yearofplenty

Wendell Berry: A Cows Contentment Flavors the Steak

Berry's comments from the Art of the Commonplace, are helpful in describing the benefits of growing your own vegetables and knowing the origins of the meat we eat.

The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and known that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater.

The same goes for eating meat. The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly grazing flavors the steak. Some, I know, will think this bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.

I hear people getting into debates about whether organic vegetables are, from the perspective of chemistry, more nutritious. Others debate the financial advantage of growing your own vegetables. Some take a pragmatic view of the politics and say things like, "the corporate agriculture industry would like nothing better than to see us spend all of our free time in our gardens and not in political dissent." And of course we love to debate the mathematics of carbon footprints.

While these perspectives are all important and need to be debated and discussed, none are quite as compelling to me as the one Berry makes in the quote above. Instead of breaking things down to their component parts, which is what our scientific approaches do, Berry is putting the food we eat in context, using words like beauty, memory and contentment. He says that simply knowing the source and conditions of the land and animals that provide our food makes the food taste better (and I would add, in many cases worse.) I can't prove it with a scientific study but I know it to be true from my experience.

www.good.is - "Cowpooling is hot right now"

I continue to enjoy the www.good.is website. This post about an upcoming edition of the magazine on neighborhoods is full of interesting links including one about cowpooling, which according to the magazine is "hot right now." That's the funniest quote I've heard in awhile. I was also fascinated by the story about Orange County, in China. Definitely worth a read.

Michael Pollan's WSU Visit Debrief

It worked out for me to attend the Michael Pollan event at Washington State University last night. It was well attended with a couple thousand people in the stands of WSU's basketball arena. He acknowledged the controversy of the visit at the beginning of his remarks but didn't go into detail. In a moment of diminished inhibitions I actually emailed him last week to see if I could interview him over the phone and get his perspective on the hubbub. His assistant was very kind in the way she told me that he was too busy.

I hate to say it but his presentation was kind of boring, at least for me. I was familiar with most of the material he covered. The advantage of an in-person presentation, just like a live music concert, is that you get something more raw and unfiltered, more improvised and personal. It felt like less of a live performance and more like a synopsis of his writings on food. Oh well.

The crowd was subdued for most of the talk with occasional applause for certain parts of his presentation. The largest applause related to his comments about private corporations having a stranglehold on the research going on at institutions like WSU. I guess that comment hit close to home.

The most fascinating part of the evening for me was that on the way out there were students lined up handing out brochures from the National Cattleman's Beef Association. I confirmed today that it was the Washington State Beef Board that provided the brochures and organized the distribution. I did a little poking around and discovered that both the national and the Washington organization are funded by a $1 per head of cattle sold fee ($79 million in 2007). This "checkoff" program is overseen by the USDA. Assuming those costs are passed on to the consumer, not only are we buying industrial beef, we are paying for the industrial beef interests to market that beef to us and tell us it's not as bad as Michael Pollan would have you think. I have a call into the state board and the office explained that they were traveling back from Pullman today. If I hear back from them I'll let you know what their perspective is on the event.

What's worse than the standard practice of soaking hamburger beef in ammonia?

What's worse is that it isn't even that effective at killing bacteria.

I have not eaten a hamburger since posting about another similar NY Times story from early October.

USA Today Reports: Chicken Used For School Lunches Not Good Enough For Colonel Sanders

Given the recent posts on the school lunch boycott in Medford Mass. this new report from the USA Today is very timely.

McDonald’s, Burger King and Costco, for instance, are far more rigorous in checking for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. They test the ground beef they buy five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day.

And the limits Jack in the Box and other big retailers set for certain bacteria in their burgers are up to 10 times more stringent than what the USDA sets for school beef.

For chicken, the USDA has supplied schools with thousands of tons of meat from old birds that might otherwise go to compost or pet food. Called “spent hens” because they’re past their egg-laying prime, the chickens don’t pass muster with Colonel Sanders— KFC won’t buy them — and they don’t pass the soup test, either. The Campbell Soup Company says it stopped using them a decade ago based on “quality considerations.”

The gist of the article is that because school lunch standards are less than most fast food chains, the lesser quality or rejected product gets dumped into the Federal system of purchasing food for school lunches. It should be noted that they are talking specifically about the Federally provided food to local schools which makes up about 15-20% of the food in public school cafeterias.

