Is organic food from China safe?
By Sarah Elton - Friday, June 17, 2011 - 1 Comment
While organic agriculture is big in China, concerns about food safety and quality are starting to arise
Nelson Ching/Bloomberg/Getty Images
In the new China, everything is big. Drive south on the wide highway from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, and for hours you will see field after field of vegetables with farmers stooped over crops, and pass trucks, motorized tricycles and bikes overflowing with fresh cabbages, onions and greens. This farmland outside Kunming is one of dozens of vast agricultural areas in the country that grow about half of all the world’s vegetables, an increasing number of which are now certified organic. Over the past 10 years, China has converted millions of hectares to organic agriculture—between 2005 and 2006, the amount of organically managed land went up more than tenfold. Today, China has more organic land than any other country, positioning it to be the world’s largest organic producer.
This potential to grow a lot in one place is what motivated Gary Lloyd to look to China in 2000 to source organic peas, spinach and other produce. Lloyd’s company freezes and packages the produce on behalf of other brands that then sell it under their own names at supermarkets in Canada and the United States. He was one of many who saw opportunity in China’s rapidly growing organic export industry—today, Canadians eat a wide range of organic produce from China. The country supplies one-third of all the green peas we eat, both conventional and organic, and much of our apple juice.
But while organic agriculture is big in China, so too are tainted food scandals—think melamine in milk and, more recently, exploding watermelons—and now concerns about food safety in the country are starting to push production back to Canada. Chinese exports of organic fruits and vegetables may be on the rise, but the question is, how long will they continue to be?
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Meet the red-wine-swilling cows
By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, August 5, 2010 at 5:37 PM - 0 Comments
In the quest for better tasting beef, one farmer pours 1,000 gallons of vino every few weeks
Photo Illustration by Bradley Reinhardt
When Bill Freding’s cows unwind over a litre of red wine, they tend to loosen up and get a little chatty, mooing more at each other. Although he serves plonk—the blend of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and shiraz wine cellared in the Okanagan Valley isn’t fit for human consumption—the cows are fond of it.
Pleasure, however, isn’t the point: Freding, who has been in the feedlot business for 23 years, believes wine-drinking cows make tastier steaks. Typically, at the age of 12 months, a cow is finished—a more genteel way of saying fattened for the kill three months away from the slaughterhouse—on grain feed, although grass works as well. But Freding also pours each of his cattle a bottle a day during that final process, something he started doing in 2009 at the suggestion of entrepreneur Janice Ravndahl. “It is probably our only hope for survival in the beef industry in B.C., to get some of the unique markets so we can command [higher] prices,” he explains.
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Now that their dinner is really ruined . . .
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, December 10, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 23 Comments
You’d think it’s a good time for progressives to rethink the vote-with-my-wallet notion. The planet should be so lucky.
Americans have two great loves, eating and shopping, and their Thanksgiving holiday is the occasion when they enjoy both activities in all their gluttonous splendour. But while the central concern of most Americans last week was how to avoid getting trampled in the Black Friday stampedes at the mall, a more conscientious group was stressing over the morality of the holiday menu: should the vegetables be organic, or local?It turns out that if you’re actually serious about taste, health benefits, and environmental impact, the correct answer is “neither.” The dispute between organic and local is one of those enormously high-strung civil wars that sweep through the environmental movement from time to time. And like its most notable predecessor, the paper-or-plastic conflict that raged across supermarket checkout counters in the late 1980s, this is one of those fights that is a genuine sucker’s game: the only way you can win is by not playing.
The jig has been up for organic for a while now. Originally promoted as the magic bullet of the produce aisle, with better taste, health benefits and environmental grades than regular food, organic has turned out to be none of those things. It didn’t help the organic brand that Wal-Mart started selling by the gross to the ambulatory eating machines of Middle America, but at least its defenders could cling to the idea that an organic tomato or lemon was more nutritious than its conventionally grown counterpart.
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Authenticity Watch: Organic Mattresses
By Andrew Potter - Friday, January 16, 2009 at 12:08 AM - 5 Comments
You have to hand it to the New York Times: With Americans facing what…
You have to hand it to the New York Times: With Americans facing what is shaping up to be the worst economic downturns in decades, they still duty-bound to give their readers this sort of stuff:
The question of what’s really in a mattress is important, at least as some people see it, because, they believe, any product made with synthetic materials carries potential health risks. “You spend a third of your life in bed,” said Debra Lynn Dadd, an author and blogger in Clearwater, Fla., who has been writing about toxic substances in household products for 25 years. “If you are interested in things like organic food and natural beauty products,” she added, “you should realize that you’re actually getting a greater exposure to toxic chemicals in your bed than anywhere else.”
