Green Options

As Thanksgiving approaches, we tend to focus more on what we have to be grateful for.  We have a bountiful food supply, symbolized at this time of year by horns of plenty, Turkey Day feasts at our tables and in trade magazines from Country Living to Better Homes and Gardens, among others.

The stewardship of sending food and other basics in the form of care packages to poverty-plagued countries tends to [...]

I knew little about Foreign Animal Disease (FAD) when I walked into a Wisconsin Department of Agriculture (DATCP) talk on the subject Nov. 3 at the Microbial Sciences Center on the UW-Madison campus.  Here is a description of foot-and-mouth disease, an example of FAD, from www.cattletoday:

Foot-and-Mouth Disease is a severe, highly communicable [...]

A recent blog criticized Kraft’s Macaroni & Cheese dinner, a family and kids favorite for decades, for selling a quick meal product made with “cheese products,” not real cheese.

On my next shopping trip, I bought a box to investigate what was in that powdery but tasty cheese sauce.  A blue and gold ribbon printed on the box already told me I was going to get The Cheesiest and the “original flavor.”  The ingredients include CHEESE SAUCE (WHEY, MILKFAT, MILK PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, SALT, SODIUM TRIPOLYPHOSPHATE . . . MILK, YELLOW 5, YELLOW 6, ENZYMES, CHEESE CULTURE). The dinner also contains wheat, milk.

Nearly 20 years ago, my doctor told me that I had IBS.  Irritable Bowel Syndrome.  I was getting my annual physical exam and lamented about consistently painful bowel movements and related flaming hemorrhoids.

One of his recommendations was a daily dose of high-fiber laxative and a high-fiber diet.  The diet made me an instant convert to bran cereals and pitted prunes.  All I needed now was an AARP membership card and a subscription to Reader’s Digest.  I felt much older than my 32 years.

Soybean oil.  That’s it. That’s it?

Yes. After learning that Crisco got its name from crystallized cotton seed oil and waxing nostalgic about the big red-white-and-blue shortening can Mom used to keep in the cupboard for baking, I was shocked to find that a typical 32-ounce bottle of all-natural, cholesterol free Crisco Pure Vegetable Oil had just one ingredient.  Not cottonseed oil but soybean oil.

Soybean oil is another surplus crop more frequently used for whatever the processors, marketers, and packagers come up with. Cottonseed oil isn’t in the cooking oil or shortening ingredients.  It appears Crisco has given in to the cheap grain trend of government-subsidized crops making more of our food.  It’s probably better than fattier cottonseed oil that’s increasingly fed to dairy cows as a fiber source that converts to butterfat in milk.

To food safety advocates, CAFO is a four-letter word.  The acronym stands for Concentrated Animal Feed Operations.  They came into being as industrialized farming methods took hold largely as a result of the demand for food worldwide and the decreasing amount of land upon which to grow it.  Author/journalist/activist Michael Pollan is among many others who have reported damage done to animals, the environment, and food itself with the advent of CAFOs that house cattle in large buildings with rows of narrow stanchions.  The cows eat feed from lower-quality surplus corn – not locally grown non-chemical feed corn raised in traditional fashion — and shipped in trucks traveling long distances that create local road congestion and burn precious fossil fuels.

Henry Albert Schroeder (1898-1967) must be rolling over in his grave at Kroghville Cemetery.  Either that, or he is about ready to come down from Heaven and give corporate farming hell, bringing with him the Clydesdales that once plowed his farm fields in the township of Pleasant Springs, 20 miles from Madison in eastern Dane County, Wisconsin.

From 1926 to 1951, Henry Schroeder farmed [...]

By Steven D. Schmitt

A Letter to the Editor in the September 17, 2009 Wisconsin State Journal could not have been timed better. A Madison resident who had farmed for a career questioned why UW-Madison was spending its financial resources to bring author Michael Pollan to the Kohl Center (Sept. 24, 7 p.m.) to speak on his book, In Defense of Food, especially because he has been so critical of the current agricultural production system.

I am reading Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, an account of his personal journey through the modern food chain that criticizes U.S. farm policies and large-scale industrialized farming for turning cheap surplus corn into a variety of consumer products that pose risks to public health and the environment.  The man did a tremendous amount of research and interviews - and even bought his own cow.