You stupid donkey... yes?!?

I've become totally obsessed with several of Gordon Ramsay's television shows lately: Hell's Kitchen, The F Word, and Kitchen Nightmares.

I've been watching Hell's Kitchen on T.V. mainly, but catch-up on any missed shows on Hulu. The F Word I've been watching in cut-up episodes on YouTube (since it's only on BBC television and I can't seem to find it in any of my local video stores), and Kitchen Nightmares also on Hulu. Hulu's a great website that has high-quality, full-length T.V. shows and movies (even though it has commercials), and although it can sometimes take awhile to find someone who has posted quality videos on YouTube, it's well worth hunting around.

Man, Gordon Ramsay definitely has balls. He definitely appears to have earned every bit of his success, and likely has an amazing team of people surrounding him that assist him in fulfilling his vision(s) of providing great food in an amazing environment. I have learned so very much about cooking, about food, by just watching him in action in his shows. One of his cookbooks will likely be my next food-related book purchase.

Another cool thing about watching the F Word is that I was introduced to the work of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, of River Cottage fame, and purchased his Meat book.

Meat madness

Wow... South Korea's government has been almost wiped out by a mass "resignation" of ministry officials from the public outcry and protests over a deal to allow U.S. industrial beef imports to resume. I was feeling rather chagrined when I found out that the U.S. had pushed industrial beef on to the unsuspecting Korean people as part of a trade agreement. But... apparently, they weren't as unsuspecting as I thought, as the Korean government has found out, much to its chagrin. Too bad the average U.S., consumer won't stand up to its own government and protest the lousy meats that are forced upon him or her; you'd think with all the current health problems and the massive meat recalls that people would finally realize what's going on and say no to industrial meat. But oh well...

In other news, perhaps caused by industrial meat contamination: tomatoes recall. But, at least it's apparently prompting the FDA to finally want to do its job, and the government to financially support the FDA so that it can do so.

Perhaps the FDA will be able to head off what appears to be the next major food disaster before it wipes out too many people. Stay tuned for MRSA.

The agro-industrial complex

An important independent report, Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America, by the Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has been released, concluding that "Industrial animal farming in the United States needs to make many major reforms in order to protect public health and the environment."

+ The report criticized "the agro-industrial complex" in regards to:

+ their over-and mis-use of antibiotics

+ the pollution created by overcrowded factory farms

+ the spread of disease in overcrowded feedlots

+ the inhumane treatment of confined animals

+ the industry's influence on agricultural research and governmental regulation

... amongst other things

Read the report in its entirety here: http://www.ncifap.org/_images/PCIFAP%20FINAL%20REPORT.pdf

Better than organic?

I am still a big fan of "beyond organic," where you do better than the organic standards, but disregard getting organic certified (since the organic standards are getting watered down yearly so that more big business can profit from what are becoming pretty much misleading and confusing -- to the consumer -- labels).

I've somewhat recently become a fan of France's "Label Rouge" (Red Label) program. France's standards for everything from Label Rouge to organic are much more stringent than our rather watered-down FDA/USDA standards. France labels food for the customer's benefit, not for business's benefit (i.e. profit). And often times, American farmers get stuck in the middle when trying to convert to organic, where in France farmers are the ones who benefit from the stricter labelling; BUT, they can't be lazy and have to stick to the prescribed standards, not just let their chickens see the light through a window ten feet up and magically be switched from conventional to free range.

Apparently, in France, Label Rouge chickens cost about twice as much as conventional chickens, whereas organic chickens cost about five times as much. So Label Rouge seems to be a "happy medium" for both the consumer and the farmer.

It would be nice to see more similar (if not the same) standards applied to food in the U.S. And if the government won't do it, farmers and consumers will need to take matters into their own hands perhaps.

Here's an excellent informational bulletin (PDF version) by the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service (ATTRA) and the National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT) on Label Rouge:

ATTRA Techs Study "Label Rouge"

Here's a few local (to me) farms that adhere to the Label Rouge standards:

Coon Rock Farm

Ashley Farms

Moo-ving right along ...

