Yakuniku - The Emperor's new dish

If you eaten in a Japanese restaurant, chances are big that you devoured Yakiniku, grilled meat. You probably believe it is developed from a long tradition of street vendors selling barbecue. Nothing could be further from reality. At the age of twenty, Emperor Meiji staged a remarkable new year’s party in Tokyo January 1873. As part of efforts to modernize Japan into the direction of the model of an enlightened Nation state –Meiji means “enlightened rule” - , guests were dressed in western style cloths and on the plates French style food was served. Most remarkably, there was beef and the Emperor himself ate beef in public. By this he broke a more than thousand year old taboo. The first decree against eating meat was issued on 675 in Japan and was repeated several times over the almost eleven hundred years before that remarkable party.[i]

What we eat and how we eat it is to a very large extent shaped by many other forces than consumer demand. Many of the shifts in diet are consequences of power politics, capitalism and technology of modern imperialism. For example, by introducing, among other things, rice, cattle, coffee and sugar-cane to the Americas, Europeans, in turn, not only altered the local foodways, but also made the economies of American societies part of global markets[ii].

When I grew up in Sweden all our bread was sweetened, and I thought that was normal. But recently I came to realise that this was a result of public policy forty years before I was born. During World War I there was a shortage of grain in Sweden, but a surplus of sugar. Therefore the authorities commanded bakeries to mix sugar with the flour to keep people sated and happy. Once eating the sweet bread we got used to it – it became something we chose.

“War is probably the single most powerful instrument of dietary change in human experience” writes Sydney Mintz in Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Under conditions of war, old habits may be surrendered more easily and new ones established with less resistance than would be the case in peaceful circumstances. Katarzyna J. Cwiertka studied the food in Japanese canteens and observed that the menues in modern day Tokyo are made up of dishes that are luxury versions of those served in the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy half a century earlier.

World War II reshaped food preferences of American citizens, both those who were drafted into the armed forces and civilians at home. This transformation of diet was also on close cooperation with the food industry. The President of Coca Cola, Robert Woodruff, ordered that every man in uniform should get a bottle of Coca-Cola for 5 cents, wherever he is, and whatever it costs the Company. In 1943, General Dwight D. Eisenhower sent an urgent cablegram to Coca-Cola, requesting shipment of materials for 10 bottling plants. “During the war, many people enjoyed their first taste of the beverage, and when peace finally came, the foundations were laid for Coca-Cola to do business overseas.” is how Coca Cola company describes the effect on its web site[iii].

As for many other industries, orders from the military have been a major driver of technology change. It is not only penicilin, aircrafts and the internet that are results of military demand but also canning. In 1795, a Parisian chef and confectioner, Nicolas Appert experimented in new ways of preserving foods by putting soups, vegetables, juices, dairy products, jellies, jams, and syrups in glass jars, sealing them and placing them in boiling water. In 1800 Napoleon, who is widely quoted, accurately or not, as saying, "An army marches on its stomach," offered an award of 12,000 francs to anyone who could devise a practical method for food preservation for the armies. The award went to Appert. Since the method was considered to be of strategic importance, Appert was not allowed to publish it until 1810[iv].

In a similar way as for Coca Cola, the Norman Camembert-makers were very successful in selling their cheese to the French military in World War I in sharp competition with Gruyere. Camembert won the war, and became itself part of the myth of the Great War, demanded by the million surviving conscripts[v].

---

[i] The politics of food, Marianne Elisabeth Lien & Brigitte Nerlich,  

[ii] Popularizing a Military Diet in Wartime and Postwar Japan, Katarzyna J. CWIERTKA

[iii] http://heritage.coca-cola.com/timeline.swf

[iv] Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) No. 59.

[v] Camembert, a national Myth, Pierre Boisard

Does vegan farming work?

Koryama proudly shows his carrots. The leaves are not very impressive, but the roots are. He grows according to the Shizen Natural Farming concept, which essentially is about not applying any fertilizers, manures or composts. They claim that yields are somewhat lower than organic farming but that taste is superior. I can at least confirm that taste was very good.

Koryama pulls a very decent carrot!

Having grown vegetables myself for 32 years on rather poor soils, I am not particularly easy to convince that it is possible to do this without major soil building. This can be in the form of green manures and, at least on poor soils, some addition of e.g potash or phosphorus-rich minerals if not animal manure is admitted. Having promoting organic for 35 years I am also aware of how easily an alternative thought is dismissed, so I agree with myself to be open minded.

