 As the value of agricultural trade has
increased,
so has the volume. Today, some 898 million tonnes of food are
shipped around the planet each year-up fourfold from 200 mil-
lion tonnesin l95l.2l (See Figures l-l and l-2,p.9.1
Surveys of food moving within nations tell the same story. (See
Figures 2-l and2-2,pp.30 and 31.) Statistics fronr several whole-
sale markets in the United States show that fruits and vegetables
are travelingbetween 2,500 and 4,000 kilometers from farm to
mar-
ket, an increase of roughly 20 percent in the last two decades.22
Food

12. eaten in the United Kingdom travels 50 percent farther on aver-
age than two decades ago. Over the same period, imports of
fruits
and vegetables arriving there by plane more than tripled, to
nearly
120,000 tonnes ayear. TLucks moving food now account for
nearly
40 percent of all road freight in the United Kingdom.23 In Nor-
way, the amount of food being shuttled around the nation nearly
doubled betrreen 1993 and 2Oo2.24
Part of the reason we are moving more food around the
planet is demographic: there are more people living in cities and
fewer living near the centers of food production-which havb
themselves become fewer and more concentrated. Perhaps more
importantlp advances in food technology that allow longer stor-
age and more distant (as well as cheaper) shipping helpetr the
food
system to sprawl.
ffffffuu U T!U!!U!UT!TTTTTTUITIII IITIIIII IIIII
Eat Here The Transcontinental Lettuce lr
Figure 2-1. Local Versus Imported Ingredlents: Iowa Figure 2-2.
Local Vercus Imported Ingredlcnts: Engtrnd
rrptc cabbagc
2,120 km
cAuron[n
0nlons
2,120 kn
tAutoR[rA

13. ircen beans
2,720 km
cAufoRt{lA
rllow peppcrs
2,720 kn
cAufoRI{IA
Canots
2,720 ktl
cAuf0R{tA
Potatocs
2,080 km
IDAHO
lcef folnt
?t,462 knt
AUSTRAUA
Crrrots
9,620 kn
soufi Arilt^Tomatoas: 2,'t2o km
tAl$oRt{IA(,
The hods going into an "Att-Iowa" Beat traveted an average of
74 kilometer to
reach their destinaHon, compared wlh 2,571 kitometers ifthey
had been shipped
from the usual dlstant sources naHonwide. Researchers
estimated that local and
regionally sourced meals entaited 4 to 17 times less petroleum
consumption and

14. 5 to 17 times less carbon dioxide emissions than a meal bought
from the conven-
tional food chain.
Source: See Endnote 22 ftr Chapter 2.
Mikal Saltveit, a professor in the Plant Science Department
at the University of California at Davis, directs a lab concerned
with "how to keep lettuce and carrots from browning, among
other
things." He says that storing food has been an on-going
preoccu-
pation for humans.2s Early agricultural societies struggled to
keep enough food to last from one harvest to the next. Before
the
advent of salting, pickling, drying, and fermenting, summer was
a notorious period for starvation. "If you could store food
longer,
you could get rid of famine," he says. The major impetus for
A "traditionat" Sunday meal in England-beef, potatoes, canots,
broccoll, beans,
btueberries, and stnwberries-made from lmpoded ingrcdlents
generat$ nearty 650
tlmes tfte tnnspoil-related carbon emissions as the sime meal
made from tocalt!
gmwn ingrcdlents (atmost !8 htognms of carbon dloxide
compand idth Just 5C
grams). Alt the ingredients are avallable ln England for much of
the year erccpt the
ftuits, which can either be storcd or preserued to ortend thdir
avallabiflty.
Soune.' See Endnote 23lor fioptu 2.
improving food storage came at the dawn of the industrial rev-
olution, Salweit says, when people flooded into massive cities