I’m not sure if the takeaway is that fast foods are actually really responsible with food safety or that the federal purchasing program is negligent.

Is Vegan the New Locavore?

As the great debate about food and the environment has evolved in recent years the argument that eating local is a good way to cut down on carbon emissions has lost its luster. If food is being shipped on average over 1500 miles to the store, it would seem to reason that eating local would take a big bite out of our carbon footprint. This is true to a certain extent but in the whole food chain it turns out that it's other variables like the kinds of food and the agricultural/livestock practices that are a much larger piece of the carbon pie. Some have even debated the math of multiple farmers driving to market vs. one big truck driving to the grocery store. There are plenty of other reasons to eat local, so I haven't gotten too worked up about this, but it is interesting to see the carbon debate shifting from transportation of food to the issue of eating meat. The UN reports that livestock emissions account for 18% of worldwide carbon emissions, more than that caused by transportation.

Some have proposed Meatless Mondays, others choose to cut way back on meat consumption, and some see it as an opportunity to promote a vegan lifestyle where not only do you avoid eating animals and animal products, you also shun the use of leather, silk, wool and any other animal byproduct.

There's an article in Sundays NY Times promoting veganism. It's a little bit overbearing. Here's a sampling of comments from the article;

Even if it is raised “free range,” it still lives a life of pain and confinement that ends with the butcher’s knife...

These uses of animals are so institutionalized, so normalized, in our society that it is difficult to find the critical distance needed to see them as the horrors that they are: so many forms of subjection, servitude and — in the case of killing animals for human consumption and other purposes — outright murder...

Think about that when you’re picking out your free-range turkey, which has absolutely nothing to be thankful for on Thanksgiving. All it ever had was a short and miserable life, thanks to us intelligent, compassionate humans.

I'm all for a more thoughtful approach to meat and have cut back quite a bit but I can't say this little sermon has me convinced. And I'm a preacher. I'm not afraid of a good sermon.

The clincher for me was his statement;

Let me be candid: By and large, meat-eaters are a self-righteous bunch.

A little pot and kettle action there.

Maybe it would be helpful to hear from Spovegan or someone else who could better explain the vegan lifestyle. I have a feeling we're going to be hearing a lot more about it in the coming months.

The Horrifying Truth of What Makes a Burger Patty (NSFFFH)

(NSFFFH stands for Not Safe for Fast Food Habits.)

The New York Times has a must-read article profiling a woman who was paralyzed by a nasty burger induced e-coli infection. While the woman’s story is compelling, the reporting on the burger making business is what makes the article a must read. I’ve read Fast Food Nation and all the other books of that genre but for some reason this article is what may have finally cured me of the ubiquitous American burger patty.

Key quote:

The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

Read on if you dare.

Cargill’s final source was a supplier that turns fatty trimmings into what it calls “fine lean textured beef.” The company, Beef Products Inc., said it bought meat that averages between 50 percent and 70 percent fat, including “any small pieces of fat derived from the normal breakdown of the beef carcass.” It warms the trimmings, removes the fat in a centrifuge and treats the remaining product with ammonia to kill E. coli.

With seven million pounds produced each week, the company’s product is widely used in hamburger meat sold by grocers and fast-food restaurants and served in the federal school lunch program. Ten percent of Ms. Smith’s burger came from Beef Products

Go here for a handy chart of the sources for the burger.

I will gladly pay $5/lb for ground beef from locally raised grass fed cows that are naturally low in saturated fat and free of Ammonia and “Beef Product”. We get ours from Susie David’s Beef and Rocky Ridge Ranch. Both are available at the Millwood Farmers’ Market which goes indoors this week right next to the usual location from noon to 5pm.

Four Categories of Beef: 120 Off, Never Never, Regular, Australian Bull

One of the lessons from our year long experiment is that it is very difficult to find out where most of the food in a grocery store comes from. One example is that Western Family products, many of which are locally sourced, are identified by the headquarters of the Western Family corporation in Portland. This doesn't mean the food comes from Portland, and there is no other identification of origin. New laws now require a country of origin labeling, but that may even make products more anonymous. This means that it's that much harder to sort out the safety and quality, i.e. did the pork on the shelf in Spokane come from the the industrial pig farm in Perote Mexico where the recent outbreak of swine flu is believed by some to have originated?

