Plant-based food companies are rising up against Big Meat

from QUARTZ:

Every five years since 1980, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issue dietary guidelines they call “authoritative [diet] advice for Americans.” The unveiling of the final guidelines follows a report from the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) and a comment period for the public to weigh in on the findings.

After issuing its last round of guidelines in 2010, the HHS received 1,159 comments. Its latest diagnosis of the American diet has received more than 8,000 comments (the comment period ends May 8), largely due to a controversial finding that a plant-based diet is both “more health promoting,” and “associated with less environmental impact than is the current US diet.”

It marked the first time that the DGAC had considered sustainability in its findings, and included a rare explicit recommendation to eat less meat: “A healthy dietary pattern is… lower in red and processed meats.”

While many faith-based organizations, universities, and health professionals have lauded the attempt to connect our diet to sustainability, the meat industry strongly opposes it. “It is not appropriate for the person designing a better light bulb to be telling Americans how to make a better sandwich,” Betsy Booren, Vice President of Scientific Affairs for the North American Meat Institute, said in one comment. Even USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack has come out against discussing sustainability in the dietary guidelines, making the stipulation’s chances of survival seem slim at best.

If the clause has any chance of surviving, it might be thanks to a new counterweight to the US meat lobby. A coalition of more than 20-plant based food companies, including The Tofurky Company, Emmy’s Organics, and Daiya Foods, joined together to support including sustainability in the guidelines. “The DGAC’s findings reflect a substantial body of science that illustrates the synergies between a healthy diet and a sustainable food system,” Michele Simon, a food industry lawyer who runs the consulting firm Eat Drink Politics, wrote in comments submitted on the coalition’s behalf.

Sales of meat alternatives still only account for a fraction of US meat sales ($550 million in 2014, compared to roughly $70 billion in sales of beef, poultry, and pork, according to Mintel). But the coalition’s letter is a reminder to the USDA that plant-based food companies represent a legitimate sector of the economy, showing that “the ‘food industry’ is not one monolithic group but rather includes a wide array of food businesses,” says Kim Kessler, Policy and Special Programs Director of the UCLA Resnick Program for Food Law and Policy.

For the USDA, which has a dual mission to protect American agribusiness and advise on healthy diets, the meat lobby’s economic might counts for a lot. “In policymaking, pizza usually speaks more loudly than peas,” Doug Blanke, Director of the Public Health Law Center at William Mitchell College of Law tells Quartz.

But scientific evidence can be hard to dismiss, even for a business-minded regulator, Blanke adds. The coalition’s letter, he notes, includes 45 footnotes, pointing to medical and environmental studies, news articles, and government websites to support its conclusions.

Models of Sustainability: Sweden Runs Out of Garbage

from True Activist

By: Amanda Froelich,

Imagine a world where pollution is a non-issue, cities are pristine, healthy environments to live in, and little to no entanglements from discarded trash injures wildlife or clogs the oceans. In Sweden, this is almost a reality, yet it’s causing a paradoxical predicament for the recycle-happy country that relies on waste to heat and provide electricity to hundreds of thousands of homes.

The Scandinavian nation of more than 9.5 million citizens has run out of garbage; while this is a positive – almost enviable – predicament for a country to be facing, Sweden now has to search for rubbish outside of its borders to generate its waste-to-energy incineration program. It’s namely Norway officials who are now shipping in 80,000 tons of refuse annually to fuel the country with outside waste.

The population’s remarkable pertinacious recycling habits are inspiration for other garbage-bloated countries where the idea of empty landfills is scarce. In fact, only 4 percent of all waste in Sweden is land-filled, a big win for the future of sustainable living. By using its two million tons of waste as energy and scrapping for more outside of its borders, this country is shown in international comparisons to be the global leader in recovering energy in waste. Go Sweden.

Public Radio International has the whole story. This (albeit short-term) solution is even highly beneficial for the Scandinavian country; Norway pays Sweden to take its excess waste, Sweden burns it for heat and electricity, and the ashes remaining from the incineration process, filled with highly polluting dioxins, are returned back to Norway and land filled.

Catarina Ostland, senior advisor for the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, suggests that Norway may not be the perfect partner for the trash import-export scheme, however. “I hope that instead we will get the waste from Italy or from Romania or Bulgaria, or the Baltic countries because they landfill a lot in these countries” she tells PRI. “They don’t have any incineration plants or recycling plants, so they need to find a solution for their waste”.

There’s definitely something to be said about being ‘green’. Regardless of its sourcing, hopefully Sweden’s impeccable job of reducing its carbon footprint may serve as an example to other areas of the world that have more than enough trash to utilize and put to sustainable use.

Sources:

Capaitalfm.co.ke

Sweden Waste-Energy Sustainability

"Earthship Biotecture": Renegade New Mexico Architect’s Radical Approach to Sustainable Living

from DemocracyNow

New Mexico residents are trying to a break free from Los Alamos’ nuclear legacy by creating more environmentally sound ways of living. At the forefront of this struggle is renegade architect Michael Reynolds, creator of radically sustainable living options through a process called "Earthship Biotecture." Reynolds’ solar homes are created from natural and recycled materials, including aluminum cans, plastic bottles and used tires. These off-the-grid homes minimize their reliance on public utilities and fossil fuels by harnessing their energy from the sun and wind turbines. In Taos, New Mexico, Reynolds gives us a tour of one of the sustainable-living homes he created.