I ask Koryama if he applies the method for the Japanese staple food rice also, but no, this was only for fruits and vegetables. However, fruit and vegs are greedy and spoiled crops, so in my opinion, if it works for them, it should also work for other crops. The soils of Koryama, in Narita in Japan, are volcanic and I believe very rich, so it is of course possible that he is still “mining fertility”. But he has farmed with the method for more than 30 years, so one can’t easily say that he will soon run out of nutrients. His crops are sold by the Shizen Organic and Natural Food Ltd. They sell for the same price as organic and are also certified organic. His yield is lower but he says he can sell lower grades to the clients that want his produce and in addition he doesn’t have to buy any inputs, so it compares quite well with “normal” organic, for which he is also certified.


My starting point in thinking is that the various production systems that mankind developed over centuries have been rather well adapted to the ecological conditions where they developed. That is why the Mediterranean production system is quite different from the system in Western Europe or in the river valleys of India. But even if they were different, there were no systems without animals. And if all these systems had animals there were probably some quite good reasons for it. Even in India, where they supposedly are vegetarians (a truth with big modification) their system has been very much based on keeping cows and buffaloes – they are the worlds biggest milk producer and the biggest beef exporter!

Natural systems also have animals and plants mixed. We can’t easily integrate wild animals in our crop production systems, as they mostly will destroy the crops. Humans are not a replacement for the grazing animals, as we can’t break down cellulose. Animals also eat a lot of stuff that we don’t want to eat. Not only people, but also a lot of soil micro-organisms like animals, or at least their droppings. So for my simplistic mind, that prefers mimicking nature, an ecologically sound system is most likely to have animals.

I have seen other farms who have basically been independent from brought in compost, manure or other fertilizers, e,g. grain farms having rotations with a lot of legumes and green manures. But in most cases the same farm get a better yield – and far better economy – by introducing animals in the production system. This was essentially what happened in Europe some 150-200 years ago. Before that, most farms grew grain crops in almost monocultures, but the soils were exhausted and yields low and land was let fallow, every second, third or fourth year. With crop rotations including clover-grass and similar, farmers could suddenly both produce more grain and meat and milk from the same area.

It is possible that the same can be accomplished with a crop rotation where the legumes and grasses can be used for other purposes, e.g. for biogas production. But also here, it seems that it in almost all cases makes more sense to feed the animals and make biogas from the manure, in which case you can make better use of bio mass. If you think it is immoral for humans to keep domesticated animals this is irrelevant, and you would argue that there is no major difference between my argument and the arguments people use in favour of factory farming. Well, I do think there is a difference, because my discussion is about an appropriate way to produce food for 9-10 billion people with as small ecological footprint as possible, and keeping animals in a way that respect their animalness. This means that we need to use resources smartly.

Perhaps the vegan culture will develop such systems in the future. Perhaps I will then stop eating meat. Meanwhile, I hope we don’t have to hear the stories about that meat-eating, as a principle, takes away food from people. That is simply not true (and if you don’t believe that read some of the blog posts listed below).


Some reading:
Proponents of vegan farming:
even my mama grows vegan-organic
viva

Some of my posts on meat production:
Producing meat (for export) or food for the people
The complicated story of meat

 

Paying farmers for environmental services in Japan

 

An organic farm in the densly populated area close to the Narita airport

Japan is perhaps not a pioneer in paying farmers for environmental services, but it has some interesting schemes. The value of the eco system services of farming in Japan equals the value of production.

At the seminar linked to the launch of my book in Japan, Mashahito Enomoto,  Director of the Policy Division for the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries held an interesting presentation about what the government is doing in support of more environmentally friendly farming in Japan. He stated that the estimated value of production from agriculture was 9.5 trillion Yen (some 120 billion dollars at today's rate) while the value of the ecosystem services were estimated to 8.2 trillion Yen, i.e. almost at par with the production value.

This shows clearly how important it is that we get in place mechanism that ensures that farmers take care of the management of the eco systems. (I have some very strong concerns about using market incentives for this. Read for example Ecosystems: Invaluable and worthless). 

Payment for ecosystem services has a long history in Japan. Already 1901, the Government of Tokyo implemented a scheme for forest management in the catchment area for its water supply (read more).For farms, Japan is partly using similar systems of support as in Europe. Organic farmers in Japan can get support in the same way, with a flat payment per area unit approximately of 64,000 Yen (800 dollar) per hectare (mind you, most Japanese farms are VERY small, outside of Hokkaido, average size is about 1 hectare). The uptake of organic farming in Japan is still rather slow (I will write more about this in a later post).

