Rominger used to be very close to Brown in his first term. I was appointed to serve on a committee with him at the time.
Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael dot perelman at gmail.com Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901 www.michaelperelman.wordpress.com From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of raghu Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 3:22 PM To: Progressive Economics Subject: [Pen-l] Not all industrial food is evil? >From the NYT via Paul Krugman: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/not-all-industrial-food-is-evil/ -----------------------------snip I'VE long wondered how producing a decent ingredient, one that you can buy in any supermarket, really happens. Take canned tomatoes, of which I probably use 100 pounds a year. It costs $2 to $3 a pound to buy hard, tasteless, "fresh" plum tomatoes, but only half that for almost two pounds of canned tomatoes that taste much better. How is that possible? The answer lies in a process that is almost unimaginable in scope without seeing it firsthand. So, fearing the worst - because we all "know" that organic farming is "good" and industrial farming is "bad" - I headed to the Sacramento Valley in California to see a big tomato operation. I began by touring Bruce Rominger's farm<http://www.romingerbrothersfarms.com/> in Winters. With his brother Rick and as many as 40 employees, Rominger farms around 6,000 acres of tomatoes, wheat, sunflowers, safflower, onions, alfalfa, sheep, rice and more. Unlike many Midwestern farm operations, which grow corn and soy exclusively, here are diversity, crop rotation, cover crops and, for the most part, real food - not crops destined for junk food, animal feed or biofuel. That's a good start. On an 82-acre field, tomato plants covered the ground for a hundred yards in every direction. Water and fertilizer are supplied through subsoil irrigation - a network of buried tubing - which reduces waste and runoff and assures roughly uniform delivery along the row. (In older, furrow-irrigated fields<http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/irfurrow.html> - in which ditches next to the rows of plants are flooded with water from a central canal - tomatoes at the ends of rows suffer.) The tomatoes are bred to ripen simultaneously because there is just one harvest. They're also blocky in shape, the better to move along conveyor belts. Hundreds of types of tomatoes are grown for processing, bred for acidity, disease resistance, use, sweetness, wall thickness, ripening date and so on. They're not referred to by cuddly names like "Early Girl" but by number: "BQ 205." I tasted two; they had a firm, pleasant texture and mild but real flavor, and were better than any tomatoes - even so-called heirlooms - sold in my supermarket.
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