This week, the FDA issued a “draft guidance” that in effect asks industrial meat producers to pretty please, at least think about limiting the practice of pumping massive quantities of antibiotics into factory animals meat machines.
The big lobbying groups, predictably, were outraged by this intrusion of mere science into their god-given right to make a bundle at the expense of the world’s health (both animal and human).
At Grist Tom Laskawy some excellent background on the issue as well as a slightly more optimistic view. “While this may sound like so much bureaucratese, it represents a strong statement by the FDA and suggests further action is forthcoming.”
This draft, though clearly preliminary and subject to industry feedback, also gives Congress a reason to move forward on legal restrictions knowing that a scientific consensus is forming — though in reality it’s unlikely a law could be passed much before November, if at all.
The question remains just how hard Big Meat will fight this guidance. The FDA wants to bend over backwards to limit problems for livestock producers by phasing in restrictions and taking their concerns into account. But will groups like the Pork Board — which denied the very existence of the problem to CBS News anchor Katie Couric in her blockbuster report on the subject — take the hand the FDA has offered? Or will they bite it?
Or will CAFO operators simply seek to bypass any regulation altogether, by claiming that routine doses of antibiotics are medically necessary to prevent disease in close quarters? I’m contacting an expert on this topic to find out if the FDA’s draft guidance indicates such loopholes will exist, and whether industry will head for them.
We know that subtherapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock is unnecessary. The Danes have, somewhat famously, proved it by banning the practice and significantly reduced the threat of antibiotic resistance with no long-term effects on livestock health or productivity. The American Society of Microbiologists knows it. The FDA does, too. Even over a hundred House members and 17 senators (that being the number of cosponsors attached to the pending legislation) know it. With any luck, the industry will finally get the message.
I imagine there must be a proverb or several somewhere about the farmer who travels in springtime, when a huge chunk of the year’s work has to get done.
This year, I had to travel not once but three times in the crucial spring months, and since returning have been scrambling to rescue my little farmstead from total chaos. Calves still coming in, new chickens to tend to, the beehives thriving but needing a lot of attention, weeds galore in the garden. Weeds. Weeds. Weeds. WEEDS! (Did I mention weeds?)
But I think I’m getting there.
Which raises the question of “where is there”?
In general I’ve downplayed my farmerly ambitions by claiming only that I’m trying to feed my family better, and perhaps create a better sense of self-reliance. I do hold out a hope, not often expressed, that someday this farm will be our livelihood. Slowed food revolution, in this month’s American Prospect, makes me wonder how realistic that dream is.
The author, Heather Rogers, offers a thorough look at the state of the American organic or alternative or sustainable farmer, seen from a policy perspective as well as through the eyes of Morse Pitts, who farms in the Hudson Valley and can charge what for me is a jaw-dropping price of $14 for a dozen eggs at the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan. In spite of this, and the fact that he is hard-working and resourceful, he still has had enough with a life that promises (and delivers) so many rewards, save one—the ability to earn a steady and decent living.
… despite having no mortgage debt (he inherited the place), a ready market, and loyal customers, Pitts wants to leave his farm. His town recently rezoned the area as industrial, and if he wants to cultivate soil that’s not surrounded by industry and its attendant potential for water and air pollution, he has to move. The problem is, he can’t afford to.
Aside from the standard instability farmers must endure — bad weather, pests, disease, and the vagaries of the market — holistic and organic growers face great but often overlooked economic hardship. They must shoulder far higher production costs than their conventional counterparts when it comes to everything from laborers to land. Without meaningful support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, their longevity hangs in the balance. In the meantime, the USDA showers billions on industrial agriculture. Growers who’ve gone the chemical, mechanized route have ready access to reasonable loans, direct subsidy payments to get through tough years, and crop insurance, plus robust research, marketing, and distribution resources. Whether organic and holistic growers raise crops, like Pitts does, or grass-fed, free-range livestock, they must contend with circumstances made harder by a USDA rigged to favor industrial agriculture and factory food.
As he has done in so many other areas, the president raised hopes for progressive farmers to the sky, and then sent them crashing. An organic garden at the White House! Beehives! But not a heck of a lot of tangible things have been delivered to folks like us. And even modest things like the Know Your Farmer campaign have met with angry resistance. “In an April letter to the new agriculture secretary, agribusiness-friendly senators Saxby Chambliss, John McCain, and Pat Roberts opposed even the meager support the USDA is giving small unconventional growers. ‘American families and rural farmers are hurting in today’s economy, and it’s unclear to us how propping up the urban locavore markets addresses their needs.'” Which of course is a hugely disingenuous piece of cow dung. And then there’s the “urban locavore” dig—a “trendy food choice” by well-to-do foodie snobs doing their evil mischief again. You know, if it weren’t for Alice Waters, America could be made whole again.
It’s a really good article, if not particularly encouraging for me, or for any of the other kooks out there who want to eat real food that isn’t farmed in ways that are killing the earth. I recommend you read the whole thing….
At a gathering Sunday evening in Grand Ferry Park, Annie and Michael Sommers put Dave Campbell’s ashes into the East River, the Ocean, and the world. Friends threw flowers into the water after the ashes, and a trio of horns played “Across the universe.”