Some countries, such as the US pays farmers to take land out of production. The US Conservation Reserve Program has some 30 million acres that are taken out of production and the EU has during various periods have had set-aside programs. In Japan, an overarching concern is abandonment of land (see my previous post), and Japan has had a program for maintaining land under cultivation since 2000. Farmers could get anything between JPY3,000 up to JPY210,000 depending on site and kind of production.  By 2004, 660,000 farmers in 33,000 communities received in total JPY55 billion for active management of the farms.

Recipients of the support have to make an agreement with local communities that stipulates conservation activities to be conducted for the duration of no less than five years. This include management of fields and the maintenance of common resources such as irrigation canals, ponds and community roads. Local governments (both prefectural and municipal) play key roles in propagating, implementing and enforcing the program.


I find it very interesting that it is only through the local communities that farmers can get this kind of compensation. I believe this has a lot of additional values. First it means that the local communities, and the municipalities, get influence over how the systems develop, secondly, I believe the monitoring and control of the support must be quite easy, and to a large extent can be informal and finally it clearly must strengthen the local communities as such. This is very different from how the EU agri-environmental support works. I am quite convinced that this model in Japan is superior.You can read more about it in: Direct Payments for Environmental Services from Mountain Agriculture in Japan: Evaluating its Effectiveness and Drawing Lessons for Developing Countries, by Takumi Sakuyama. The evaluation points to some shortcomings of the program, which have a lot to do with the criteria for support, where to few indicators have been used to determine who should get support and at which level.


More about ecosystem services in my blogposts:
The Polluter Gets Paid Principle
Ecosystems: Invaluable and worthless
carbon projects drives land grabbing and GMOs?
Man: more dependent on nature than ever
The market is not a management system for the planet

 

Launching Garden Earth in Japan

I am in Japan for the launch of my book, Garden Earth in Japanese. It is published by Doyosha, a smaller publisher.

JONA, Japan Organic & Natural Foods Association is my host here and have made a very intensive visit program. The first day brought us two two organic farms, a cooperativa, a wholesaler, the Ministry of Agriculture and JICA, the Japan public development agency.

Ageing farmers is a very big problem in Japan (see my earlier post Will there be farmers? about this global problem). Only some 5% of the farms are operated by people below 45 years. Paradoxically enough there is quite some land agriculture land abandoned in Japan which seems strange in a country with so little agriculture land and the lowest food self-sufficiency in the world (of the bigger countries at least). This seems to have many reasons, among others, global specialization and competition, the small scale of Japanese farms combined with zoning and other regulations making it hard to consolidate farms into larger units, and the aging farmers that continue to own the land, but stopped managing it.


The government is now supporting young farmers with subsidies in the range of JPY1.5 million per farmer and year for five years. Many of these young farmers go for organic farming, and the Sanbu-Yasai Cooperative has a special program to find land and train young organic farms. A great initiative!

Japan: the tragedy has a face

I got an email from a friend in Japan, She writes:
> We already lost numerous farmlands from TSUNAMI. In addition to the
> disaster, Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant has, and is going to affect more
> farmland, of course organic farms also.
>
> You might already know that a farmer had committed suicide because he
> found his organic vegetables were contaminated by radiation effects. He
> has been organic farmer more than 30 years; his life was all about
> producing safe, careful, ethical foods. It is just such a pain.

No further comments.

Japan: post growth and post-peak-oil works?

This blog post has a lot of copying from of Japan: The World’s First Post-Growth Economy? at postgrowth.org

One of the problems with the post-growth movement is that it can appear theoretical. More of the ideas have been tried than you might think, but certainly they haven’t all been tried at once as a deliberate strategy. No matter how confident we might be, we lack proof that a post-growth economy is possible. Or do we? Perhaps the world already has a post-growth society, albeit an unintentional one. Here’s what Japan’s GDP has been up to for the last twenty years:

I also contrast this against the chart of Japan's energy consumption which proves my point of the intrinsical link between energy and economic growth. Japan is also a country that emits a lot less carbon per person than most other rich countries.

