September 5, 2010

There’s an old pop song from the ’60s that goes something like this:

They say that all good things must end some day.

Autumn leaves must fall.

It’s Chad and Jeremy, I think, and it’s a guy saying farewell to a summer love. There were a number of these in the ’60s. Did all of us go and live on a lake somewhere over the summer, or stay for weeks or months with our grandparents? Why was it that we were saying goodbye to summer flings? It doesn’t seem to be such a part of the present day rhythm.

But it’s a rhythm that has stayed with me my whole life. It’s a consequence of working the college circuit. September has marked a major transition in my daily activities every year of my life. It’s going back to school time, leaving aside summer diversions, and since I turned pro in the mid ’70s, it means going back to work.

Well, that’s not exactly right. I’ve been busting my butt all summer long, in some respects working harder than I do during the year. But the pace is quite different. From mid-May to August, I’m trying to wrap up projects, knock out papers that need to get written, and get geared up for my classes. Come September, I’m having these long meandering talks with my students about technology over coffee, explaining to a woman who just finished her undergraduate degree what graduate school would actually prepare her to do, having these jarring discontinuities as I bounce back and forth between the occasional new student who has read something I wrote and is impressed by the fact that they are talking to someone that they had heard of before they met them, and the more typical new student who does not know me from Adam’s off ox (and why should they?). All of this seems casual, but there is also that background pace of needing to have lecture notes, class presentations and assignments ready on an unrelenting schedule. And in all these conversations, I still have that urge to get back to the unfinished projects still lingering from the summer, but it’s an urge I have to stifle. Talking to students is my job.

And then there’s a relatively new pop song by Bruce Springsteen. It goes:

The girls in their summer clothes
In the cool of the evening light
The girls in their summer clothes, pass me by

This song captures the September mood for a late fifties guy sitting on Grand River across from the MSU campus drinking coffee during the days that students trickle back to campus pretty nicely. Look it up if you don’t know it. But in some respects, it’s just the echoes of Chad and Jeremy all over again.

For foodies, this means that fresh tomatoes and peaches are coming to an end. We’ve been eating an obscenely expensive box of white organic peaches in a mad race to savor as much of that bliss as we can before it rots. And although tomatoes will still be around for a few weeks, the dark red heirlooms are pretty much done. We still have the high points of harvest time ahead of us: root crops and winter squash in particular, and probably some of those late season greens, too. But it’s coming around and winter will be staring us in the face before we know it.

Calendars are cycles that endow the present tense with meanings it might otherwise lack. Modern folks live calendars through the school cycle, and as my musings here indicate, some of us live their whole life that way. There are also the holidays, of course, and I’m sure that lots of folks are enjoying the long weekend that marks the official end of summer. Food is a major part of that calendar. Eating in season and taking note of it with a casual remark (or a blog) is the fun side of food ethics, recompense for our responsibility to think about the hungry or bad eggs. As for me, I’m sitting in the Amsterdam airport lounge on my way to Bulgaria for a project meeting on transgenic animals. It’s another symptom of the restart that’s happening, putting me back on the academic time clock. It was great to spend the summer in Michigan, I’ll say. It would have been a tragedy to miss those tomatoes and peaches.

Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University

August 29, 2010

So speaking of hunger (weren’t we?) a while back my wife Diane presents a sack to me that our newspaper carrier left for canned goods so we can donate to a local food drive, “What do you want to give?” she asks. I rumble through our rather limited stock of canned items and my hand moves quickly to some condensed milk that I know has been sitting there some time. Diane looks at the can, noticing a “best by” date of December 2008. (This particular episode is occurring in May of 2009.) She points out the date but I am not dissuaded. At this point she berates me for thinking that I can dispose of outdated food items by pawning them off on needy people.

My immediate response is defensive. “That’s perfectly good food,” I say. “I would eat it and I would feed it to my children.” The can of milk is in fact there because it is an ingredient in the pumpkin pies favored by my son, Walker. I go on to point out that canned foods can remain quite safe to eat for many years, even decades, especially when they show no signs of deformity, rust or any other breach of integrity. The condensed milk, I should add, looks to be in pristine condition. I note that food pantries routinely receive items from grocery stores that have passed their sell-by dates, but that are still within the margin of time for safe use. For canned items the use date may be a year or two after the product needs to be removed from the grocery store shelf.

These points are batted back and forth between us for a while. Diane is skeptical. “Why are those dates there if they don’t mean what they say,” she asks. I reiterate the point about margins of safety and the difference between a “sell by” and a safe-use date. I also note that these are not even sell-by dates, but “best by” dates. “How would I be supposed to know that, if I were in a food pantry looking for something to feed my family?” she retorts. I reply that this is not esoteric knowledge that only I know because of my professional work on food. It’s something I learned growing up.