15. and governments maintained large standing armies.26 In 1809,
Napoleon Bonaparte offered 12,000 francs (equivalent to about
460,000 francs today) for a method to keep military rations
from
spoiling.In response, French chef Nicolas Appert developed the
first technique for canning foods. Appert packed food into glass
jars, sealed the cork tops with pitch, and boiled the jars-a tech-
nique not too different from modern home canning. Napoleon
knew that armies marched on their stomachs, and (untilAppert's
._-' ?
Eat Here
invention) lived off the land, which limited the size and stamina
of military campaigns. Across the English channel, the British
quickly refined-some say stole-the technique by using tin-
coated steel with a hand-soldered cover.27 A good worker could
produce four cans in one day. (A canned food factory today
man-
ufactures about 400 per minute.)28 ByWaterloo ( 1815), the
troops
that faced offon both sides ate from cans.2e
By the 1860s, the time and cost of canning food had fallen dra-
maticallyand canned foodswere soon commonplace, just in time
for the next groundbreaking innovation in food storage. "The
invention of mechanical refrigeration in 1875 was crucial to the
'
modern storage of perishable food," Salweit says.3o In the late
1870s, Chicago meatpacker Gustavus F. Swift introduced an
improved refrigerated railroad car that revolufionized food ship-
ping.3l Even though ice-refrigerated railroad cars-with blocks

16. of
ice, buckets of brine, and fans to circulate the cold air-allowed
S perishable food products to be shipped as early as the 1860s,
it was
major advances in freezing technology during World War II-
spurredbythe shortage of metals for food canning-that gave
birth
to the frozen food industry.32 In the mid- 1920s, the Birdseye
com-
pany started "fast-freezing" produce, which helped retain the
nutri-
tive value, flavor, and mouthfeel.33 Suddenly it became
possible to
store everything from trout to tomatoes almost indefinitely.
Food scientists further extended the storage life of perish-
ables by tinkering with plant biology, using rudimentary
approaches
early on and crop breeding and genetic engineering in recent
decades. In the 1920s, British scientists developed "controlled
atmosphere storage" for apples, which slowed ripening by
lower-
ing orygen and raising carbon dioxide levels in the air.3a Todap
virtuallydl apples are stored and shipped in this
environment,some-
times as long as oneyear after theywere severed from the tree.
Plas-
tic bags containingpre-cut salads house tinycontrolled
atmosphere
environments with nitrogen gas added to reduce browning. After
the discovery of ethylene in 1924, fruit producers first began to
ship
tomatoes, bananas, and other fruits unripe, and ripen them upon
The Transcontinentat Lettuce

17. arrival using ethylene gas.3s Most bananas grown around the
world
have been bred to not fipen on their own, but instead to obedi-
ently wait for their arrival at regional gassing facilities near
their
final point of sale.36
Of course, there are certain things that farmers can do in the
field to make food last longer. Prevent an apple from getting
bruised and it will last longer before it gets mealy. Put a head of
lettuce into a cooler immediately after harvest and it wilt be
less
likely to wilt. But the leading edge of food preservation
technol-
ogy is making foods themselves more storable without heating
or
packaging, or anything else, once they're harvested. "Both tradi-
tional plant breeding and biotechnological genetic engineering
are
being usedj'salweit says. He argues that concerns about the lat-
ter shouldn't taint all of its uses: "Reducing softening of
tomatoes
byanti-sensing [reversing through genetic engineering] a
specific
gene should not be viewed with the.sanre concern as introducing
human genes into pigs."rz
As for those fragile foods that need additional protection,
Salweit notes that food technologists are toyingwith"certain for-
mulations of edible packaging." This technology worla best for
whole, unsliced foods-an unpeeled, uncut grapefruit, for
instance.
(The exposed surface of a sliced peach, in contrast,"prevents
many
edible coatings from firmly adhering to the piece bf