I just read an interesting article on why cattle in the United Kingdom come down with so many diseases. This excerpt particularly caught my eye:

But the country does have the distinction of being Europe's primary landing spot for global travel, and that could put livestock at risk. Travelers from every continent pass through London Heathrow Airport (the busiest airport in the world for international traffic), and with them comes food waste from airplanes. Pathology researchers consider airline food waste, which is sometimes processed into food for livestock, the greatest danger to animal health in the world. Airline garbage that's contaminated with foreign diseases can end up in livestock troughs ...

Wow ... that doesn't sound very good, and that as a problem never crossed my mind. Cattle eating animal byproducts is not a very good thing (cows are herbivores, after all, and shouldn't even be forced to eat corn for instance), but feeding them with people food that may be contaminated from an uncontrolled international source sounds very baaad too.

As a side note, Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, wrote an interesting Op-Ed article in 2004 about the USDA and Mad Cow Disease.

I seem to recall a court case against McDonald's in the late 1970s, where they were forced to quit feeding their cattle rendered byproducts from euthanised animals (mainly cats and dogs) collected from animal shelters in the U.S. And, you may never again eat any beef-filled items from Taco Bell after reading these postings.

Ok, that's all for now.

Two more reasons to raise your own food

"the family's bag of Fast Fixin Frozen Chicken Strips contained mercury and glass shards. The parents learned of the problem after their children complained about the taste of the chicken"

read it here: http://www.wgal.com/news/13957356/detail.html

and

"'We've urbanized a world. We have moved people and food around that world at ever increasing speed,' World Health Organization (WHO) epidemics expert Dr. Mike Ryan said. WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan said one of the changes affecting human health was increasingly intensive poultry farming, which may account for the global spread of bird flu.
'It should not come as a surprise that we are seeing more and more disease outbreaks coming from the animal sector,' including Ebola, SARS, or bird flu."

read it here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20416085

[Boy am I hungry!]

Heat over meat

I was just in California, visiting my mom, and read an interesting article in a local newspaper, the Point Reyes Light.

The article was about a slaughterhouse in nearby Petaluma that is closing its doors after almost a century in business serving mostly local cattle ranchers and dairy farmers.

(By the way, the property owner will do very well from the sale of the property, as it’s in a high-priced land area, and its development is already well-planned out, so at least he and his family won’t be hurt by the business’s closing.)

Anyway, hopefully the closing of the slaughterhouse will cause local ranchers/farmers to do away with obsolete mid-twentieth-century practices and become more efficient and profitable.

An organization called North Coast Meats has formed since the slaughterhouse's closure was announced. The group "aims not only to preserve existing infrastructure but also to foster the possibilities for livestock growers and meat providers in the local sustainable agriculture movement."

“The task is to create a regional agricultural infrastructure, but not necessarily to recreate what was here before,” stated North Coast Meats' Sam Goldberger. “Right now, food travels on the order of thousands of miles before it reaches you and consumers are demanding for that to change.”

According to the article, "The group is currently doing a feasibility study examining the costs of building and operating an organic, USDA-approved 'Integrated Animal Processing Center' that would serve a wider variety of functions than traditional slaughterhouses do – such as including a cut-and-wrap facility for the meat and direct distribution of the meats to retailers. They also plan to house a commercial kitchen, provide profit sharing, and make their own energy by processing biological waste."

“Local ranchers are increasingly caught between the rising cost of grain and price competition with large-scale producers. As feedlots, slaughterhouses, distributors and retailers each claim a piece of the profits and the price of conventionally grown meat stays the same, ranchers wind up paying the price.”

By combining several of the steps of slaughtering and packaging meat into one location, North Coast Meats plans to remove the profit-consuming middlemen of the meat business. North Coast Meats hopes “to steer the direction of agriculture in an unconventional direction designed to benefit the rancher and the consumer above any middlemen. ‘If the rancher is going to be able to survive they are going to need higher margin products,’ said Goldberger. ‘I see slaughterhouses as just one link in that chain.’”

Cattle ranchers that are raising local meat to serve the local community will be hurt the most by the closure of the slaughterhouse. David Evans of Marin Sun Farms in Point Reyes said that “it is very important to his locally-grown, grass-fed business that to have a processing facility nearby.”

