Bookworm

A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss

"As a person of rural origin who has lived much of my life in rural places,” she said, “I can’t tell you how joyful it makes me to hear that it’s trendy for people in Manhattan to own a part of a cow.”  [NYTimes.com]

Yes, We Will Have No Bananas

"Once you become accustomed to gas at $4 a gallon, brace yourself for the next shocking retail threshold: bananas reaching $1 a pound. At that price, Americans may stop thinking of bananas as a cheap staple, and then a strategy that has served the big banana companies for more than a century — enabling them to turn an exotic, tropical fruit into an everyday favorite — will begin to unravel." [Op-Ed - NYTimes.com]

I was just thinking about that this week -- I don't remember if if was when I bought them at the store or when I got one for my daughter (who likes to eat one before bed).  Bananas are grown so far away and then transported here -- it's really unbelievable how affordable they have always been. 

Fighting on a Battlefield the Size of a Milk Label

". . . a farmer advocacy group promoting synthetic bovine growth hormone is actually funded by Monsanto, the hormone's manufacturer. The group, American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology, has also had help from a marketing firm founded by a former Monsanto exec. The hormone, Posilac, can allow cows to produce an extra gallon of milk a day, but despite FDA approval, many consumers are skeptical, and major stores are openly touting milk that is free of synthetic hormones."  [Link: Fighting on a Battlefield the Size of a Milk Label - Brijit Abstract - 2.0 Dots]

Organic or Conventionally Grown and/or Locally Grown?

I've become more interested in U.S. food production and distribution.  In recent years I've watched the movie SuperSize Me and seen food recalls for everything from meat to spinach. The only organic thing I buy is Stonyfield Farms yogurt because it's delicious.  We spend a (seeming) fortune on groceries as it is because we want our daughter to have lots of healthy food to eat, but because I know people who do the organic thing, it's always in the back of my mind.  This Time magazine article, which I haven't yet read completely, addresses not only organically grown vs. conventionally grown, but also the concept of buying locally grown food because of our concerns over how wasteful of oil/gas/diesel the transportation of food can be.

There's a book out there called The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which sounds quite interesting.  I hope to read it soon. 

From the Washington Post/found on Amazon's site: "In the United States, Pollan makes clear, we're mostly fed by two things: corn and oil. We may not sit down to bowls of yummy petroleum, but almost everything we eat has used enormous amounts of fossil fuels to get to our tables. Oil products are part of the fertilizers that feed plants, the pesticides that keep insects away from them, the fuels used by the trains and trucks that transport them across the country, and the packaging in which they're wrapped. We're addicted to oil, and we really like to eat. Oil underlines Pollan's story about agribusiness, but corn is its focus. American cattle fatten on corn. Corn also feeds poultry, pigs and sheep, even farmed fish. But that's just the beginning. In addition to dairy products from corn-fed cows and eggs from corn-fed chickens, corn starch, corn oil and corn syrup make up key ingredients in prepared foods. High-fructose corn syrup sweetens everything from juice to toothpaste. Even the alcohol in beer is corn-based. Corn is in everything from frozen yogurt to ketchup, from mayonnaise and mustard to hot dogs and bologna, from salad dressings to vitamin pills. "Tell me what you eat," said the French gastronomist Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "and I will tell you what you are." We're corn.   Each bushel of industrial corn grown, Pollan notes, uses the equivalent of up to a third of a gallon of oil. Some of the oil products evaporate and acidify rain; some seep into the water table; some wash into rivers, affecting drinking water and poisoning marine ecosystems. The industrial logic also means vast farms that grow only corn. When the price of corn drops, the solution, the farmer hopes, is to plant more corn for next year. The paradoxical result? While farmers earn less, there's an over-supply of cheap corn, and that means finding ever more ways to use it up."

Consolidating Food Safety

"According to the United States Government Accountability Office, the federal responsibility for food safety is scattered across some 15 separate agencies. . . Over the years, the idea of merging all those pieces of our food inspection system into a single food safety administration has surfaced again and again. It’s a good idea, and it has gained some momentum thanks to the recent E. coli outbreak caused by contaminated spinach.