18. commodity,"
Salweit says.)38 Using such coatings, the U.S. Army recently
cre-
ated an "indestructible sandwich' designed to stay "fresh" as
long
as three years.3e
(The overlap between the military and the modern food indus-
try is no coincidence. The military enjoys a captive audience,
con-
siderable freedom to experiment, and low palatability standards.
Dehydrated eggs, freeze-dried coffee, and processed cheese are
just some of the innovations originally developed by the
military
that eventually found a wider market the armies-so to speak-
of McDonald's and Nestld and Wal-Mart.)no
People have always tieen wary of new techniques of processing
and storing food, Saltveit says. In the late lgth century, Brits
3332
tttttttitttttttltlttttiiiriiiitiitiiiiililri
,,,, r' ! r, rt u ll u 5 u ra u u U u u u u u u I u u u u u u u 5 ll |L t
5 |l ll 5 t ll lt u u
lt34 Eat Here
called the first canned foods "embalmed." A range of groups,
from mothers to doctors to priests, opposed the widespread pas-
teurization of milk beginning in the early part of the 20th cen-
tury, and the burgeoning frozen food industry tried to calm
resistance by renaming their products "frosted." But Salweit
feels

19. that the trajectory has generally been beneficial and necessary,
despite some concerns about a loss of variety or flavor. People
may
reminisce about the perfect, juicy tomatoes of yesteryear,
Saltveit
says, quickly forgetting that these were only available for three
months out of the year. Americans can now buy ripe tomatoes
year-round, partly because 80 percent of fresh tomatoes on the
market are ripened with ethylene and partly because American
stores import tomatoes from as far awayas Mexico and Holland.
"Of course, they may not be as good as a tomato.you pick dead
ripe off the vinej' he admits. "But good enough fior a BLI or
salad." Saltveit grows cherry tomatoes in a backyard garden,
and
says that his children will not eat the storebought varieties after
being exposed to the homegrown pleasures. "If you really look
at
it in a historical fashion, on average, quality of food is
increasing
as is the healthfulness of the diet."al
Not everyone calls the situation rosy. Robert Sommers, another
University of California professor, was once driving on the
high-
way behind an l8-wheel truck carrying recently harvested toma-
toes piled a few meters deep on top of each other. He told me
that
"when the truck went around a corner at 60 miles an hour, some
tomatoes rolled off the top of the truck, and when they hit the
highway they bounced!"42 So much for subtle flavor. Sommers,
who headed the Center for Consumer Research at the University
of California at Davis, says that these hard tomatoes were a sort
of turning point in farm research. "The universities were
support-
ing research !o make things look pretty at the neglect of things

20. that were important to consumersi' Sommers notes. "But
consumer
resistance to the tough, square, tasteless tomato was so great
that
the universities couldn't just support the mechanical, industrial
type of agriculture." 4s In Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times,f im
High-
The Transcontinentat Lettuce
tower tells the story of industrial farming through the example
of tomatoes bred to withstand mechanical harvesting, artificial
ripening, and even being dropped from a third-story window
(by curious plant breeders).44 The sturdy fruit allowed the first
mechanical harvesters, which were faster than human pickers,
but
also put a lot of California farm laborers out of work and were
affordable only by the larger growers. "Both small farmers and
con-
sumers were being hurt," Sommers says. After that, the Univer-
sity of California created a number of alternative agriculture
programs, including a center for small farms and Sommert own
center for consumer research.4s
Jet-Lagged Fruits
Advances in food transportation-steamships in the mid-1800s,
railroads later in the t 9th century the refrigerated truck in the
mid-
1900s---combined with falling oil prices to dramatically reduce
the
cost of shipping food.t Foodthat is shipped around the globe
today
often takes advantage ofall three ofthese routes: chilled
beefbeing

