How much wood, would a human chuck...

This totally grosses me out...

15 Food Companies that Serve You ‘Wood’

Manufacturers use cellulose in food as an extender, providing structure and reducing breakage, said Dan Inman, director of research and development at J. Rettenmaier USA, a company that supplies “organic” cellulose fibers for use in a variety of processed foods and meats meant for human and pet consumption, as well as for plastics, cleaning detergents, welding electrodes, pet litter, automotive brake pads, glue and reinforcing compounds, construction materials, roof coating, asphalt and even emulsion paints, among many other products.

[shudder]

An argument in favor of less government for better food...

The post is about the causes of perceived elitism in locally-produced small scale food, and adds to this outlook I have that the government will always favor the big guys at the expense of individual citizens. Food "safety" laws are far less about safety and far more about providing an advantage to the industry.

Is the Local Food Movement Elitist?

I [an individual farmer] can produce a gallon of milk from my barn for about $2.40 in hay, grain, amortized goat costs, and a tiny chunk of my mortgage payment....That's not too bad - my local Stewarts is advertising milk for 3.80 per gallon, so I could sell a few gallons to my neighbors and offset some feed costs, without costing them more, maybe even save them some pennies.

My friend Judy, who runs a dairy, observes that it costs $9 for her to produce a gallon of goat's milk. Now why the difference? Why does it cost her $9, which isn't even remotely competetive and me $2.40? Well the main difference is that she had to get set up to sell her goat's milk. She had to put in a bulk tank, build a barn to specifications, put in the second septic system between the milk room and the barn septic, add restroom facilities (even though her house bathroom is three steps away), and pay 16,000 dollars for pasteurizer.

As I'm adding up my costs, I don't have to count any of those things.

Of course, the big difference is that Judy *can* legally sell her milk, and I can't. In order to sell milk, I'd have to build the milking parlor, get the bulk tank, run power to the barn, and buy the 16K pasteurizer. Nevermind that for someone milking 6 does, this is ridiculous overkill - them's the rules. And look, my organic milk now costs $9 gallon - and gee, isn't that elitist, to think that ordinary people can afford organic *milk!?!*

The local food system is elitist in large part because it is forced to be. Others have documented the ways in which small producers are discriminated against - the way subsidies favor large producers, the way externalization of pollutants favors people who don't actually live where they produce their food. Joel Salatin in _Everything I Want to Do is Illegal_ carefully documents ways in which beaurocratic regulations have nothing to do with food safety - and indeed, the system that produces the 1,000 cow hamburger can't be said to be primarily focused on keeping eaters safe.

Chicken Weekend Approaches

I've been having an internal debate on how to start this post. I considered including a "Please Note" (but definitely not a "warning") that the post would include blunt talk about processing chickens and some readers might want to skip it. But I really think that all eaters (all consumers, really) should have an awareness of where their products come from. So, there is no disclaimer - I'm not giving you an easy excuse to ignore this post. If choose not to read any further, it's got to be your decision.

Perhaps a more appropriate warning would be that this post is a bit preachy. While it strongly conveys my views, I don't want it mistaken for a lecture or condemnation of anyone who disagrees with me. As I hope you understand after reading the post - it takes pretty strong feelings about food and the environment to raise your own meat. I just want to explain why we've decided to follow through with a seemingly radical food choice.

This weekend is Chicken Weekend. I'm not going to lie - I've been dreading it for months. We've got 20 chickens (mostly Dark Cornish) to butcher, which is twice as many as we did on our last Chicken Day.


It is a crappy, crappy day, and knowing that it will be twice as long as last year is not adding to my enthusiasm. But at the end of the weekend, we'll have one less flock to feed and worry about becoming hawk food (we've caught a Cooper’s Hawk feasting on our chickens three times in the last month).

More importantly, and the real reason we do this is the satisfaction of living our convictions of supporting sustainable, natural food and relieving some of the burden of outsourcing crappy jobs to other people.

These are the two biggies of why we endure Chicken Day. And for me, it’s "barely endure." Last year, I was on the verge of tears. My job is plucking, which compared to Bill's work is easy. But it's still hard work combined with the emotional toil of partaking in the direct killing of an animal…multiple animals. I've made a personal commitment to be present for the killing of all our livestock. Though I don't actually *do* anything, I don't want Bill to do it alone, and I think it's important to fully appreciate the sacrifice.


There was recently an article in the NY Times by Michael Pollan. He participated in a 36-Hour meal based heavily on a single goat, a cob oven, and a good community.

Ten days ago, Mike and I drove to the ranch to choose our animal and watch an itinerant butcher slaughter and dress it; Mike says the experience made him want to honor our goat by wasting as little of it as possible.

I don't know if it's possible to overemphasize that point. When you are involved in butchering, waste becomes intolerable.

As much as I am still dreading it, my resolve for Chicken Weekend has been bolstered by that article and blog posts, which were kind enough to have the excellent timing of being published this week.

One is from Sharon Astyk who farms and writes in upstate NY. Her post "On Sentiment...And Against Sentimentality" is about many aspects of farming and the attitude needed to be successful. She believes there is a difference between sentiment - "the logical emotions of love and attachment that emerge from knowing something well" - and sentimentality - "cheap emotion, the substitution of a weak thing for something deeper.”