It was a moving and beautiful ceremony, and gave closure of a sort for family and friends who have been hurting since his death May 19, from the cancer he had been battling so well and so bravely.
After the scattering of ashes, we reconvened across the river at the bar at 2A. We traveled from Brazil, Seattle,Tennessee, Chicago and, yes, Kentucky, to honor an irreplaceable soul.
I have just a few pictures I will post when I get back home. Here is Steve Antonakos’ photo montage which is moving even now.
This song! From the golden age of the thrift store, this Voice of the Beehive gem has kooky vintage clothes and jewelry, goofy dancing, sunglasses worn indoors, and a great sunny melody (with dark undertones). It is the perfect eighties tune.
Also, it has censorship issues. Californian sisters Tracey Bryn and Melissa Brooke Belland were based in London for the peak Voice of the Beehive Years. The BBC folks insisted they change the lyrics “she says I get it every night” and “he’ll rip you right in two.” The best lines of the song! Here they are “she says I see him every night” and “he’ll rip your heart in two,” which just ain’t the same thing.
They have a Web site that makes me regret even mentally categorizing them as a one-hit wonder eighties band. They worked hard at it for nearly a decade, had a number of respectably charting singles, and headlined shows on both sides of the Atlantic.
Also, this is a pretty awesome Partridge Family cover:
This guy Max Blumenthal. Courageous or reckless I’m not sure which. His site (where this video was originally posted) is great. It offers real skeptical journalism that’s sadly missing from the big boys.
I mean, he broke the story about the doctored radio transmission featuring the hilarious Daffy Duck as menacing Arab voiceover (and forced an IDF retraction) but it should not have been up to a blogger to do that. Paid journalists seemed contented to just type their talking points and call it a day in the crucial early hours after the Israeli pirate attack in international waters. Now they’re coming around and are acting all shocked and scrambling to offer both sides of the story. (Too late, though, as one of the protesters interviewed by Blumenthal is already quoting the “go back to Auschwitz” fabrication as fact.)
Blumenthal walks a fine line. To me, it’s kind of funny/ kind of scary when he suggests to a Tel Aviv protester that the “activists smashed their heads into the bullets,” or that the commandos descended from the “helicopter of love.” Funny because he can never come up with a suggestion that’s too extreme for his interview subjects. “Helicopter of love? If you say so…..” Scary because I am beginning to fear for his safety in this atmosphere of … what? “Collective Israeli derangement” is Max’s phrase. Which from a distance seems apt.
There have always been retro bands like Lucky Soul around, and if they haven’t made it big by now, they probably won’t. (But they have Glastonbury in late June….)
But I think they are fab. There are echoes of early Cardigans, St. Etienne, Camera Obscura, and even Swing Out Sister!
I confess to adoring their tunes, and singer Ali’s voice, attitude, and cheekbones pretty much equally.
Michael Sommers, the Brazil-based brother of Annie, Dave Campbell’s wife, has written “Thinking about ‘Wave Boy'”, a beautiful account of Dave’s time spent visiting Salvador and Rio. Curiosity, enthusiasm, recklessness. Classic Campbell.
A sample:
Another time, he and my sister went to the beach and Dave returned, thrilled at having made a new friend: a street kid to whom he had given the nickname “Wave Boy.” (Dave’s Portuguese was limited to “Tudo bem?”, “Tudo bom” and the ubiquitous thumbs-up sign that Brazilians use on a variety of occasions to mean “okay”, “cool”, “great”, etc. – but he got incredible mileage out of this linguistic trio). While I retroactively worried about the naivete of my sister and Dave palling around with street kids (not always the safest thing to do), Dave’s eyes were shining as he sipped his post-beach caipirinha and told me about the joys of body-surfing with this marvelous kid.
A rabid sports fan, Dave was over the moon to be in the land of futebol. When he discovered that a regional championship game was going to played in Salvador, he begged to be taken. My boyfriend (who had never been to a live soccer game) did the honors which, at the time, entailed hopping a municipal bus stuffed to the gills (to say there was “standing room” would be overly generous) with drunken, chanting, drumming (on the seats, windows, and side of the bus) fans. After getting far enough out in Salvador’s suburbs, it was necessary to walk through a favela and a garbage dump to actually reach the stadium. Emotions always run high at these games, but Dave’s joy lasted for months – and just as amazing as the actual game to him were the favela, the garbage, the endless ride, the pounding on the bus.
I am, I think, pulling out of the state of shock I’ve been in for the past 10 days. There will be a gathering of Dave’s college buddies and others in New York on the weekend of the 12th, and Heather and I will be there for that.
Until then, I have been driving the roads of central Kentucky, listening constantly to Dave’s genius compilations of brasilero music.
Dave Campbell, my best friend in the world, passed away Wednesday night. He was 50. I am still in shock. He had cancer but was responding terrifically to the chemo. I had just spoken to him a couple weeks earlier, and he was in good spirits and full of plans.