I had a fascinating conversation today with a new friend who helps manage a local meat wholesaler in Spokane. He confirmed that when they get the meat from Kansas, Pasco, Australia or elsewhere, they process it, package it, and from that point on there is no way to track where it is from. Go here for my previous rundown on beef industry practices.

My friend went on to explain that the beef comes to them in several different varieties. They get it "regular", which means that it is grain fed and it is likely there is some remnant of growth hormones and antibiotics in the beef. I already knew about that beef. What I didn't know is that they also get beef he called, "120 off" which he explained has been intentionally kept free of hormones and antibiotics for 120 days. There is no trace of the chemicals in this beef. This is often marketed as "natural". They also receive beef he called, "never, never" which means that it has never had antibiotics or growth hormone. What's fascinating to me about this information is that it is not readily available to consumers. Did you know that beef comes in these categories? Why not? Shouldn't consumers know that information and shouldn't they be empowered to make those choices.

He also described Wal Mart's practices of asking the supplier for the cheapest beef that they then inject with saline and chemicals to keep the meat red for up to a year. Beefalicious.

Another surprise is that the bull meat they get from Australia is grass fed and is made into hamburger. Your hamburger meat may be the only non grain-stuffed meat at the market.

Rustling Cattle and Animal Dignity Revisted

We have been at a Colorado dude ranch on vacation this week. Lots of fun riding horses every morning and afternoon. The highlight was spending a day off the trail, rounding up around a 100 yearling cows who were grazing the National Forest surrounding the ranch. This high mountain forest was recently ravaged by a fire, leaving behind a maze of lifeless Ponderosas. The wrangler explained that the Forest Service has been expanding the permitted number of cattle. Studies show that managed grazing is benefical to the regeneration of the land. Given our lessons this year on industrial cattle practices here and here, it was especially meaningful to participate in a more sustainable model.

One of our values this year has been making field trips to the producers and growers of the food and items we consume. The emphasis has been spending time with people with the intent of becoming more atturned to their hopes, dreams and challenges. Based on my experience with the cows, I can also see the benefit of spending time with the animals we consume as well.

I found that spending time with the year old cows gave me a new respect for them as animals. I will remember their wild eyes, their stubborn disposition, and their desperate sense of being lost when separated from the herd. There are a lot of barriers that keep us from associating the meat we consume from the animals that are parted out on our behalf, especially cows. (There is a reason we don't ask the butcher for a cut of cow. We ask for beef or hamburger.) That night at dinner when I ordered the prime rib, it felt like a statement of respect, knowing that I was actually ordering prime cow, not some some trivial piece of meat.

The other benefit of spending time rustling cows was a surprise. When I started the day I had a mostly pastoral vision for what it is like to rustle cattle. A couple hours walking behind a group of smelly, poop covered, not too bright animals that had a tendency to mount and hump their fellow travelers was enough to cure me of my idyllic visions. They are worthy of cow dignity, but it's probably helpful to understand that they are not pets or people. On one end we have a tendency, probably a greater tendency, to commodify and devalue cows, but an absence of experiencing real cows in real places can also lead us to mis-value them. For an example see this article that describes PETA's latest ad:

The animal rights group PETA has tried unsuccessfully to run a newspaper ad comparing the beheading and cannibalizing of a passenger on a Greyhound bus in Canada last week to the treatment of animals by the meat industry.    

For more on this see my post here where I cite the following quote from a farmer who is rich in real experiences of real animals.

The Bible says that God created every animal 'after its own kind.' Chickens aren't people, but neither are they nothing but hunks of meat. Chickens are chickens, and they deserve to be treated like chickens!  

Pew Study Concludes Industrial Farm Animal Production Needs to Change

A task force sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust has just released their findings in a thorough and balanced analysis of the current state of industrial animal production. The summary of the report can be found here.

The introduction of the report states:

Over the last 50 years, the method of producing food animals in the United States has changed from the extensive system of small and medium-sized farms owned by a single family to a system of large, intensive operations where the animals are housed in large numbers in enclosed structures that resemble industrial buildings more than they do a traditional barn. That change has happened primarily out of view of consumers but has come at a cost to the environment and a negative impact on public health, rural communities, and the health and well-being of the animals themselves.

Reading something like that makes me feel pretty good about spending a little extra for locally raised grass fed beef.