Let's start Chapters 2 and 3 with the main points. Goodies to come!

Chapter 2:  The Shape of Things to Come

·         A Swiftly Tilting Palate

Throughout the developing world, the dietary revolution of high processed, high fat foods, meat and dairy from industrial-scale operations, is transforming the eating habits, agricultural practices, and bodies across the globe.  These global diet trends are climate-destructive.

·         Controlling Our Appetites

Food companies spend millions of dollars to construct demand for their products through advertising.  Consider the following examples:

Coke has advertised in India to replace the traditional habit of drinking tea with drinking Coke.

Marketers have studied how young children perceive the world and created packaging to appeal to them.

·         Controlling the Land

There is a trend or race among wealthy private investors and governments to invest in overseas farmland.  They use the land for large scale production. Examples include US investors buying land in the Sudan, Swedish companies buying land in Russia, and the government of Saudi Arabia buying land in Indonesia.

The investors say they are helping poor countries by providing cash needed for building infrastructures including food storage and shipping.  Critics cite the following disadvantages:

1. Land in some places (like Ethiopia) is communal.  This means it is owned and shared by the community, not owned by one private individual.  The concept of communal ownership is being violated by these investor purchases.

2. These purchases divert land that could be used for feeding the local population to instead feed peoples half a world away.

3. These land purchases erode local control of agricultural resources and weaken accountability for how the land is used.

·         Controlling Production

The US based company, Smithfield (as in Smithfield Hams), http://www.smithfieldfoods.com/  is an example of how a multinational company can enter a country and gain control of an industry.  Smithfield successfully entered Poland and became its largest pork producer and took control of the pork industry through the following steps.  (These steps are used by multinational corporations at home and abroad to secure more markets and produce their products more cheaply, regardless of the environmental and social costs.)

1. Exploiting legal loopholes.  Officially, foreign companies weren’t allowed to own farms in Poland.  Smithfield partnered with Polish companies to purchase farms. 

2.  Capitalizing on subsidies.  When Smithfield launched in Poland it initially faced 43 million dollars in losses.  Through its relationship with a pork processing plant in Poland, Smithfield received a European bank loan to get the money it needed. 

3.  Strengthening power through contract farming.  Independent farmers signed contracts, so they then take orders from Smithfield.  Smithfield gains the right to determine hog breeds, feed, vet care, time to market, price it will pay per animal.

4.  Centralizing power through vertical integration.  Smithfield controls most of the steps along the food chain including production, slaughter, processing, and marketing.

5.  Shrinking the “free” in “free market."  As Smithfield acquires more and more and becomes more dominant, the competition shrinks. 

Smithfield is now moving into Romania.  It also has subsidiaries in France, the UK, China, Mexico, and Spain.

China is now the world’s largest producer and consumer of agricultural products.

Though China’s industrial factories get most of the blame for greenhouse-gas emissions, we rarely hear about its meat industry.  China’s meat industry produces 40 times the nitrogen and 3 times the solid waste of the nation’s other factories.

Chapter 3:  Blinded by the Bite

The food-climate connection refers to the food and agriculture industries, which are part of the global warming problem and also hold potential solutions to the problem.

·    Why we missed It (Five possible reasons it’s taking so long for us to realize the food and climate-change connection.)

1. The Nature of Food

Food feels far removed from nature for most of us.   To illustrate this point, a survey was conducted by Getty Images.  People were asked what images they most associated with nature.  The most frequent answers in order were trees, oceans, rivers, waterfalls, flowers, and soaring birds.  Farms and food were never mentioned.

2. Carbon Centric

The term carbon centric means that we immediately think of “carbon dioxide” when “greenhouse gas” is mentioned.  It is the most common, man-made, greenhouse gas, and it is the cause of ¾ of global warming; however, there are other gases that play a major role including methane gas and nitrous oxide.  The food system is most responsible for their production.

3.  Systems, Oh My! The Complexity of Food

When we consume food, we don’t think about all the complex systems that operated to get the food to our plates.  These systems include agricultural chemicals, food processing plants, farm machinery, heating and cooling of supermarkets, and refrigerated trucks.

