The Customer is Always Right.....?

"I’ve had the first one of the year…..more to come.  A customer wants to know which ….uhhh…let me copy and paste this because I can’t do it justice.

Please advise."

I take a deep breath. Our family grows a lot of plants for the woman sending us this email.  We ship vegetable starter plants, finished hanging baskets and flowering pots, and...starting this year....herbs and cucumber plants, stevia and edamame (yep, edible soybeans) and a host of other flowering annuals.  In our greenhouses, we grow not just hybrid tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, but also heirloom tomatoes, hot and sweet peppers, destined for the patios and gardens of Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, with some making their way as far north as the Dakotas.  Last year we fielded questions about our entire production system for growing the vegetables that would eventually bloom and produce something edible: were they organic; did they contain GMOs? (insinuating that being GMO is a contagion one can catch.)   But the letter she was preparing to copy and paste..copied and pasted here ....was clearly one for the record books.  Read it and weep.

"I need to know which plants that you sell are genetically modified - what I mean by genetically modified are plants that undergo unnatural genetic engineering including shooting genes into chromosomes.  I am fine with plants that have been selectively bred.  Selective breeding is a natural process of natural selection.  I would prefer native but will accepts selective breeding options.  If any of these flowering plants are native and not altered in any way, I need to know that for sure.  I would like to place a sizable order but your plants are not marketed to indicate which ones may be unnaturally genetically modified.  I do not want to kill bees and other pollinators by planting unsafe plants for them.  I am also selective about considering plants that produce vegetables for our consumption.  I only plant non genetically modified (no lab created seeds) food plants for my family's consumption and only use organic soil.  I do not use miracle grow or other harmful products in my food gardens.  If your food plants are not modified, you need to indicate it for sure.  I need to know, for sure, that the flowering ornamental plants I consider from your company will not be harmful in any way to our ecosystem."

Sigh.  Really, where does one start.  With the confused, incomprehensible, and value laden  differentiation between 'natural' and whatever it's antithesis is considered to be?  (Unsafe? Harmful? Unselective, perhaps?  Foreign, heaven forfend.....)  How can we possibly cut a Gordian knot that defines "selective"breeding as a "natural" process of "natural" selection!!?  Selection involves a choice...by someone or something.  In this case, the someone is a human being.  In the broadest sense, yes, a human being is certainly something "natural", but using that interpretation makes all genetic alteration natural and I don't think that's what the writer intended to imply at all.  Choosing a desirable characteristic is certainly "selection", but there is nothing "natural", aka accidental or arbitrary, about it.

Let's continue. No, I'm afraid none of the flowering plants we are growing for this account are 'native'.  They are annuals and unmistakably altered (bred) for color, hardiness, disease resistance, long blooming, and probably, drought tolerance, seeing as many of the flowers purchased by our customers have to endure conditions that are quite "unnatural".... roots constrained to a very small volume of soil and watered once a week or less....  But no problem: if one desires a "natural" planting there are other options.  Just let these highly improved annuals reseed for year or two and the offspring will revert to the pallid ancestors of sporadic bloom and sprawling habit. Or grow your own natives from seed or purchased perennials.  There ARE indeed grand and garden worthy native plants; I'm a huge fan.  But growing indigenous species will not make you a better person or provide more habitat for pollinators or butterflies than a pot of lantana or a planting of pentas.  Grow 'em both; that's my advice!

And let's get one thing perfectly straight; there isn't going to be a genetically modified seed or plant in any of our greenhouses this year.  I wish there were!  I wish there was a way to prevent fungus from spotting zinnias, botrytis from browning geraniums, and put a stop to the downy mildew plague that has devastated impatiens the last few years!  If one buys a tomato from us, it may be a brand new hybrid with lots of letters after its name signifying its resistance to various nasty fungi...or one can choose something tried and true like Rutgers or Big Boy....but we will be just as happy to sell you a heritage tomato variety like Cherokee or German Johnson.  Choice is good, and one need only leaf through a catalog like Totally Tomatoes to realize the past, present, and future of home garden production offers a cornucopia of decisions.  

While I'm on my garden soapbox, allow me to point out that it would be a really tough job to find a totally inorganic soil.  Even an abused garden plot will contain a fair amount of organic matter in the form of stems, leaves, roots, mulch and other leftovers in various stages of decomposition.  I guess my grandkids' sandbox might be considered an inorganic garden spot...but not after they've pounded a half dozen gourds into pulp and planted the seeds.....

Ecosystem is such a sterile technical term.  A garden can be many things...organized or unkempt, monotone or multi-hued, edible or ornamental, frivolous or practical. Forgive me if I believe planting flowers and vegetables, whether for consumption or pleasure, is a net gain for the earth and all the creatures thereof.  We grow plants for a living...and for love.  That's the kind of rule I can live with....