21. sent from British farms to restaurants in fapan commonly moves
via large refrigerated container ship to the U.S. east coast, then
onto
"doublestack" refrigerated container trains across the country to
the west coast, aboard ship again for transit to fapan, and then
by
truck for the journey's final leg, all the while depending on pre-
cise coordination among an array of enterprises in order to
main-
tain adequate temperature and avoid spoilage.aT (This land-
bridge
route is preferred to an all-sea route, since the very large ships
that
can.reduce the cost of shipping a given unit cannot fit through
the
Suez or Panama canals.) Containerization-the practice of put-
ting food in standard-sized containers that can lre easily moved
and loaded-also revolutionized food transportation by further
increasing speed, ease, and uniformity, while cutting down on
cost. At some of the world's most innovative vegetable farms,
con-
tainers sit on flatbed trucks at the field's edge ready to be
shuttled
to market after the harvest has been packed inside.as
It now costs 70 percent less to ship cargo (all items, not iust
Eat Here
food) by sea, and 50 percent less to ship by air, than it did 20
years
ago.ae Such declines have been under way for some time. For
instance, the cost of shipping a bushel of wheat from Chicago to
London has dropped from 60 cents in 1865 to 10 cents by 1900

22. to
substantially less than I cent today,s0"Larger, faster, steam-
driven
ships replaced smalle$ slower, sail-driven ships," according to a
U.S.
Department of Agriculture report, "and successive generations
of
larger and faster trains were introduced.'sl [n the United States,
annual expenditures for shipping food have grown from just
over
$4 billion in 1967 to nearly $24 billion in 1997,but have
actually
declined fuom 7 percent to 5 percent as a share of the total food
marketing bill during the period.sz
These innovations in food processing and shipping often
worked together. For instance, before scientists figured out how
to make frozen orange juice concentrate, orange growers could
only
B ship their fruit fresh, and most people in temperate regions
enjoyed
oranges and orange juice only as seasonal delicacies.
DuringWorld
War II, partly in response to requests from the U.S. government
for an orange juice product that could be shipped to troops over-
seas,American scientists developed a process for concentrating
the
orange juice (reducing its bulk and allowing it to be shipped at
lower
cost), adding a small amount of unconcentrated juice to the mix-
ture (which greatly improved the flavor), vacuum sealing it in
cans, and then passing the cans through afreezingtunnel before
shipping in refrigerated ocean liners, boxcars, and trucks. This
process, still in use today, revolutionized the orange growing
indus-

23. try freed it from seasonal and geographic constraints, and
thereby
transformed orange juice into a daily ration for manyAmericans
and Europeans-and turned frozen orange juice into a multibil-
lion-dollar international business.s3
AII this food traffic requires staggering amounts of fuel (and
probably wouldn't be feasible without abundant and cheap oil).
Among the biggest culprits are those pricey, delicate items
which
are mostly water and provide relatively few calories, such as cut
flowers, fruits, vcg,elablcs, and lrozen ftrotls. (Nutritionist loalr
The Transcontinental Lettuce
Gussow of Columbia University describes the process as "burn-
ing lots of petroleum to ship cold water around.")s4 The
transcon-
tinental head of lettuce, grown in the Salinas Valley of
California
and shipped nearly 5,000 kilometers to Washington, D.C.,
requires
about 35 times as much fossil fuel energy in transport as it pro-
vides in food energywhen it arrives.ss By the time this lettuce
gets
to London (and California lettuce does get shipped to the United
Kingdom), the ratio of energy consumed to calories provided
jumps to.127.56 "Perishablss"-xs thsse goods are known in
indus-
try jargon-constitute the fastest growing segment (over 4 per-
cent per year) of the food cargo business and are increasingly
shipped by refrigerated plane.sT
Most international food trade isbyboat, and most foodtrade
within nations is by rail or truck, all relatively energy efficient
forms of transportation compared with climate-controlled