But by now I am actually coming around to her view. I disrespect the eventual recipients of these items if I pick something that can be questioned in the way that Diane is now doing. The condensed milk goes back on the shelf, eventually to become a pie for my son, while a can of spinach well within its “best by” date goes into the bag.

Oddly, however, Diane is now taking my point. Isn’t there an ethical problem here, she asks, if we are wasting perfectly good food simply because the food companies have incorporated these margins of safety into their labels? They have an economic interest in selling more food, after all, while the public interest here should be geared toward getting good food to needy people. Our conversation has now become more philosophical, as we recognize the tension between these conflicting notions of good food. The outdated milk is perfectly good food in the sense that it is safe to eat. What is more one influential idea has it that canned milk is particularly good food. My hand had gone to it partly because of conditioning from my youth that places items like condensed or dry milk into the “good food” category, even though if it weren’t for pies we would hardly ever use these items today. They come from the middle of the super market, and as Michael Pollen has taught us, the good food in the market is around the edges, not in the middle. Such considerations have been working at the back of mind as I switch my ground, coming to a very different notion of good food, one that is much closer to my daily practice. So we are now sending lots of fresh tomatoes on the food bank, but I won’t promise that the now out of date can of organic pumpkin pie filling in the cupboard won’t go in the bag next time there is a newspaper carrier canned food drive.

Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agriculture, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University

August 22, 2010

I’m in a serious mood this morning, so be warned before reading further. The food news this week swirled around Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) actions to recall a half a billion eggs due to suspected contamination by salmonella. Salmonella is a bacterium that is the leading cause of food poisoning in the United States. Infection by these bacteria as a result of consuming contaminated food typically involves indigestion and flu-like symptoms of relatively short duration, but the infection can be very serious, even fatal. Reported cases of food poisoning from salmonella have been rising dramatically over the last two or three months, and FDA and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are trying to figure out why. There is an argument for suspecting eggs, and here it is:

• We know that eggs can get contaminated by salmonella in several different ways.
• We know that people do not always cook their eggs thoroughly. Cooking thoroughly kills bacteria, and reduces the risk of becoming ill to vanishingly small levels.
• We believe that people are more likely to eat raw or undercooked eggs that they have purchased as so-called “shell eggs” (eggs in the shell), than eggs used in processed foods or prepared by professional cooks.

Δ  An increase in contamination of shell eggs would explain the observed rise in cases of salmonella food poisoning.

Routine monitoring has identified contamination from at least two suppliers of shell eggs, hence FSIS and FDA have acted quickly in ordering the recall. That’s the background. Now for my question: Is there an ethical issue here?

In a lighthearted mood, the answer is “Well, it depends,” but I’m not in a lighthearted mood, and I want to examine some of the things that it depends on. It may not be obvious to everyone, but it does depend on what we mean by “ethics”. If we are talking about a personal code of conduct that individuals follow out of respect for others, and if we see this as different from obeying the law or having sound public policy, that narrows things a bit too much. There is a story out this morning stating that the owner of the egg farm has been cited for several previous violations—everything from worker safety laws to mislabeling product. That starts to sound a bit like an ethics issue, but operating a business (even a household) in our society today often means responding to complaints and paying fines as a matter of course. So we need more context than we currently have from the stories being circulated in the newspaper to say for sure.

I’m not lighthearted about this because regular readers of this blog (if there are any) know that I have a professional relationship with the egg industry. This entails three things that I see as extremely important. First, I know something about egg production and how the industry works. This puts me in a position of moral responsibility to the general public that extends beyond that of the average person, or even the average ethics professor. Second, I worry about whether my relationship compromises my judgment. I worry that I will be too ready to excuse conduct that should be condemned simply because I understand how I might have done the same thing had I been in that position. Third, I know that my relationship with the egg industry leads people to think that I am shilling for the egg industry, despite the fact that I do not receive any financial compensation for my work with egg producers. I am as likely to overstate an ethical concern in a benighted attempt to boost my credibility as I am to understate one because I am too sympathetic with the difficulties that egg producers face.

I’m sorely tempted to do about 4000 words of reflexivity. Academics are misusing this word a lot these days by referring to an activity properly described as “reflective” as “reflexive”. But reflexivity occurs when the process of perceiving, measuring or monitoring a phenomenon dramatically changes the nature of that phenomenon, usually in ways that an un-reflective perceiver is not aware of. One navel-gazing aspect of reflexivity here is that my own attempts at being ethically reflective have been affected by the way that I perceive other people to perceive me. More important, egg safety is itself reflexive. The tools that we have for monitoring salmonella have dramatically changed the way that we conceive egg safety. The rates of salmonella contamination in eggs are so small that one must normally test thousands of eggs to find any at all. The testing itself is a time consuming process that destroys the tested egg, so in using testing, one is looking for a statistically determined rate of salmonella occurrence that one presumes to be representative of eggs that are in the stores and being eaten. What safety means within the context of FDA regulation has been dramatically shaped by these statistical and technological testing procedures. People in the industry believe that there is much less actual contamination by salmonella today than, say, fifty years ago. But is this because technological methods for testing eggs began to be used, or because sanitary conditions in factory farms are actually better than traditional farms? Or were traditional family farms with chickens in barnyards safer? We have no straightforward way to know.