Poison, Poems and Prairies

 He's young and slender and dressed all in black.  We're sitting in the 'green room' backstage at the Gem Theater at 18th and Vine in the historic Jazz District of Kansas City.  "This is Alex", the woman with the headset tells us, "And he's going to recite a poem." I don't remember the title of Alex's poem, but it was appropriate to the event being a lusciously descriptive list of the good things cooking in a traditional Southern kitchen.  He exhibits a cultivated intensity, attaching gravity to beans and collards.  We are taking food seriously too, having got to the theater early so Blake can do a sound check; this poem and a couple of chunks of cheese are as close as we are likely to come to supper until this NPR event, Going There, How We Eat, is over and we are invited for a glass of wine and some "curated" food at a reception across the street.

This isn't our first rodeo. The occasion is part of a live-event series for National Public Radio hosted by the weekend host of All Things Considered, Michel Martin. Kansas City is a logical locus for the  focus for this show: “How We Eat” will include both live discussions and a virtual panel of Twitter contributors.  It has been our experience that an invitation to represent the "conventional farmer" viewpoint on a "diverse" agricultural panel is a chance to be the "skunk in the garden party", as Blake represents himself to moderator Michel Martin.  The diverse part is readily apparent in the green room.  Here's the "tomato whisperer", who grows heirloom tomatoes and hosts tomato tastings.  There's a young entrepreneur who went back to her cooking roots after the 2008-9 bust left her jobless. The MacArthur grant genius and grand old man of perennial prairie grasses, Wes Jackson, sits down with us two unrepentant growers of annual crops to talk about the Fall.  No, not Adam and Eve.  The Fall, according to Mr. Jackson, is when one of our hungry ancestors scratched down to bare earth.  From that, 'twas but a wide and slippery slope to the cultivation of  wheat and corn and rice, crops that require the hand of man to plant, to harvest, to thrive, crops that turned humanity not into farmers...but "weeders" in Mr. Jackson's parlance. "I don't know why farmers don't like me,"he says. Yeah.  Perhaps it’s because you consider agriculture a 10,000 year old mistake leading to “soil loss and degradation, ecosystem destruction and high energy use”, while farmers like us tend to believe we marshal limited resources in an economical fashion, utilizing brains and technology to grow maximum food and fiber with minimum “unnatural’ inputs. Blake and I are not unfamiliar with his lifework and enjoy the chance to respectfully spar with someone famous in his field, even though I cannot help but think of the Wizard of Oz as we talk about being  “imprisoned by our technology.”  If there had been a genetic shortcut to a perennial grain, would Mr. Jackson have made that deal with the technological Devil?

 One of the other panelists describes herself as the "farm steward" of the  acreage where she "forages" for sustainably produced fruit, vegetables, herbs and other edibles to sell to her customers.  Nothing value laden in that description, right?  While she insists her intent is not to be confrontational, her description of pesticide use is difficult to construe as anything but antagonistic no matter how mild her manner.  Question: "As I understand it, you're critical of conventional farming. You are all organic...." Answer: "...it's just very practical.  If I just say it out loud that we dump poison on our food or use poison to protect our food...." This is a person familiar with chemicals, with modern medicine. Yet she sees no incongruity between confidence in the science of today's medicine and fear of today's technologies in agriculture.  Growing organic and eating organic is certainly a choice. But it is not necessarily better for the land, the farmer, or the people eating any more than relying on homemade herbal poultices is a better remedy for my headache than a chemical medicine like ibuprofen.

No wonder a self proclaimed conventional farmer using every conceivable tool, genetic, mechanical, cloud based, can feel like he's being picked on.  Blake, the poster child for our version of family farming, takes advantage of every inconsistency in the arguments of the anti technology advocates to defend and promote two fundamental ideas:  1) that the ultimate goal is to feed people and take care of the land, and 2) that there will be a farmer willing to produce whatever the market wishes as long as there is freedom to do so.  This is a conciliatory gesture that most of this audience in Kansas City can rally to: that growing food and buying food and eating food for every budget, taste, and philosophy is far too big a challenge for but one set of rules.

 Michel Martin, the host, steers the group by asking questions that cut through cliche in a way that is pithy and not judgmental.  For instance, a question for Blake: "Why (would) you even feel the need to say you're unapologetic about it (being a conventional farmer)....you know, large-scale farming is in part one of the reasons why this country has been the best-fed nation in the history of the world". For Wes Jackson ringing the doomsday bell about  the outlook for an agriculture based on conventional crops: "How many years do we have left?"  About organic food: "How much would it take to switch to organic?" And I cannot imagine an audience anywhere but in the Midwest approving the notion that folks ought to know what their slaughtered beef looks like.  