4. Farmer vs the Planet:  The Ultimate Matchup?

Advocates of sustainable farming and mainstream environmentalists are on opposite sides of the issue.  Until the last decade, the environmentalists would talk about farmers as being threats.  The farmers were considered either polluting high production big business farmers or smaller farmers who destroyed the land.

Gradually this divide between the two camps (environmental and agricultural) is closing as the connection between sustainable farming and climate change mitigation is being made.

5. Food Is Off-Limits

Policy makers and the public avoid promoting change that on the surface looks like it would make food more expensive.  There is fear of taking a position that will make it even tougher on the hungry.   (In the U.S. 36.2 million people are “food insecure,” and 1/3 of these are children.)

While some feel we need to avoid talking about the food-global warming connection, others are beginning to see that we can talk about food being part of our “ecological footprint,” based upon our recent successes in getting the public to adopt energy-efficient appliances, carpool, and change to more environmentally friendly light bulbs.

·    How We Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Climate Change, or How the Food Industry Ignores, Denies, and Embraces Global Warming.

The different sectors of the food industry have different communication strategies to respond to the growing awareness about food and climate change.  These strategies range from silence, to denial, to embracing the message.

The Silent Treatment

The meat industry has remained silent about climate change.  Many have done so by using the our hands are clean argument because they are not directly involved with growing food.  For example, a fertilizer company may use this tactic, ignoring all the energy required to produce fertilizer, and instead, talk about how they help farmers mazimize production and lessen their problems.

Doubt is their Product

Now that the climate-change fight has shifted from “Is it a real threat?” to “What’s causing it and what can we do about it?,” the food industry is fighting back, particularly the meat industry.

1. One way to foster doubt, is to fudge the math.  

Terry Stokes, head of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, thinks that anyone who critiques the cattle industry is antimeat.  He tends to underestimate livestock’s contribution to greenhouse gases; nevertheless, the cattle industry is a small contributor to greenhouse gases, compared to other industries. 

Stokes criticizes anti-meat activists who want to convert grass land for grazing cattle into farms for vegetable or grain production, saying that would have its own serious environmental consequences.  What he’s missing is that sustainable vegetable and grain production can help remove carbon and benefit emissions.

Doubt keeps people fighting about percentage point contributions to pollution, while opportunities to pass effective policies slip by.

2. A second way to foster doubt is to question the Science. 

The industrial-agricultural proponents use a win through obfuscation strategy.  

They use complicated calculations and they claim, erroneously, that it takes three times more land to raise grass-fed beef than it does grain-fed cattle, and therefore switching to all this extra land would emit more carbon dioxide. This assumption is erroneous because the land required for grass-fed vs grain-fed systems varies depending on where you are farming and whether you can grow grass throughout the year.

So the proponents of beef are saying trying to become more eco-friendly will actually have the opposite effect.  They are trying to confuse us.

Actually industrial live-stock produce greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of the process, and we need more studies to fully understand.

There are dozens of companies who have an interest in beef production and seeing the  “feed lot”’ model remain, rather than “grass fed.”  These industries include those listed below.

1.   Big pharma: (This is the term for big pharmaceutical industries.)  An example is Eli Lilly Co.  http://www.lilly.com/   Many of these companies, like Eli Lilly,  make veterinary drugs for cattle that are used to increase growth rates and stave off disease in the confined quarters of feed lots.

2.   Agrochemical industry:  An example is DuPont.  http://www2.dupont.com/DuPont_Home/en_US/index.html

      These companies make chemicals that foster plant growth and protect against pests on feed fields.

3.  Feed industry:  For example, Monsanto.  http://www.monsanto.com/Pages/default.aspx

      These companies produce or buy feed for confined livestock.  They have a direct interest in seeing the feed lot model remain.

4.   Oil industry:  The meat industry is dependent on fossil fuels to operate slaughterhouses.  The meat industry is dependent on petroleum-based chemicals used in feed production. The oil industry has an indirect interest in seeing the feed lot model remain.

·         From Silent Treatment to Market Opportunity

The chemical and food industries are now talking about climate change.  They see it as a way to court new customers, i.e., a market opportunity.  There is a growing perception that addressing global warming is inevitable.  Every company will be affected.