“This will be most devastating to anyone who is trying to get out of the commodity beef market and do more grass-fed, direct marketing, or community supported agriculture,” said Ellie Rilla, the Marin County Farm Advisor for UCCE.

The article stated that “though only a few local ranches are currently exploring those specialty markets, consumer demand for them is making them more profitable. Last year, The UCCE went to every ranch in Marin County and surveyed them about their interest in pursuing those specialty markets. Over half of them said that they are.”

According to an earlier 2003 University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE) survey, out of 186 agricultural producers in Marin County, two percent (or about four) of them were considering leaving the business, even though 63 percent (or about 117 of them) were unprofitable or marginally profitable.

It is absolutely time for a change in farming, ranching, etc.; the government needs to quit subsidizing the largest food producers so as to give the more efficient, more sustainable, and more profitable small-time food producers a chance. The government is always preaching how a market should control itself (basic supply and demand-type stuff), but it still feels compelled to subsidize inefficient business. It’s also time for food producers to quit paying for chemical and poison pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, hormones, and etc., which costs them many thousands of dollars a year, and only profits the companies that produce those chemical and poisons. Post-World War Two, the government and the big chemical companies pushed all that junk onto farmers, and now, several generations later, it’s the only way the large-scale farmers know how to farm.

But, there’s no reason for the smaller farmers to continue to farm the way their fathers or grandfathers did, when they can more profitably and sustainably farm the way their great-grandfathers did.

Sustainability is one major key to keeping family farms going and to obtain profits. The public does want inexpensive food, but it also wants food that tastes like it’s supposed to, and that won’t harm their health in the short AND long term. Produce like genetically-modified tomatoes only help the producer of the tomato; buying a tomato that has a month-long shelf life or a perfect, blemish-free red skin but that internally is unripe and is tasteless is like marrying an attractive person that is ugly on the inside: perhaps gratifying in the short term, but one grows weary of it after awhile.

Need I say more?

Origins of Our Food

(Verbatim from a July 4, 2007 New York Times editorial)

With imports of agricultural products rising sharply and sporadic scares about their safety, Americans surely have a right to know what country their food has come from. Unfortunately, they have little chance of finding out, due to the intransigence of meat importers and grocery retailers.

Lobbyists for both groups have blocked implementation of a 2002 law that requires country-of-origin labels on fresh fruits and vegetables, red meats, seafood and peanuts. Only the seafood part of the law has been put into effect, largely because Alaskan fishermen liked some of its provisions and had a powerful champion in the Senate.

With the recent questions about Chinese seafood, those labels mean that consumers can make informed choices at the seafood counter — something they should be able to do with all of their food purchases.

As Andrew Martin reported in The Times on Monday, the Bush administration’s Agriculture Department [USDA] was hostile to the labeling from the start. That comes as no surprise given that many of its top officials had worked for a trade association representing meatpackers and ranchers that opposes labeling. The Republican-controlled Congress, with key members beholden to campaign contributions from agribusiness, twice delayed the starting date for mandatory labeling, ultimately pushing it back to September 2008.

Industry lobbyists raise a flurry of unpersuasive objections. They claim it would be too costly for American meatpackers to segregate and track imported meat, and especially difficult to label ground meat which often comes from different cows. They also claim that labeling is a disguised form of protectionism, which implies that all foreign food is suspect. But these rationales are trumped by the simple argument that consumers have a right to know the origins of what they are buying. The required record-keeping should also help in tracking any dangerous products back through the supply chain to the source of contamination.

With the Democrats now in control of Congress, it is time to put an end to the excuses and delays, and finally implement the labeling requirement — preferably without waiting until late 2008. This could be done through the mammoth farm policy bill that will be up for a vote in coming months or through an agriculture appropriations bill. If there are elements of the original law that are unnecessarily onerous and costly, these can be modified during the legislative process or during administrative rule-making to implement the law. But there should be no compromise of the basic principle that consumers have a right to know where their food comes from before popping it into their mouths.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company