The recent recalls mean that inspectors have seen a rise in this rate of salmonella occurrence in the eggs they are testing, but it is still the case that salmonella is being found in a very small number of eggs. It is also still the case that cooking the egg kills the bacteria, so unless you have been eating raw eggs (like I have), you are very unlikely to get sick. Although there are pundits pronouncing on the causes of contamination, I do not believe we have a very good handle on what might really be causing it. In order to statistically analyze what might be causing contamination, one must test hundreds of thousands of eggs under conditions that isolate the hypothetical cause and compare it to a control group. The control group must be similar to the test group (except for the hypothetical cause) in order for the testing to have any validity. This is expensive and has not been done. As I write this, we don’t know what, specifically, might be causing the rise in contamination. We don’t know whether it is a blip or a trend. More generally, we don’t know which feature of the production system (such as the machinery, the housing of the birds, the feed, etc.) might affect levels of salmonella in eggs. That uncertainty affects our understanding of food safety, too.

Here is another little tidbit  for food ethics: FDA and FSIS, which is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, are struggling with one another to see who can appear to be the most pro-active and consumer responsive in this crisis. It’s interesting to note that neither agency’s website even mentions the existence of the other agency. A certain amount of behind the scenes inter-agency politics is definitely affecting the way that this recall episode is being portrayed to the wider public, but that is another (and much longer) story in food policy.

Saying all this can readily be seen as a defense of the industry, but that’s not how I mean it. (That’s another instance of the navel gazing reflexivity I mentioned above.) The FDA is telling people to discard any eggs that you might be unsure of, and I would not contradict that advice. We also know that many people will simply stop eating eggs of any kind for some time. That’s what always happens when news like this hits, and that, too is a reflex action. I’d like to think that ethics involves being reflective, rather than reflexive, but man, that’s a hard road to travel!

Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University

August 15, 2010

I occasionally get responses to the blog through back channels. Very few official comments posted to the blog come from sources that do not look suspiciously like robots. I thought I would share a few e-mails this week from blogs over the summer. First, Terry Link, Director of the Greater Lansing Food Bank copied me on the following message he had sent around to a number of friends:

Dr. Paul Thompson, Kellogg Professor of Agricultural Ethics at MSU, writes a great weekly blog on food, agriculture and ethics. This one actually mentions the GLFB briefly. His pieces are typically thoughtful, “light-hearted”, and pertinent to how we make sense of living in a complex world. You can subscribe yourself. His work is always food for thought!

Terry’s generous comment was written in response to “Hunger” on July 25, 2010. He is referring to the link on the upper right hand corner of this page that will deliver a copy of the blog to your e-mail, probably sometime on Monday morning.

And then there is this one, written in response to “I Scream”:

The ice referred to in this blog (below) was not free… it was half of a 25 pound block (15 cents), crushed after purchase… into the aluminum lined green can, which finally bit the dust when I emptied out the storeroom a few months ago.

The secret to the ice cream recipe is enough vanilla.. just pour it in there.
And… the big debate in the family (my dad, Grandpa and Grandma Brown.. also ace ice cream makers) was whether or not to cook the eggs.
answer… no way.

and be prepared to get the roof of your mouth painfully frozen.

The author of that will remain anonymous, though I presume that most readers can guess. I’m generally presuming that these direct e-mails come in from people who really don’t want to be identified for all the world see on the World Wide Web. This goes especially for my most recent correspondent, who wrote in response to last week’s blog on “Supply Chain Food Ethics”:

Dear Professer Tomsun,

You have whited my interest in ethics and stuff like that.

Thanks to you, I am now a thinker more than a believer.

In your poll, mark me down as voting yes.

Yes, I think food is ethical.  My supporting for that is
I prayed long and hard about it.  And God appeared with a
chiken leg just when I thought I would die.

Bless you and your Mission

What else needs to be said beyond that? … And, by the way, “Happy Birthday” to Diane.

Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University

August 8, 2010

The food supply chain is basic for present-day food ethics. The idea of a supply chain comes from retail management. Once upon a time, not that long ago really, retailers of all kinds sourced the goods that they offered to the public from wholesalers. Wholesalers sourced from distributors, distributors from manufacturers, and manufacturers sourced from commodity brokers. The commodity brokers, in turn, got the raw commodity goods that they were selling to manufacturers by operating businesses where primary producers could sell their goods at the prevailing market rate. Primary producers, in turn, may buy inputs for the production process from various input supply firms, each of which may have wholesale suppliers themselves, and the whole thing cycles around again.