 In the end, we skipped the line for the curated food across the road in the Jazz Museum, opting instead for a couple of sandwiches at the Love's Truck Stop just south of St. Joseph.  The wind whipped up a cloud of gravel dust ahead of a squall line visible north on I-29.  There were three cars at the gas pumps and two tables of huddled diners inside. Were the sandwiches we ate in the car at 11 pm as delicious as the tasty greens in Kansas City?

Nope.

I remembered how one of the panelists complained that "food was just fuel...it allows us to keep working.  We don't think of it as history or culture."  But that is exactly the strength and glory of our food system: It is big enough to do both jobs and carry them off well.  Some of us farmers grow cash crops to feed the makings of a chicken sandwich at a truck stop at midnight.  And some of us grow the chef's herbs for a meal savored and celebrated and memorized.

And a very few, like Alex, call it poetry.....

To hear part of the discussion, listen here:

  Going There: How We Eat...Food, Farming and Health

Not Free Enough

It was right there on the label.

"Gluten-Free"

Because we have several family members who have celiac disease, I was thrilled to discover another cereal from a mainstream manufacturer to add to the various Chex rice and corn cereals.  Even a full spectrum of Chex flavors like vanilla, cinnamon, and chocolate leaves one longing for variety.  I thought I was getting ready to provide a real treat, a breakthrough in breakfast.  While I tend to cast a jaundiced eye on the eating public's current infatuation with all things gluten free, it's an ill wind that blows no good.  This latest fad makes it easier to find foods labeled gluten free without reading through all the fine print.  One need not hunt up a specialty health food store to find certain foods. Cooking and shopping for a person with celiac is both more convenient and less risky.

Except for when it isn't.  

Turns out that the oats in these new products meet these requirements:

"FDA labeling rules allow the use of oats as long as the finished food contains less than 20 parts per million of gluten, the standard applied to any gluten-free product."

"Prior to approval of the FDA’s labeling laws, only specialty gluten-free oats grown and processed in a precise way to prevent cross-contamination were permitted in foods labeled gluten free.

Due to the scarcity and higher cost of these specialty gluten-free oats, food manufacturers making gluten-free products are utilizing mechanical and optical sorting processes to separate stray wheat and barley from the oats prior to manufacturing. This includes General Mills’ Cheerios and Quaker’s gluten-free oatmeal."

Ok. So here's my interpretation of these developments.  First of all,  there are and have been actual gluten free oats for oatmeal and baking that will not make a celiac sick.  I have some in my freezer right now.  But, you don't have to read between the lines to figure out that oats produced in an uncontaminated environment are too expensive to attract moms who believe going "gluten free" is somehow better for their family's diet but will never know whether "gluten free" means 21 ppm or 200 ppm because their health does not depend on it.

(I get a kick out of the use of the term "scarcity".  Clearly, clean facilities currently exist to process oats to ensure they are free from barley and wheat, the main gluten culprits.  Are they running three shifts? Are they bidding up the price of oats in their area?  If they are, then there may be a temporary shortage of oats while the market adjusts to the increased demand.  But if General Mills and Post don't think the families of America will pay more for truly gluten free oats, then yes, I reckon there will continue to be scarcity.  Thus has it ever been.)

My excitement over the new gluten free additions to breakfast was short lived.  Turns out the FDA label requirements for defining gluten free are insufficiently rigorous: a sensitive celiac will get sick from eating the new Honey Bunches of Oats or Quaker Oats. The label Gluten Free isn't worth the cardboard box it is printed on.  A food label is intended to provide useful and helpful information.

Until it doesn't.

Talk of labeling reminds me of the current kerfuffle about GMO labeling.  We have a greenhouse customer who wants to know what to tell her clientele about our vegetable plants.  Some of her customers want to know if our tomatoes and peppers are GMO (they aren't) and if they are organic. (nope, we use a specially balanced chemical fertilizer to ensure our plants stay green...not purple!) Sure, it's OK to ask us these questions, but how on earth would these would-be gardeners know if their vegetable plants were GMO? Can they tell by looking?  By tasting?  (I certainly wish I would never consume another cabbage looper with my broccoli from the garden.) Whether the foods purchased at the grocery are labeled GMO or not labled GMO, no one is going to get sick or be hurt when they partake.  They will never know the difference between a slice of toast spread with GMO margarine and one spread with non GMO oleo...if such a thing existed.  No one has a GMO food allergy.  No scary warning label like the ones that proclaim baldly CONTAINS: MILK or NUTS or EGGS or SOY.

But the GLUTEN FREE label so carelessly plastered on the boxes of cereal does make people sick...it does make a mockery of the food safety and information imperative that labeling implies.  If a food label cannot be trusted, if it only exists as another marketing tool to differentiate one similar product from another, if the label doesn't keep people healthy, then what's the point?

NUT FREE should mean no nuts...safe for people allergic to nuts.

And GLUTEN FREE should mean no gluten...safe for celiacs...not just a way to participate in the latest food fight.