Sentiment, Astyk argues, is essential for good farmers. You need to pay very close attention to your animals in order to care for them well. This attention naturally leads to feelings of love, appreciation and attachment. I understand this completely. I am jarred by the heartbreak that accompanies the inevitable loss of an animal to a predator or illness. It sucks. And not just for the loss of time, money and energy that went into growing something that is now gone. It is a feeling of failure (no matter how unjustified) in not protecting an animal who depends on me - an animal I care for physically and emotionally.

Sentiment - love, anger, attachment, affection - real emotions - these derive from knowledge, and they can't be faked.

Sentimentality, on the other hand, is the “cheap” emotion based on…well, nothing really. I think of it as manufactured – the stuff of Hallmark commercials and reality TV. This, here, is the bit of Astyk’s post that will be helping me get through Chicken Weekend:

I do want to stand up for sentiment in agriculture because I would argue that our industrial society discourages real sentiment, the emotion that emerges from knowing things, and exchanges it for sentimentality. This is an exchange that runs deeply to our detriment, in part because it enables us not to know things.

Sentimentality creates the CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) farm - the sentimentality that says we are too weak to bear the pain of knowing animals and watching them die. This is what turns our food into styrofoam packages and allows CAFO agriculture, where animals are carefully hidden from our view, and the relationship of our purchases carefully concealed.

In this instance, giving in to sentimentality and not wanting to know things (or read this blog post) creates the real evil. How evil?

something on the order of 98% of our meat in America comes from factory farms that raise thousands upon thousands of animals at a time. To satisfy our ever-increasing demand for cheap meat, the places where animals are raised for slaughter have changed so radically that it’s not even really fair to call them farms. (The Unappetizing Realities of Factory-Farmed Meat)

Since 1935, consolidation and industrialization have seen the number of U.S. farms decline from 6.8 million to fewer than 2 million — with the average farmer now feeding 129 Americans, compared with 19 people in 1940.

In CAFOs, large numbers of animals — 1,000 or more in the case of cattle and tens of thousands for chicken and pigs — are kept in close, concentrated conditions and fattened up for slaughter as fast as possible, contributing to efficiencies of scale and thus lower prices. … To stay alive and grow in such conditions, farm animals need pharmaceutical help, which can have further damaging consequences for humans. (Time)

You know these places. They give you salmonella. They are the target of news reports and documentaries. They are really gross. Horrible for the animals and the people that work there. Horrible for the farmers. Great for the big company and the bottom line.

According to the USDA, Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. (Time)

This weekend, as much as I won't like the work, I am satisfied knowing that I am not supporting a system with which I disagree and believe is unduly harmful to the environment, the "farm" animals, the workers, and ultimately the people who eat the product.

Today, I ate...

garden tomatoes with local goat cheese:

...vanilla ice cream with bourbon peaches (both homemade, natch)

...and meat on a stick.

At least the dough was homemade...

Fast Food Fix

From BBC News

Give out statins with junk food

Fast food outlets should consider handing out cholesterol-lowering drugs to combat the effects of fatty food, say UK researchers.

According to the article, we could save so many lives for the cost of a packet of ketchup. And no one has to change their eating habits!! Brilliant solution, yeah?

Lazy Food

Nice article from BBC regarding our seemingly increasing distance from actual food preparation.

I am hopeless in the kitchen and resort to either eating ramen or laying pathetically on the couch, a slave to low blood sugar, whenever Bill isn't around to make food magically appear in front of me - so I completely get my hypocrisy in loving this article.

However, I will hedge my incompetence a little, because I think my lack of skills is largely a result of my not needing to know how to cook. I do help lots - I just need clear instructions. Shred this cheese! Chop this onion! I'm a kitchen follower, not a leader.

In general, it seems to me that the sort of distance from food described in the article is related to our distance from so many environmental processes and a general sleepwalking through life. We have such great distractions - tv, cheap stuff from China, career advancement, soccer/gymnastics/marching band - that we're spending less time living (and preparing the food we need for living) and more time doing.

Here's an added bonus hypocrisy - I know that my love of canning, for example, is one of those contemporary food luxuries that I get to *enjoy* because it is not necessary for my survival. I know that tv, cheap stuff from China, and career advancement have made my desire for a simpler life possible and...desirable.

There's got to be a middle ground, however, somewhere between a return to 1960s home economies (as described in this awesome article), and pre-peeled potatoes.

"...cooking is a bit of ritual, it's a process to start from the beginning with ingredients you prepare yourself. Preparation is an important part of cooking. You get a feel for what you are making. And food tastes better when it's made from scratch."

Food, Inc.

There is a new documentary out this summer called “Food, Inc.” I don’t really want to see it, but felt a little guilty about that decision until Pajiba - my most favorite movie review site - gave me an out by saying “Food, Inc. is that warm smug self-satisfaction that comes with having a Trader Joe’s reuseable bag full of five dollar tomatoes.” And perhaps a blog about sustainable food?