This varies from industry to industry, of course. In the oil and gas industry, big oil companies roll many of these elements together to produce a “vertically integrated” supply chain. But in food, each of these elements was distinct and each represented a transaction that was pretty much divorced from the others, at least until recently.  The primary producers are farmers and ranchers who buy inputs from seed, chemical, machinery and energy firms. The retailers at the end of the chain were grocery stores and restaurants. The rise of chain stores just about eliminated wholesalers some time ago, except in limited areas like fruits and vegetables. A few meat or dairy wholesalers and restaurant supply firms service the independent restaurant trade.

So one thing that changed this picture is the concentration and integration of food industry firms. Production of chicken broiler meat is now every bit as vertically integrated as the oil industry. Broiler companies such as Tyson own the birds right up to the point that they are sold to the grocery chain as processed chicken, though they generally contract with independent operators to raise the birds in facilities that the operator, not the integrator, owns. This is a way of shifting the capital at risk in broiler production to relatively small-scale firms.

Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres rather nicely lays out how struggling farmers are tempted to get into this kind of contract animal production (there it was hogs, I believe) as a last ditch effort to “save” a farm that his become unprofitable. They go heavily in debt to build facilities, and are totally at the mercy of the integrator for the series of contracts needed to pay them off. Since it can take well over a decade to retire such debt, and technology may well change faster than that, these highly vulnerable “little guys” are often faced with the unenviable choice between a deepening cycle of borrowing, construction and debt, on the one hand, or losing the farm to bankruptcy—the very fate they were hoping to avoid in the first place—on the other.

Large chains such as Wal-Mart and McDonalds built their success in large part by reaching much deeper into supply chains than wholesalers and distributers, the people that were selling to them. Once these chains became large enough, they had the economic power to stipulate conditions for manufacturers. In the first rounds of supply chain management, the emphasis was on price. More recently, such firms have made stipulations that sound a bit like food ethics. McDonalds has stipulated that farmers and ranchers follow production practices that respect animal welfare and that curtail rainforest destruction. Wal Mart set a standard for the amount of energy a television sold in its stores could consume as a way to reduce carbon emissions.

But the other thing that has changed this picture is consumer tastes. In the old days, consumers were pretty much buying food based on price and on material characteristics that could be ascertained by inspecting the product itself. A given consumer might rely on a brand or label, but a testing organization (such as Consumers Union or the Food Safety Inspection Service) could determine traits such as microbial contamination or moisture content by examining the food item itself. The shift came when consumers started to care about things like “fairly traded” “locally grown” or “organic”. There is no test that can be performed on a coffee bean that will tell you whether the farmers who grew it got a fair return for their labor. However, retailers who have become adept at reaching back into a supply chain to reduce carbon emissions or improve animal welfare can just as easily do so to promote fair trade or locally grown.

There is some debate in the food ethics crowd as to how we should feel about these trends. Some are buoyed by the new responsiveness to ethically oriented actions. Others see it as just another extension and growth of corporate power, a trend that they presume will come to naught sooner or later. What do you think?

Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University

August 1, 2010

Thornapple members picked up some wonderful tomatoes at their weekly delivery this week. For the Thompson family, this signals a time to stop in at the grocery store and pick up some ordinary cottage cheese. I say “ordinary” because there is nothing better to go with fresh, juicy summer tomatoes than the bland, liquid type of cottage cheese you get from the major chains store brand. In fact, not even Dean Foods makes a decent cottage cheese for eating with tomatoes. And none of this piquant, curdy or cheesy stuff you get from the so-called quality brands. I’d love to find an organic brand of cottage cheese that could cut the mustard for eating with that acidic bliss you get from summer tomatoes, but everything available locally is just too arty for my taste. It’s one time of the year that I am definitely heading to Meijer or Kroger.

All of which puts me in a mind to reveal one of my long held dreams for getting rich. I want to open up a chain of drive through restaurants that sells fresh, ripe tomatoes cut in chunks and topped with my preferred style of cottage cheese. Fine ground black pepper will be available on request. That and some cold cereal with milk and a generous helping of fresh Michigan blueberries is just about all I’m going to need to get by for the next six weeks or so. And I can’t imagine that other people wouldn’t see things the same way if they ever got a taste of this wonderful combination. The only trick will be to source enough of the right kind of cottage cheese. It used to be plentiful in my youth, but as tastes have become “sophisticated” it’s getting harder and harder to find. But if I can operate these drive-throughs on a large enough scale, I’m sure I can commission some organic supplier to make the right kind of cottage cheese.