THAT would be truth  in labeling.

That Ol' Black Magic....or Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself

Fair Warning: Gut Wrenching Emotions and Finger Wagging Preaching Ahead.

A couple of weeks ago, Blake and I joined with some of our Missouri Farm Bureau friends to tour the NICU floor of St. Louis Children's Hospital  as part of our Farm Bureau's partnership with the St. Louis Cardinals and the March of Dimes.  Once on the floor, my heart raced to my throat as the twin emotions of hope and fear were awakened by the rhythmic beeps of monitors and the hush associated with all nurseries.  It was not quite a year since our grandson Levi was born early and rushed to the NICU at the Virginia Medical Center, but I know I'll never cease praying for the moms and dads, brothers, sisters and tiny new siblings whose journey in life begins with time in the NICU.  Add to that list the medical staff: ever patient, ever watchful, ever solicitous, ever sensitive to the needs of their patients and their loved ones. 

It takes more than prayer to heal and grow these tiny people.  It takes science. How many of these little patients would be bundled into their infant seats and sleep in their own cribs to the rejoicing of their families without the efforts of researchers in labs using substances with scary sounding long names and machines with tubes and needles and someone analyzing what will make tiny guts and unfinished lungs strong and healthy.

Anyone who visits a NICU will agree that human ingenuity and scientific research is on the side of the angels. Even if they do not understand the processes or substances or applications involved.  It is good medicine.

So.... why the brouhaha when scientists change plants? Humans have been doing this for millennia, of course, but only recently has alteration of plant genetic makeup caused some people to make the sign against the Evil Eye.  Science works to heal us, to feed us, to entertain us, to educate us: which of these benefits is society willing to lay aside?  Which of these benefits can the human race do without?  

Last time I looked, we all needed to eat. 

Scientists and farmers, plant and animal breeders, did not under take to improve nature's handiwork just to make a life of cultivation easier.  Whether hybridization or the use of mineral fertilizers or irrigation or the addition of genes to make a plant less susceptible to insects, man has a moral imperative to use all the the tools in his arsenal to produce sustenance for a growing world, just as doctors, nurses and all the healers elsewhere in a hospital work to nourish and sustain the babies in a NICU.  This is what they are called to do.

Those who would argue that one is a natural reaction and the other an artificial concoction, that messing with the genetic code is a bridge too far may be guilty of nothing more than a skewed perception.  Read this from Maria Konnikova in the New Yorker:

 "Psychologists have long observed that there is a continuum in what we perceive as natural or unnatural. As the psychologist Robert Sternberg wrote in 1982, the natural is what we find more familiar, while what we consider unnatural tends to be more novel—perceptually and experientially unfamiliar—and complex, meaning that more cognitive effort is required to understand it. The natural is seen as inherently positive; the unnatural is not. And anything that involves human manipulation is considered highly unnatural—like, say, G.M.O.s, even though genetically modified food already lines the shelves at grocery stores. As Michael Specter put it, “The history of agriculture is the history of humans breeding seeds and animals to produce traits we want in our crops and livestock.

       In a 2013 study, a group of Cornell University researchers found that how a food is labelled affects our perception of how it tastes, what its nutritional value is, and our willingness to pay for it. A hundred and fifteen shoppers at a local Ithaca mall were given three different food pairs. One item in each pair was labelled “organic” while the other was labelled “regular.” (In reality, the two items were identical, and both were organically produced.) The shoppers were then asked to rate the taste and the nutritional value of the products, as well as to guess at calorie counts and say how much they’d be willing to pay for each item. The researchers found that people's calorie estimates for the organic foods were consistently lower: an organic cookie, for example, was seen as approximately twenty-four per cent less caloric than a regular one. They thought the organic food tasted less artificial and was more nutritious over-all. They were also willing to pay somewhere between sixteen and twenty-three per cent more for the organic items. They were, essentially, experiencing something known as the halo effect, a phenomenon whereby one positive attribute of a person or thing colors other, unrelated characteristics in a positive light."

We are rich beyond belief in comparison to the timeline of human history.  We are so rich we can battle for every human life against whatever odds.  And we use extraordinary feats of science and human imagination to do so.  Many of us have witnessed this firsthand and are changed by our experience.  It is not immoral to believe we owe this same effort and ingenuity to food production: the best utilization and preservation of the limited arable productive land, soil, and water on this earth.  Human nutrition and human health are intertwined; any given two hours of television infomercials can tell you that.  

Indeed, we humans tend to fear what we don't comprehend....except for when we need to be healed, and accept what we don't understand without a peep because there is no alternative.  When it comes to science, its time to realize a double standard has been constructed and recognize we cannot afford it.  

Off my soapbox.  There is a whole trunkful of groceries to unload for a summer feast to celebrate the first birthday of the little boy who spent his first two weeks in the NICU. 

Let's party!