So, I haven’t seen this movie, though we may Netflix it. I’ve only watched the preview and read some reviews. I’m going to talk about it anyway…

The movie seems to take a dash of food-related ideas that have been known for years, and combines with beautiful/shocking/inspiring visuals to goad people into actions they didn’t take when they initially learned the ideas without the beautiful/shocking/inspiring visuals. Maybe this works? But my cynical self seems to think it won’t do much beyond giving the hipster crowd fun new things to talk about over organic wine and stinky cheese. (Which, BTW, is a great activity, but perhaps detracts from useful action on these issues.)

Shocking thing you already know #1: Corn is subsidized by Uncle Sam (thanks for paying taxes!) and is in everything. Are there people who are not yet aware of high-fructose corn syrup?

Shocking thing you already know #2: Fast food/slaughterhouses are assembly lines and seriously, seriously gross. The inclusion of footage from slaughterhouses is one of the main reasons I, myself, have no desire to see this movie. This is for many reasons (including the fact that I sat through K-Pax) but mostly because I have slaughtered my own chickens and made the commitment to only purchase other meat from small or local family farms. We have found this to be the absolute easiest modification to our food purchasing habits. I will admit that I don’t pay as much attention to meat when I am eating out. We still occasionally eat at Olive Garden and I’ll bet their chicken is likely gross. And what are the possibilities that the cashier at Five Guys knows what their beef was fed? I think I’ll have to work on this…

Shocking thing you already know #3: Big Agribusiness is in it for the money. Disclosure: Big Agribusiness pays for my house. The film spends a lot of time talking about Monsanto owning patents on the “biology inside” the GM crops it produces which is an argument that has been a talking point of anti-GM lobby for years.

I also take serious issue with the idea that you can’t eat well inexpensively. Bill and I had a grocery budget of $30/week when he was a grad student. We were able to eat plenty of fine food without resorting to BK and Taco Bell.

There is something that seems to be absent from the reviews and previews that I’ve seen – the idea that we could not sustain 6-7 billion people on this planet without industrial agriculture. I wonder if the movie includes any consideration of the things we enjoy in life that are made possible specifically because we designate a small number of people to produce lots of cheap food for the rest of us. I would hypothesize that a well considered list would include such things as the women being able to “work outside the home,” children going to school for 9 months a year, a lack of serfdom and movie theaters for independent documentaries.

So, this movie isn’t so much for me. And I’m not entirely sure what my beef with it is…perhaps I’m just annoyed that it throws a glaring spotlight on the idea that people have been eating under this system for so long and not paying attention.

Meat birds

Bill did a lot of reading and thinking when deciding which sorts of chickens we'd like to keep on our little farm. He went with the barred rock because of their low maintenance life style. As a traditional breed, they seem more natural in that they are good foragers and know how to brood their own babies.

But to fill out the minimum order of 25 birds, we also ordered a bunch of Cornish X (Cornish Cross, CC) meat birds.

While our barred rocks will live a fab-o organic, free-range (when possible) lifestyle, the cornish crosses will be in our freezer before they are big enough to live outside. According to this blogger, that is just as well.

For me, raising them has been a horrible experience. CC are not like real chickens. They are a factory farm cross breed made by crossing a Cornish with a White Rock. Their intelligence and alert foraging abilities have been bred out of them. They have massive, fast-growing bodies with short, thick legs. These legs will literally go out from under them when reaching about 8 or 9 weeks of age. They just can’t support their own weight. They have congestive heart failure quite easily. Rarely, and I do mean rarely, one will live as long as a year. But CC are an industry bird, and those grocery store chickens you see with the plump white meat, well, those are them. And they basically just eat, drink, and poop and prefer to be in a cool, confined space, unlike a normal chicken, who craves scratching, eating fresh grasses, and sleeping in sunlight. Cornish Cross chickens are the edible freaks of the chicken world.

She tried letting her cornish crosses out in the outside pen with the rest of her birds, but a few died within a few hours because they didn't know how to stay out of the sun or to drink water when it wasn't right in front of them.

The most complex issue concerning meat birds at all, at least for me, is the issue of “humane” meat growing. For some reason I believed that my way of raising Cornish Crosses would be more humane than their being raised on a factory farm. Now I’m not so sure. I thought raising them in fresh air and sunshine would be good for them, and they died. Where a factory farm has controlled heating and cooling specifically designed for meat birds, and they are bred to be comfortable under those conditions. Those who rally against factory farmed birds being mistreated by not having access to the outdoors (i.e. free-ranging), maybe have the wrong argument. Just because these birds have never seen the sun, never felt grass beneath their toes, or have lived long enough to mount or crow, doesn’t mean they are being mistreated. Cornish Crosses are engineered to eat, drink, and poop. It is all they care about and it is all they can manage to do, anyway.

Industrializing food has interesting consequences. Barred rock chickens, a current favorite of small farms and backyard chicken-raisers, were first bred in the early 1800 but were recently in danger of extinction because they lay cream colored (not white) eggs, which are not good for industrial processes. And while they are decent layers and decent for meat, they aren't exceptional at either. I assume as industry moved toward breeds like cornish crosses, more traditional breeds suffered.