I knew Dave from the age of 13, when we compared results on our first test in Fred Gatto’s freshman biology class at St. Thomas Academy. We both lived in Minneapolis and commuted to a high school that was 15 miles away. A boys’ Catholic military school. It was a supremely strange experience, but we never thought so at the time. Our years there went from Nixon through Ford to Carter. It was a hard time for the authorities to keep order. There was a significantly large subgroup of the school that actively and openly mocked the JROTC and the military structure. Dave and I were in that group. He was a good student, but his subversive streak was already apparent. By himself, Dave turned more than a few teachers’ heads gray.
That obit mentions how Dave “reveled in small, clever displays of defiance against authority.” Perfectly said. There are so many of these from which to choose, but my most cherished was his graduation gesture. Remember, it’s a military school. All the cadets were expected to march smartly up to the stage to receive their diplomas with a crisp salute. Dave ambled up with his characteristic splay-footed, forward-leaning shuffle, and flipped the most nonchalant salute imaginable from shoulder height. There was an audible gasp, and I looked around to see parents and teachers mouthing silent imprecations à la the wedding scene from the Graduate (2:28-2:34). I could not stop grinning.
He went to the University of Chicago, I to Notre Dame, 90 miles away. The first time I visited him in Hyde Park he had discovered an entirely new personality that merged Kerouac-era beatnik with an 80-year-old bluesman up from the Mississippi Delta. That was when strange phrases such as “a buck three-eighty” (an indeterminate sum of money) and “going to get my butter whipped” (haircut) entered his vocabulary. Did he pick them up from old guys on the South Side, or did he invent them? I don’t think I’ll ever know.
We would bump into each other a few times after college, but he came back into my life in a major way in 1988. In the wake of an unpleasant after-hours bar dust up in Chicago, he left his paralegal job in Chicago and drove a Dodge Colt, with expired plates and done up in patchy gray primer, to Brooklyn. I had an apartment there and he stayed on the couch for a fairly long time. Under pressure from my roommates, he answered an ad for a share, and moved into 234 5th Avenue with a crowd of French and Japanese musicians the very same day. That night, Christmas Eve, he sat in on drums at a basement jam session and I beheld the return of that look of infinite joy that lit up his face every time he stepped behind the kit!
Dave eventually became a senior resident of the shared apartment. He gave himself a pretty sweet deal on his share of the rent, which apparently caused no small stir of resentment on the part of one Becky Wreck, another drummer and his roommate.
One weekday early in spring, Dave invited me over to watch an afternoon Twins game on this new thing (for us) called Cable Television. We were nursing our Bud torpedoes and enjoying the game (Frankie Viola on the mound). Becky (who was paying the cable bill as well as a lot more rent than Dave) stormed in, yanked the cable connection out of the wall, and started in on Dave.
I lamely pipped up something to the effect of “er, but I was watching that….”
She whirled and shouted “I DON’T KNOW YOU!” Dave, til that moment speechless, sighed and made a little windshield wiper motion with his index fingers, and muttered:
“Tim … Becky.
Becky … Tim …”
***
Dave and me, Brooklyn rooftop 1990
Dave and I were bike messengers together for a while. And then we made the major career move up to office temps for Laury Girls. Our typing tests were comical. But for whatever reason, Laury kept sending us out. Eventually we got “real” jobs. We both worked in midtown for the better part of a decade, and often had long lunches together in Central Park, where we toted our greasy bags containing double wurst combos from Rolf, the Hallo Berlin cart man (who sadly also passed away recently). Rolf, who could be a major grouch, was thrilled to see Dave, and there was always a surreally entertaining exchange between the two of them.
Dave was best man when Heather and I got married in 1990, and when we moved to a farm in Kentucky in 2003, he came down to visit every year, sometimes twice. He loved it here, and was the source of much amusement for our kids. We played golf. Many of Dave’s urban friends may be unaware of the importance of golf to the man. If you thought he could go on about Elvin Jones, wait til he started in on Jack Nicklaus.
His passion for the game was great, but he was never very good. For someone capable of such finesse with drum sticks and brushes, he had the most brutal chipping touch of anyone I have ever seen. He gripped way too tightly, and often sent the ball clear over the green, when he wasn’t chunking it two feet. Hitting the driver was another story. He LOVED swinging a golf club hard, and it was the rare tee shot that didn’t require a few steps backwards to right himself from the violence of his swing. Whether the ball traveled far or not, you could always say to Dave, “You didn’t get cheated on that one.” He did not hold anything back.
And that is the one small consolation I can find in my current broken-hearted state.
Dave never held anything back. He never got cheated. Ever. He packed more into his fifty years than most of us could in a hundred.
In five days I already have such a backlog of things I mentally file under “Wait’ll I tell Dave about this.” I want to tell him about what Heather’s up to (he was so proud of Heather and promised her books would never go out of print while he was in charge of inventory), or what Theo or Daniel or Lila said; when my calves are born. I want to continue arguing Tiger vs. Jack, to have endless arguments about his weirdly arbitrary passions; I want to send him twenty emails a day when the World Cup is on.
I don’t have any way to sum this all up. It is still pretty much unbearable for me. I miss him a lot already.
Please go to my tumblr for more pix of Dave which I am uploading in fits and starts….