And then there are the tomatoes, of course. I personally love the heirloom tomatoes we are getting from Thornapple right now. I notice that some people don’t seem to get it. They think that tomatoes are supposed to be bright red, with no pithy parts and of generally softball size and shape. How wrong you are, deluded youth. You are supposed to have ugly tomatoes that come in shades of purple, pink and yellow to orange with huge woody stems, tough skins and bulbous globules that bulge out at irregular angles. My Nana never grew a tomato that she did not feel obligated to peel, and she grew the best tomatoes under creation. You just trim off the inedible parts and put them in the compost heap. Tomatoes are so plentiful when you can get them at all, that you don’t think twice about tossing away those rotting, pussy and fibrous bits that constitute the top half of some really good heirloom tomatoes. Get used to it, and you will find yourself eating some of the best food to come out of the garden all summer long. Texas songwriter Guy Clark has it about right:

Get you a ripe one don’t get a hard one
Plant `em in the spring eat `em in the summer
All winter without `em’s a culinary bummer
I forget all about the sweatin’ & diggin’
Everytime I go out & pick me a big one

Homegrown tomatoes homegrown tomatoes
What’d life be without homegrown tomatoes
Only two things that money can’t buy
That’s true love & homegrown tomatoes

But in fact, all the tomatoes coming out of the Thronapple plots are pretty damn good with cottage cheese, even the regular varieties. So if I can wrap up enough supplier contracts I’m sure I can make a fortune with my drive-through restaurant idea. The only problem is that you can’t make a drive through restaurant work on six to eight weeks of business, and you will not catch me serving those boxy tomatoes that have been bred to withstand the thirty mile impact that they get when they are hurled into a truck by a mechanical tomato harvester at my drive in restaurants. Nooo. So my idea is that when the tomatoes go out of season, we will serve canned peaches with our cottage cheese. I want to call my restaurant chain “Fat Elvis”, if I can just get Priscilla and Lisa Marie to go along with it.

Well I’ve probably blown my chance at untold fortune by giving this great idea away in my blog, but fortunately I’ve got fresh Thornapple tomatoes sitting downstairs on the kitchen counter, and Walker and I stocked up on massive quantities of cottage cheese on Friday afternoon. So I’m outta here, right now. If anyone capitalizes on Fat Elvis, the least you can do is send me check.

Paul B. Thompson holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University

July 25, 2010

Now and again we need to remind ourselves that people are hungry. I happened to visit the new farmer’s market near the White House this week. This is the one that Michelle Obama was instrumental in getting started, arguing that there was a need for better access to fresh, local foods in downtown Washington DC. I was walking with Jaydee Hanson, and we were on our way to a dinner engagement on “Eye” Street. We perused the stalls and Jaydee schmoozed a bit with one of his former interns from the International Center for Technology Assessment. As we were heading off down Eye toward Tuscana West for our dinner, we were accosted by a homeless man soliciting funds. Jaydee’s response was, “I’ll get you on the way back.” To which he replied, “I won’t be here then,” so Jaydee digs into his wallet and gives him a buck or two.

I do this kind of thing occasionally, but maybe not occasionally enough. Thornapple CSA has also made commitments to help hungry people by donating one share and by giving any extra produce that is not picked up by members to Food Movers. From a food ethics perspective, efforts to address hunger by offering a little spare change to a homeless person or making occasional donations to the food bank are important, but they would only be adequate if the reality of hunger were somewhat different than it actually is. Spontaneous acts of charity are ethically important because they are good for the soul; I say nothing against them. They can also do a tremendous amount of good for the recipient, especially when that person is hungry in the colloquial sense. By this I mean that the person is feeling some hunger pangs that will be relieved by a good hot meal, allowing them to get along with the rest of their life. Given the current economic situation in the U.S., we know that families are experiencing hunger in just this sense, some having that experience all too frequently. Assuming they are adequately supported, food banks and relief programs like the Greater Lansing Food Bank or the one I visited in Detroit are a good response to this kind of hunger. They meet the short term food need, and they do so through one of the most basic and universal of human social forms: sharing.

There are some big scale international events that also fit this form. The earthquake in Haiti put most of that nation’s population at risk for hunger, and promises of international assistance can help relieve that hunger while the infrastructure for distributing food grown on the island are rebuilt. Again, the importance of sharing captures what is ethically significant here. But there are also people in Haiti who were hungry before the earthquake, and many of them were hungry in a totally different sense. These are people whose diets are so deficient that they become vulnerable to a large class of health ailments. They are often unable to work, even if work were available to them. Children suffer from deprivations that permanently affect the development of their brains and bodies. It is misleading to describe their problem as one of being hungry. Their problem is one of systemic poverty.