24. airplane.
And products like grains and beans-which pack a great deal of
nutrition into a given unit of weight-as well as coffee, tea,
choco-
late, and spices, can all be shipped dry, without climate control.
Nonetheless, Anika Carlsson-Kanyama of Stockholm University
has shown that a basic diet-some meat, grain, fruits, and vegeta-
bles-composed of imported ingredients can easily entail four
times
the energy and four times the greenhouse gas emissions of an
equivalent diet with ingredients from domestic sources.s8 In
Britain, food transportation is now among the biggest and
fastest
growing sources of British greenhouse gas emissions-a pattern
emerging in much of the world.se
The climate-changing implications of a long-distance food
system are particularh ironic, since farming may be the human
endeavor most dependent on a stable climate. From theAmerican
breadbasket to the North China Plain to the fields of southern
Africa, farmers and climate scientists are finding that
generations-
old patterns of rainfall and temperature are shifting. Plant scien:
tists at the International Rice Research Institute in the
Philippines
alreadynote regular heat damage in Cambodia,India, and
theirown
test farms in Manila, where the average temperature is now 2.5
36
- --- a a - a a aaa a a a a a a aa a a aa a a --..,-r--
o-,

25. UI
degrees Centrigrade higher than it was 50 years ago. "In rice,
wheat,
and maize, grain yields are likely to decline by l0 percent for
every
I degree C increase over 30 degreesi says researcher Iohn
Sheehy.
"We are abeady at or close to this threshold." 60 Sheehy
estimates
that grain yields in the tropics might fall as much as 30 per cent
over the next 50 years, due to damage from increasing tempera-
tures, during a period when the regiont already malnourished
pop-
ulation will increase by 44 percent.6l
As these changes disrupt the vast intercontinental web of food
production and rearrange the world's major breadbaskets,
depend-
ing on food from afar will be more expensive and more precari-
ous. All the petroleum now used to move food around the planet
is just one small part of modern agriculture's heavy dependence
on fossil fuels-to run tractors, make fertilizen and pump
water.62
So abrupt changes in the prices or availability of fuel-and many
geologists argue that oil production will likely peak within the
next
decade-could be as big a shock to farming as abrupt changes in
weather. The interest in local food could be the first step in
break-
ing this addiction. Farmers who learn now how to raise crops
with
less oil will be better offwhen these fuels become scare. So will
com-
munities that have cultivated local food sources.

26. Not only is long-distance food contributing to climate change,
adding insult to injury is the fact that much of it seems entirely
illogical. Regions and nations often import food they already
have.
A recent survey of trade data from the United Kingdom exposed
the astonishing reality that the nation imports large amounts of
milk, pork,lamb, and other major commodities even as it exports
comparable quantities of the same foods, shuttling hundreds of
millions of tonnes of identical food in opposite
directions.6sAna-
lysts explain this "food swap" as an artifact of subsidized
transporta-
tion, centralized buyingby supermarkets and food
manufacturers,
and trade agreements that set food import quotas even for self-
suf6cient nations. In the case of milk, British supermarkets and
food rnanufacturers prefer to buy a standardized, predictable
commodity in large quantities from a few sources on the world
market, forcing British dairy farmers to sell their rnilk itt ittlcr
rur
tional markets. These same economic forces also explain wlry
thc
label on a bottle of Thopicana brand apple juice says it
"colttailts
concentrate from Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Argentina,
Chile, Turkey, Brazil, China, and the United States."Apart from
the
questionable cost and pollution, a company buyingwhatever pro-
duce is cheapest on the world market can have no allegiance to
place,
and the drinker can never really be sure what he or she is drink-
ing. (The above list of countries has a wide range of pesticide
standards.) And as ecological economist Herman Daly once
remarked about this sort of trade, "Americans import Danish