And yet, the lights are still on, everything still works. Literacy is high, and crime is low. Life expectancy is better than almost anywhere on earth – 82 years to the US’ 78. The trains run to the second. Unemployment is only 5%, and levels of inequality are enviable. In fact, it is living proof that growth isn’t necessary to deliver a high standard of living. And they even seem to cope with the effect of the earthquake and disaster fairly well. This because Japan is a rather well functioning society with social capital
That’s not to say that Japan is to be envied or emulated. A legacy of failed stimulus ideas has left it with big debts, and the future is as uncertain as it is anywhere. Neither is it a steady-state economy in the way that matters most – in its materials. Japan consumes considerably more than a one-planet share and is not sustainable in that sense.
The point is that for well over a decade, one of the world’s most important economies hasn’t grown. And at the end of that stint, it’s still a great place to live. So maybe Japan isn’t a failure. Maybe it’s just ahead of its time – not ‘stagnating’, but settling into the plateau of ‘enough’.
After 15 years of fretting, maybe it’s time Japan embraced its post-growth state and told the economists where to stick their theories. Professor Norihiro Kato recently suggested that Japanese youth culture was doing just that, downsizing and taking a more measured approach to consumerism. Japan’s population had already levelled off, he noted. He even suggested Japan was entering a post-growth era. “Japan is a small country” people are saying, “and we’re O.K. with small. It is, perhaps, a sort of maturity.”
Japan, whether it likes it or not, is the world’s first post-growth economy. It won’t be the last. Japan proves that growth isn’t necessary to safeguard the things that matter most in life. There’s nothing to fear in levelling out, and if the alternative is boom and bust, then the plateau is a far safer place to be. How Japanese people themselves look at it can be read at: http://www.japanfs.org/en/mailmagazine/newsletter/pages/030685.html 

Update: just a few days after this was posted, The Guardian had an article about Japan as a show case for how "post-peak-oil" could look like.  So I amended the headline of this article, to include that perspective. I had already mentioned that there is this strong link between energy growth and economic growth. Essentiallyh post-growth and post peak oil are the same, at least as long as we have an economic system as the one we have.

Save organic from over-regulation

Just came back from Japan.

Organic agriculture as a concept is not at all new in Japan; Japan actually has contributed a lot to the global development of the organic sector. An early pioneer was Mokichi Okada who established nature farming field experiments in Japan 1935. He was later followed e.g. by Masanobu Fukuoka who promoted a kind of organic farming which was mimicking nature as much as possible. The so called Effective Microorganisms (EM) also originate from Japan. A special way of compost making, bokashi, is also a Japanese contribution to organic farming, which has spread far beyond Japan.

The figures for certified organic farming are not very impressive. In 2008/2009, 8,595 hectares were certified of which rice paddy constituted 2,810 hectares; annual crops 4,416; perennial crops 998 ha and pasture 362 hectares respectively. This corresponds to just 0.19 percent of the total arable land. The number of certified farmers is just above 3800. supervision and enforcement.

In contrast to these very modest figures, 4.7% of the farmers claim, in a survey from 2007, that they are already doing organic farming. Some estimate that the number of organic farmers outside the JAS system amounts to the double of those within the system while the member of Parliament Mr Tsurunen told me that he believes there are seven times as many, which would correspond better with the claims by the farmers. Many sources state that a considerable proportion of those that are claimed to be organic are not really following the standard, e.g. they might rotate organic crops in an otherwise non-organic crop rotation, or they might indeed use some chemical fertilizer. Regardless which figure is the correct one it is clear that third-party certification and government regulation has not unified the Japanese organic sector, rather the opposite, and that there is at least as many serious organic farmers outside the system as within.

“Until the latter half of the 1990s when the WTO regime was established they (the Government) rushed to set up rather low quality organic standards based on the Codex Guidelines and a very strict accreditation system (the revised JAS law). In doing so, they robbed the terminology ‘organic agriculture’ from the private sector, which had been taking into account the farming conditions in Japan. Since the implementation of the revised JAS law, the share of domestically produced ‘organic agricultural products’ distributed in Japan has lowered disastrously. In the meantime, those participating in Teikei and self-sufficient methods continue to work outside the market distribution framework, choosing not to use the organic JAS label.” says Katsu Murayama, an organic pioneer.

There is a fairly large number of organic farmers also in Europe and the USA that have stayed outside or quit the regulatory systems of certification. It is scandalous that those are deprived from the right to define themselves and their producs as organic by zealous (or perhaps just incompentent?) regulators. But--- in all fairness, to a large extent the sector itself is to blame for calling in the governments in the first place.

Gardens in Japan

This entry isn't philosophical or deep in any sense. Just want to share some pictures of beautiful Japanes gardens I just visited in Tokyo and Kyoto.
Enjoy
You can see more of them at http://picasaweb.google.se/GunneEpost/JapanGardens#

Koishikawa Karokuen Garden, Tokyo

Golden Pavilion, Kyoto

Entsu Ji Temple, Kyoto

Heijan Jingu, Kyoto

Heijan Jingu, Kyoto

Kyiomizu-dera, Kyoto