The World Bank estimates that one third of the world’s population is adequately fed, one third inadequately fed and one third starving. I won’t try to guess the percentage of people in that middle third that are “merely hungry” in the sense I describe above. Using phrases like “merely hungry” is actually kind of offensive, but it may be necessary if we are come to the important ethical point. Being merely hungry is a terrible fate, one that’s associated with suffering I am sure that I cannot adequately imagine. Indeed, the “merely hungry” very likely suffer more in terms of felt pain and anguish than do those whose persistent hunger is life threatening in the near term, and compromising their lifetime opportunities, to boot. The human body eventually adapts to this state of persistent deprivation, and silences the gnawing pangs that are impossible to ignore. Nonetheless, we face a global situation in which perhaps half of the world’s population is experiencing a state of food deprivation that both compels a moral response, and remains exceedingly difficult to address. We would be badly mistaken if we thought that acts of sharing or charity represent a morally appropriate response to their problems, even if continuing to provide support for food assistance whenever and wherever possible continues to be a moral duty for all of us in the one third who are adequately fed. These problems of persistent poverty are problems of development ethics, rather than food ethics. Development ethics is a tortuous domain in which our best intentions and our moral intuitions often fail us. The work here is serious, and frankly too complex to be taken up in a lighthearted blog.

I argue that food ethics enters into development ethics through the door marked “agriculture”, rather than the door marked “hunger.” Many of that third in extreme poverty are poor because they work in agriculture. Doing things that help hungry people in cities (like giving away food surpluses) actually hurts those poor farmers, who would otherwise get a more reasonable return for their crop. This is a problem I have once before described as “the fundamental tension” in agricultural ethics. It is a problem that is not going away any time soon.

Yet it’s not a reason to look the other way when a needy person approaches you for a handout. There are complex ethical issues here, too, and they can assume tragic proportions in certain cases. On the one hand, we know that there are people out there who exploit our praiseworthy tendency toward sharing. We feel stupid when exploited, and this may make us defensive and resistant to sharing. I know that I fall prey to this when I look away and walk past people like the man that Jaydee and I encountered on Thursday evening. On the other hand, loosening up and helping out on a case by case basis is not what’s keeping developing country farmers in extreme poverty. For that, you need to look toward international trade and monetary policies and toward bad governments in their own country. And many of those people asking for a buck or two are very hungry. Sharing with them is good all the way around.

Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University

July 18, 2010

Summer time is the time for ice cream, I think. We’ve been making the rounds. Yesterday we were at the MSU Dairy store, where Diane opted for the dreamsicle milkshake (i.e. a milkshake made from dairy store orange sherbet,) while I went for the single dip of peach ice cream. The MSU Dairy Store is a much loved local institution, probably ranking second only to Tom Izzo in terms of generating warm feelings in the Lansing area for Michigan State University. Diane, however, is not really all that impressed with the ingredients list in MSU ice cream. I will say as a food ethicist that it is not really that bad, using only a few extras like guar gum. Guar gum comes from guar beans and it is used as a thickening agent, like corn starch. You don’t really have to have a thickening agent to make good ice cream, however, and Diane says “Fie to you, guar gum!”

Our daughter came into town on Friday evening, though she had a grueling experience losing her bag on the flight. We took her to Pablo’s in Old Town to cheer all of us up, which meant a walk across the street to the Arctic Corner. Arctic Corner has my vote for the best summer ice cream this year. It’s been a perfect consistency every time I’ve tried it and I actually prefer soft serve that is a bit less creamy and sweet over the putatively more premium mixes. I’m planning on heading over there later this week to celebrate my 59^th birthday by having my annual banana split. As many of you know, this location at Grand River and Center St. was down for a couple of years. Rumor had it that it was an internal family dispute. Whatever. I’m glad they’re back. Arctic Corner has taken over from our usual Westside summer hang-out, the Frosty Corner on MLK. I don’t like the mix that Frosty Corner is using now as well as their old stuff, though the old guy inside (who I assume owns the place) likes to brag about the quality. No accounting for taste, I guess.

This afternoon we followed up a visit to the Kresge Art Museum on the MSU Campus with a stop at the new location of Tasty Twist. Tasty Twist has long had the reputation for “best soft serve” in the area, though we are such wimps that we usually don’t want to drive all the way to East Lansing to get ice cream. If you don’t know the story of Tasty Twist, it’s a good lesson in food ethics. I don’t know how long they had been at their funky little classic-style soft serve ice cream stand location on Grand River, but last year they were told they would need to vacate by the owner, only to discover a new business moving in with the name “Tasty Treat” and looking very much like the old Tasty Twist with the same blue awning etc. As a food ethicist, you will not see me frequenting Tasty Treat, so I have no idea how good their ice cream is. In fact, I suspect that Tasty Twist probably has pretty good grounds for a lawsuit against Tasty Treat, as theft of “trade dress”—the thematic colors and appearance of a successful retail operation—can be challenged under intellectual property law. It’s considered to be false advertising. Check out “Lanham Act” on Wikipedia if you care to have a look.