27. sugar cookies,and Danes importAmerican sugar cookies.
Exchang-
ing recipes would surely be more efficientj'6a
Meanwhile, as food ends up farther from the soil in which it
was grown, waste loops are broken. |erry Goldstein, the editor
of
Biocycle, a journal that tracks trends in handling organic waste
around the world, notes that the long-distance nature of food
sys-
tems'treates tremendous food waste disposal pressures at one
end,
while at the other end eliminating an ideal source of plant nutri-
ents and soil-building organic matter for agricultural soils, in
favor of polluting chemical fertilizers."65 (Programs to collect
food waste, compost it, and return it to parks, farms, and forests
have been successfully piloted in supermarkets, restaurants, and
residential neighborhoods around the world.) The growth in tht:
distance food travels has also corresponded with an incrcasc in
food packaging, as food products are designed for longer jour-
neys and shelf-lives.66 Food scraps and food packaging now
nrirkc
up a significant share of the waste stream in many citics world-
wide. In North American cities, they account for as much as a
third
of total landfilled waste.67
Edible packaging should help on this front, cvcn if the culi-
nary advantages are debatable. But landlills bulging with decay-
ing food scraps that could best be uscd on farrns is just one of
the
symptoms of a food chain that has been stretched so long that
its
weak points have started to show. Long-distance food has
helped

28. 4140 Eat Here
feed certain parts of the globe and brought exotic foods to
many,
but the pendulum has swung too far. Attempts to ship lettuce
around the world without it browning or to find an international
market for surplus beef might have once been valiant and neces-
sary. Now, with greed as a motivation and technology as the
accomplici, the same logic has resulted in all sorts of wasteful
ship-
ping that can only exist as long as people deny the problems it
brings. The transcontinental lettuce wowed supermarket shop-
pers with its unexpected appearance and novelty. But it also
elim-
inated local lettuce growers, rendered salads bland and
uninteresting, and sucked up more fossil fuels than the planet
can
afford. A few short decades after its big splash, it's time for the
transcontinental lettuce to retire.
The Transcontinenta[ lettuce
BRrnsre Gnouro: ftlaui, Hawaii
Peopte concerned about the wastefut use of fossil fuels woutd
be
appa[ed by how Hawaiian farmers raise beef. "I catt it meats on
keets," jokes David Cote, a former America Ontine executive
turned
organic farmer.68 Each year, Hawaii loads about 42,000 cows
on
boats, sends them to be fattened in California, 3,500 kilotneters
away, then ships the packaged meat back to Hawaii,6e "Ifs a
very

29. odd situation,'Cole said. "Ifs not ethical from an energy
manage-
ment perspective. It's not moral in terms of managing your
environ-
ment. Itt unwise from a security perspective." A dock strike or
weather disruption in the western United Stat6s can empty the
shetves in Hawaiian grocery stores for days. "What if this went
on for
weeks or months?" Cote asks. "We'd start eating each other."7o
So when an old friend offered Cole the opportunity in 2003 to
return to his native Hawaii to manage the Maui Pineapple and
land
Corporation, one of the targest landholders and the largest
emptoyer
on the istand of Maui, he jumped at the opportunity. Cole had
previ-
ously hetped transform a depressed rural enctave ln Virglnla
lnto a
mecca of organic farming, hand-crafted comestibles, and
cutinary
awareness. The setting had changed. So had the climate. 8ut the
vision remained the same: create businesses that reconnect
tocats
with their landscape white making profits..
Ifs hard to overstate the potentiat. At the 2003 Hawaii
Agriculture
Conference, agricuttural economist Ken Meter estimated that
the
chain of istands cunently imports more than 90 percent of its
food,
even as 200,000 hectares of lush farmtand [ie fattow. (The state
est:i-
mates that 85 percent of its farmtand is cunentty unused.) The
most

30. dramatic chart in Mete/s presentation showed the annual income
of
Hawaii's farms fatting from S500 mittion to $200 miltion (in
2000
do[[ars) between 1969 and 2000, as the amount of food
purchased by
tourists rose from $500 mittion to $2.2 bi[ion.7l
When I spoke to Cote in a Washington, D.C., restaurant that
serves
his Virginia-raised beef, he furiously scribbted numbers and
obscure
shapes on the back of a napkin. In an intricate dance he calts
"pro-
tein condominium," cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens each use
the
same grazing land in rotation. "You get a pretty high conversion
of
sotar energy into protein," Cole exptained. The economic
argument is
o
qqqIql.llltqlllllllllltllallllllllrqqrrqrrq.rrr
even more powerfut. Hog, [amb, cattte, and chicken companies
can
share the cost of fencing, in exchange for using parts of the
fietds
('tondominium") for a certain time. No imported feed, no
ghipping
costs. "You end up with lots of equity and you have improved