Yet the legislation that would create a single food safety administration always seems to get devoured in committee. . . The National Academy of Sciences has recommended an integrated food safety system, and the G.A.O. has reported on the generally positive results of consolidation in other countries. . . Congress needs to make sure a new agency is not only well-organized but has the powers and authority it needs to control the American food supply in a way that keeps everyone safe." [NY Times]

Leafy Green Sewage

"Farmers and food safety officials still have much to figure out about the recent spate of E. coli infections linked to raw spinach. . . this epidemic, which has infected more than 100 people and resulted in at least one death, probably has little do with the folks who grow and package your greens. . . [T]he villain in this outbreak, E. coli O157:H7, is far scarier [than more common strains], at least for humans. Your stomach juices are not strong enough to kill this acid-loving bacterium, which is why it’s more likely than other members of the E. coli family to produce abdominal cramps, diarrhea, fever and, in rare cases, fatal kidney failure.  Where does this particularly virulent strain come from? . . . O157 thrives in a new — that is, recent in the history of animal diets — biological niche: the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and dairy cattle fed on grain, the typical ration on most industrial farms. It’s the infected manure from these grain-fed cattle that contaminates the groundwater and spreads the bacteria to produce, like spinach, growing on neighboring farms.  . . [In an experiment,] when cows were switched from a grain diet to hay for only five days, O157 declined 1,000-fold.  This is good news. In a week, we could choke O157 from its favorite home — even if beef cattle were switched to a forage diet just seven days before slaughter, it would greatly reduce cross-contamination by manure of, say, hamburger in meat-packing plants.  . . The United States Department of Agriculture does recognize the threat from these huge lagoons of waste, and so pays 75 percent of the cost for a confinement cattle farmer to make manure pits watertight, either by lining them with concrete or building them above ground. But taxpayers are financing a policy that only treats the symptom, not the disease, and at great expense. There remains only one long-term remedy, and it’s still the simplest one: stop feeding grain to cattle. . . [T]housands of acres of other produce are still downstream from these lakes of E. coli-ridden cattle manure." [NY Times; emphasis mine]

I don't eat a lot of spinach, but I had a bag of baby spinach in my refrigerator when this story broke and, even though it was probably fine, I'm very grateful I didn't eat it or feed it to my family.

Food Network Leftovers

In case you have ever wondered, like me, where the extra food goes -- Food Network Kitchens: ‘LEFT OVERS’.

Jane Smiley: CEO President

"In the late eighties, I wrote a novel called A Thousand Acres. Everyone thought it was about incest and "King Lear". To me, those were plot elements that I was using in service to the theme, which concerned the transformation of the midwestern American landscape from a unique, diverse, and rather fragile natural ecosystem that supported methods of European animal and grain farming imported by German, English, and Scandinavian farmers during the nineteenth century to a denuded and lifeless "food" factory in which a few crops (corn, soybeans, hogs, and beef) and the money that could be made from them pushed every other consideration of human endeavor and biodiversity to the margins, or snuffed them out entirely." [The Blog | Jane Smiley: CEO President | The Huffington Post]

Caffeine

Good to know: I could drink 217.16 cans of Diet Mountain Dew before croaking.

How much of your favorite caffeinated beverage would it take to kill you? 

(I found this amusing -- if you don't, please just ignore this post.)

Safety of U.S. Food Supply

"Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson resigned Friday, warning of a potential global outbreak of the flu and health-related terrorist attacks. “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do,” he said."  [MSNBC]

Bush was questioned . . . about comments by Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson about the vulnerability of the US food supply. . . "We're a large country with all kinds of avenues where somebody can inflict harm," Bush said. "We're doing everything we can to protect the American people. There's a lot of work to be done."  [Boston Globe]

"Rules announced Monday will make it easier to investigate a bioterror attack on the U.S. food supply, though they won't change the vulnerability of the nation's food.  ''There are any number of threats, and they range from what's done across the oceans to what's done in the kitchen in the restaurant that you're eating in,'' said Michael Osterholm, associate director of the National Center for Food Protection and Defense at the University of Minnesota, a project of the Homeland Security Department. The regulations announced Monday by the Food and Drug Administration aim to trace the source of food contamination after the fact. Most businesses involved in the nation's human and animal food supply will have to keep records showing where they received food and where they shipped it."  [Chicago Sun-Times]

Thanks, I feel a lot safer now.  Time for lunch.  Sigh.