The solution in East Lansing has not thus far gotten the lawyers involved. There is a Facebook page to inform people where they should really be going for their summer ice cream, as Tasty Twist has moved down Grand River a block or so and is now occupying a spot in one of those low-rent down at the heel strip malls. This is the one next door to Bell’s Greek Pizza. There is plenty of parking, but frankly it doesn’t have the ambiance of the old locale. I hope they do okay there, but it just steams me to see a really good local food operation get the kind of treatment that Tasty Twist got. The ice cream is still great. I had a strawberry sundae. Go down there and buy a banana split if you live in East Lansing.

But what I really wanted to talk about was home-made ice cream. My Grandaddy Thompson used to go down to the ice company in Springfield, MO and get this old beat up green insulated 5 gallon bucket filled with chipped ice. I think it was free for the asking, but I don’t really know. He would bring it back home and then stir up a fantastic mix of homemade vanilla. We would turn the freezer by hand with a crank, and the ice was so chunky that it usually took one person to hold the freezer down, a second to turn the crank, and a third to add rock salt and more ice chunks. I don’t remember his recipe, but I do remember my Dad’s. He would break a dozen raw eggs into a bowl, and stir in two cups of sugar as he beat the eggs very lightly. Then he would add two tablespoons of vanilla extract, stir and pour the whole thing into the freezer drum. He would swish out the bowl (always coated with a thick egg-sugar mix) with some whole milk, then he would fill the drum almost to the top with whole milk. Four ingredients and no actual cream. Because he filled the drum so full, there was very little room for the mixture to expand as it froze, so it would take forever for that stuff to turn into anything solid enough to eat. And it would start to melt as soon as it came out. Eventually the leavings would go to the freezer inside, where they would take on the consistency of a popsicle: crystallized frozen milk. However, the stuff tasted great. We loved it and I’ll have to find an excuse for making some ice cream right away just thinking about this. I use a fewer eggs (like four instead of 12), about half the sugar and I leave a good three inches for expansion. Sometimes I’ll use some heavy cream, too, but you really don’t need it. And I’ve been known to make decent strawberry and peach ice cream, myself. But I’m still down with the raw eggs.

As a food ethicist, I can’t really recommend this. Eggs can become contaminated with salmonella, and there is very little beyond cooking the egg slightly that can be done about it. Once or twice a year, I’m willing to take that risk. My Dad’s recipe, however, is heart stopping.

Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University

July 11, 2010

Like most of the world I spent a huge chunk of the afternoon watching the FIFA World Cup Final. What is more, I’ve spent enough time in the Netherlands that I am a mild fan of the Dutch team. So I had someone to root for. It was, as most of you probably know, a hard fought game that Spain won in the last two minutes of overtime by the score of 1-0. And we are not done watching television in the Thompson household, either. Tonight there is the premiere of Murder on the Orient Express with David Suchet as Poirot.

In the meantime, it looks like we’ll spend the waning hours of this Sunday afternoon wringing our hands over CSA beeswax. Yes, folks this is the Thornapple CSA daytime soap. It’s a cavalcade of escapades, trauma and drama. Here are just a few of the highlights.

So what should the CSA do about members who do not sign up at the very beginning of the year? Now I hasten to add before getting into this that I am not a member of the Thornapple CSA core group, and what I think about these questions means absolutely nothing. It’s just that I happen to overhear conversations on such questions while I am puttering around on my computer listening to Roger “Jim” McGuinn singing “So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star” on my i-tunes. I’m long past the time when my hair’s just right and my pants fit tight, and I get easily distracted. I’ve undoubtedly failed to get all the plot twists right, but nonetheless here’s what I think.

Don’t go there! This is a quagmire. There will be no principled way to sort this out once you get started trying to figure out a fair system for pro-rating. It’s not, for example, fair to just divide the number of weeks by the number of dollars, because the earliest weeks in the distribution are the weeks when the size of the pick-up is the smallest. And then there is all that chard we have to endure before we get to the really good stuff at the end of season. And of course there is the fact that people who signed up on time have actually been working on the farm for the last twelve weeks. “Sweat equity” as the core group charmingly calls it. (Not that I do any sweat equity—Diane’s contribution more than makes up for my share). We can all understand why latecomers might think it’s fair to pay less, but this is a case where all the time spent trying to figure out what would be fair is an unfair burden to place on the core group members.

And then there is the question of what to do about the carrots. Our next crop of carrots have apparently become so overrun with weeds that they are getting strangled out. Do we recruit extra “sweat equity” to save these sweet chubs, or should we resort to hired labor? One point of view is that they are not worth the money or the aggravation, but that just brings up another issue: do we just let the members suck up this casualty of the wet spring (that’s the CSA way, after all), or do we dip into the meager treasury and buy some carrots from another farm? Here, I remain agnostic. It’s not up to me, anyway.  Carrots are certainly better than chard, but I’m not going to risk a knockdown brawl the next time the core group meets in my dining room by venturing an opinion on this one.