31. the
soit," Cote said.72
But Cole's vision-guided by the Hawaiian concepts of ahupua'a'
(self-sufficient communities) and malama'aina (care for the
tand)-
goes way beyond meat.73 He's working with growers to raise
six dif-
ferent oitseed crops to turn into biodiesel fuet. They are
gradualty
taking [and out of export crops like pineapples to raise organic
meat,
fruit, and vegetabtes for Hawaii's top resorts, where tourists
co[tec-
tivety spend as much on food each year as locals. For Cote, atl
of the
imported veggies or the cows that are fattened off-island
represent
bittions of dotlars that coutd enrich Hawaii's farmers and
aspiring
food businesses.T4
"They've brought excitement back into agriculture here on the
istand of Maui," said Atex Franco, a rancher and managing
director of
Maui Cattte Company, a coatition of seven ranching famiLies.
0f the
5,000 head of cattle the company manages each year, nearty half
are
raised on Maui Land and Pineappte Company pasture and
pineappte
sitage. In the year since the coltaboration began, Franco's
company
has jumped from setting one animal a week to 30 animals a
week and
from three customers to over 60, and has moved into a new,

32. larger
processing plant. "There's been a tremendous amount of support
for
a [oca[ product," said Franco, adding that the beef is higher
quality
than that coming from cattte fattened on the maintand and that
more ranching famities can afford to hotd onto their [and.
"We're
moving in the right direction."75
'As istanders, we have a much greater consciousness of the [ocal
foodshed than if we had the freedom to drive across a politicat
boundary for our food," Cote said. In a recent speech to the
Maui
chamber of commerce, Cote said that Maui could be an exampte
for
the other islands, and that Hawaii could serve as an exampte for
other states. The analogy can be extended atmost indefinitety.
"Utti-
matety we're atl on the biggest istand of at[," he said. "The
orbiting
blue batt."76
Running Head: Fake News 1 of 3
Fake News: Annotated Bibliography
Rosalyn Albright
ENG 122 Comp. 11

33. Nicole Elliot
October 23, 2017
Running Head: Fake News 2 of 3
Fake News
Fake News: Annotated Bibliography
Thesis Statement: Fake news should be researched to make sure
it is legitimate, because bogus
information is damaging academically and false information is a
substandard influence in our
society

34. Spratt, Hannah E.: Agosto, Denise E. In: Young Adult Literacy
Services. Summer2017, Vol. 15
issue4, p17, 5p.
The author states that internet is so easy access to people of all
ages that people aren't judging the
quality of news they consume. Fake news is serious and
damaging to our society because fake
news plays with the emotions of people lives. Teens use other
forms of getting information, such
as tv, radio, reading books but are more drawn to social media.
Although teens and adults are
drawn to social medial education young teens to distinguish
misleading news can be done by
librarians. We as people need to be information literate because
what happens in the world that
we read about should be the truth.
Fake News: Annotated Bibliography
Crocco, Margret; Halvorsen, Annelise; Jacobsen, Rebecca;
Aven. In: Phi Delta Kappan.
April 2017, Vol. 98 Issue 7, 67

35. Running Head: Fake News 3 of 3
The author states that we consume information in according to
our beliefs or what is instilled in
us. Social Media is on the rise for most people today. Ten years
ago, before Facebook and twitter
surfaced people depended on the local news channels and local
newspaper in their community
for news. In those times news was very reliable. Now that
Social Media is so popular these
services provide news and information or conspiracy theories to
draw attention. We people need
to be able to access in on the trustworthiness of evidence.
Fake News: Annotated Bibliography
Phi Delta Kappen. Feb 2017, Vol. 98 Issue 5,6
The author states that young people are not educated enough to
distinguish credible news
information. Young people's ability to explain the information
they consume on the internet is

36. lacking. Computer literate people can move swiftly through
everything Social Media has to offer
but are not able to evaluate news information from Social
Media. We people need to separate our
personal beliefs from bogus news we read.
How to use this template:
To use this template, replace the instructions written in italic
font with your own discussion text. Be sure to proofread your
work and check it for completeness and accuracy. Delete any
extra text/instructions/references that do not apply to your
response. Then, copy your work and paste it into the discussion
response window in class. At least two of your weekly
responses to classmates must fulfill the requirements outlined in
the “Respond to Peers” section of the discussion instructions.
You are welcome to add additional conversation after the
required elements have been addressed. This template provides
the basic requirement for responding to a peer. Please add more
and feel free to collaborate with more than two students
throughout the learning week.Week 3, Discussion 2: Respond to
Peers
Hello [Name],
After looking closely at your concluding paragraph, I
see that… (Here, you should discuss and critique your
classmate’s concluding paragraph. Is the thesis statement
rephrased? Are the main points summarized? Was the thesis
proven in the closing argument? Use the textbook and Ashford
Writing Center to ensure you are giving accurate information.)
After reading your closing argument, I have questions about…
(Here, you should share any questions you may have regarding

37. your classmate’s conclusion and/or closing argument [e.g.,
rephrased thesis statement, summarized main points, etc.].
Substantiate your ideas and suggestions with specific examples
from your classmate’s concluding paragraphs and the assigned
reading materials.)
References
(If you reference the tutorials, textbook, instructor guidance, or
handouts – which you should – be sure to cite them in-text and
add the references to the end of your post.)
Prepare: As you prepare to write your second discussion for this
week, take a few moments to do the following:
· Read the Ashford Writing Center (Links to an external
site.)Links to an external site. articles on Introductions and
Conclusions (Links to an external site.)Links to an external
site. and Essay Structure (Links to an external site.)Links to an
external site.
· Review the grading rubric for this discussion
Reflect: Before drafting your initial post, take time to reflect on
your closing argument. Does your conclusion reemphasize the
important points that you have made in your essay? Have you
summarized your main points and rephrased your thesis
statement? Do the final lines of your conclusion leave your
readers with something interesting to consider?
Write(due Thursday, Day 3): In 200 to 300 words, share your
concluding paragraph. Your conclusion should reiterate the
position of your paper by summarizing your main points and
rephrased thesis statement. In a final paragraph, share your
original thesis statement.
In a separate paragraph, identify and explain the following:
· What is your conclusion’s closing argument?
· In addition, note any questions you may have regarding your
conclusion (e.g., rephrased thesis statement, summarized main

38. points, etc.) so your classmates can assist you.
Please review the Week Three Discussion 2 Initial Post
Template before writing your response.
Respond to Peers(due Monday, Day 7): In 125 to 200 words
each, discuss and critique the concluding paragraphs of at least
two of your classmates. Please identify, analyze, and discuss the
following:
· Rephrased thesis statement
· Main points of the argument (e.g., are the main points
summarized?)
· Closing argument (e.g., was the thesis proven?)
· Questions and concerns regarding the development of the
closing argument
· Substantiate your ideas and suggestions with specific
examples from your classmates’ concluding paragraphs and the
assigned reading materials.
Please review the Week Three Discussion 2 Peer Response
Templatebefore writing your response.
In the second of the Week 3 threads, students will share their
conclusions. The final paragraph should signal to the reader that
the essay is ending, and it should emphasize the importance or
significance of your topic.
Review your conclusion and ask yourself the following
questions.
· If my readers were to only read my conclusion, would they
understand my paper's purpose?
· Do I summarize my argument for my readers?
· Do I answer the question "So what, who cares?"
· Do I tie all of my points together?*