And finally there are the interpersonal relationships that make belonging to a CSA the next best thing to Peyton Place or As the World Turns except without the sex. These include clueless boobs who complain about the “hired help” that takes charge of distribution day. Wake up folks. This is a volunteer activity. There is no hired help (well, maybe just a little in the case of the carrots). If you don’t like it, pitch in and do it yourself. Then there are the personality intrigues that make life interesting, but probably don’t belong in a blog that can be read by any idiot with an internet browser. Sorry folks, I’m not going there either. I’ll be in enough trouble already if people start bugging Diane about carrot futures.

Yes, it really is part of what the CSA experience is all about, especially when the organizational base for the group is the membership itself as opposed to someone who, say, already is a farmer. This ain’t a grocery store and it ain’t even a business enterprise. It’s a social movement, folks, and as Oscar Wilde himself once said “The only difficulty with socialism is that it requires too many evenings.”

Paul B. Thompson holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University

July 4, 2010

It’s that time of the year again. Time to dust off the old ‘68 vintage Kalamazoo SG knock-off and haul out the ’72 Bassman head from attic, and plug them into the Altec-Lansing 15s that I made homemade cabinets for out in the garage on Long Island from left-over particle board. All this stuff goes out on to the side porch where I treat the neighborhood to my version of the Star Spangled Banner. Everyone loves this stuff, you know. And no one complains about that annoying hum I have never been able to get out of the Bassman head. It’s tradition, after all.

Not that I have much more to say about today’s celebrations, but this little opening got me out of the need to title this week’s blog something like “Another Pick-Up”. I got in enough trouble for the last one.

Diane tells me that things are humming down on the Allen Street Farmer’s Market on Wednesday afternoons. I haven’t gotten down there yet myself. Thornapple is apparently handing out the shares “buffet style” this year. This means that everyone does a take one from column A and one from column B when it comes time to pick-up your veggies. Diane says that this approach has several advantages over the “pre-bagged” option, which is certainly quicker for busy people trying to do a quickie pick-up. For one thing, you get a bit more choice. If you like several little baby heads of lettuce instead of one big one, that’s in your control. And people just aren’t picking up the stuff they don’t want. This is important because research shows that “too much food” is the number one complaint that people have about belonging to a CSA. What is more, the extra food is being picked up by Food Movers this year and being distributed through the Greater Lansing Food Bank.

But the main thing that Diane likes about this approach is that it forces people to slow down a little bit. This draws people into conversations that would not happen otherwise. And as Diane reminds me (and I suspect others), the first word in CSA is “community”. This idea that something which entails taking extra trouble and bother, but that has the unintended and often unnoticed benefit of drawing us into more meaningful relationships is a key theme in the work of one of my favorite living philosophers, Albert Borgmann. Albert calls the things that make us do this “focal things” and the practices that they engage us in “focal practices.” He contrasts these focal things with technologies that deliver what we need with the flip of a switch or less. These conveniences make life easier, and Albert is not “against” them. It would be impossible to get along in the modern world without these devices that make things go smoothly, and that do not require us to become deeply involved.

Albert’s point is that when our life become totally dominated by these simplifying devices, it also becomes emptied of meaning. He calls this “the failed promise of modern technology.” In days past, people’s entire lives were consumed by tasks such as cutting wood and tending the stove. While this was a pain, the hearth in the traditional farm household was a natural focal thing. It drew people in the household and the tasks needed to keep a wood-fired hearth going provided rhythm and structure that created a sense of community among those who lived in or visited the household. Although modern technologies such as the instant-on kitchen range and the central heating system have replaced the toil needed to keep a hearth going, these technologies have also failed us in fundamental ways. There is little in the modern lifestyle to replace the structure, rhythm and engagement that came naturally before.

This is not to imply that we should go back to wood-burning stoves. That would be pretty bad for global warming, for one thing. No, what Albert says is that we must now mindfully dedicate ourselves to focal practices that may have been part of the natural rhythm of life in ages past. He offers examples of focal practice that include running, and hiking in the woods. One of his extended examples is what he calls “the culture of the table”: an extended set of focal practices that are organized around the tasks of acquiring, preparing, serving and enjoying the food that we eat. Well structured food practices bring people together, and create meaningful lives. So take a minute to say “Hi” to Diane when you are picking up your veggies at the Allen Street Market next Wednesday. And if you are over on the Westside and hear something that sounds like badly played Hendrix wafting through the trees, you will know what that is, too.

Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University

Readers interested in reading more about the culture of the table should consult Albert Borgmann Real American Ethics, 2007 or Paul B. Thompson The Agrarian Vision 2010.