Green Options

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Much of the press surrounding efforts to improve school lunches focuses on resistance from junk food-addled children who like their potatoes with partially-hydrogenated oil and their fruit juice incased in gelatin and xanthan gum. TV shows like Jamie’s School Dinners show picky children gagging at the sight of tomatoes, spitting out pieces of lettuce. This makes for excellent TV, but is it really accurate?

The Mercury News - a local Silicon Valley newspaper - recently reported the popularity of healthy cafeteria menus with the schools’ students. In fact, school lunch participation has gone up in the two school districts (Los Gatos and Saratoga Union School Districts) that have teamed up with Revolution Foods - a school catering company that sources local foods, uses 85% organic ingredients, and teams up with Whole Foods to broaden their purchasing options.

Let’s talk food additives. Even when I go to the health food store and pick up all-natural, gluten-free, sprouted hemp, vegan cookies (okay, especially when I pick up items that have been so worked-over…), I find ingredients on the back like phosphates, lactic acid, or carrageenen. What should I make of such seemingly blatant contradiction? How am I supposed to know what is safe? Are the labels lying or have I been brainwashed into find fault in anything with a vaguely chemical sounding name? Now there is a database that can help decode the polysyllabic ingredients on the back of food packaging.

After 83 buffalo dairy providers from the Campania region of Italy were suspended after high levels of the toxicant class, dioxins were found in mozzarella made from their milk, two unlikely industries found themselves in the hot seat: independent farmers and traditional cheesemakers.

We often think of small farmers and food artisans as immune to the undignified fallout of mechanized food production. Instead, our romanticized view imagines century’s old techniques, the pure ingredients of yesteryear and a complete unfamiliarity with chemical additives. But there is a danger to thinking that traditional food production exists in a vacuum.

Willie Nelson and wife Annie are joining the campaign to help dairy cows, who are all too often living in extremely in-humane conditions. They are working with the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) to help bring awareness to the plight of these animals and work to end the harmful practices used by industrial dairy farms, such as the Mendes Ranch in California. You can join in by going to the Free […]

Maybe we really have reached our limits. David Korten, author, lecturer, and founder of Yes magazine, believes we have. He believes that climate change, peak oil, and the meltdown of the U.S. dollar are all symptoms of the impending fall of our modern, globalized way of life. And he has a point. The stock market is crashing, gas and food prices are skyrocketing, and our economy is faltering. Of course, if you are an optimist, you might say, well, we will survive, as we have before. Except for one thing: what will we eat?

When I take stock, I realize I can do without most of the things I buy. Yesterday I bought gas, printer cartridges, and mad libs for my daughter. Food was the only necessity I spent money on. But if David Korten is onto something, access to most of that food is in danger.

Consider: by most estimates, 98% of the food consumed by Americans comes from the industrial food system.

My guest today is Beth Bader, a very busy mom who juggles raising a family while working full-time, and writing three different blogs. In our interview, she talks about wrangling sharks, not for food, but tagging them, and what she’s discovered about the foods we’re eating.

Beth’s blog is The Expatriate’s Kitchen, “Musings on food and life, with my original recipes, and a cynical wit as sharp as my ten-inch French knife”.

beth-bader-final.mp3

Urban Agriculturalist is a series on the ways city and suburb dwellers use their land as a food resource.

What would you say if a farmer knocked on your door and asked to rent your backyard to grow raddichio or sweet peas? My guess is, you might inquire about his medication. But renting backyards is exactly what Wally Satzewich and Gail Vandersteen of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan started doing when they realized that their small-scale urban crops fetched a far higher profit than the large-scale vegetable growing that they did on a 20-acre farm north of the city.

People can’t believe their success with urban plots, says Vandersteen, “They think it’s too much work, but the truth is, this is much less work than mechanized, large-scale farming. We used to have a tractor to hill potatoes and cultivate, but we find it’s more efficient to do things by hand.” With fewer pests and gentler winds, empty urban lots sound downright ideal. But how could it be more profitable?

Milk is big in our house. We eat ice cream, butter, cheese, and yogurt. I love my morning coffee with just enough half-and-half to turn it a lovely shade of caramel. My daughter drinks milk with lunch and dinner. When you factor in the pizza with mozzarella and the breakfast cereal, hardly a meal goes by that is dairy-free.

Haunting all this milk, filled with calcium, protein, and fat, has been a single question: what is the real story behind recombinant bovine growth hormone?

If you read about food in general, or genetically engineered organisms specifically, it can’t have escaped your notice that there is a battle raging in this country about the use of rBGH in dairy cows. It’s a battle being fought in grocery stores, state legislatures, the corporate offices of Monsanto Corporation and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

I guess Thursday is Bad Cow Day. Sorry cows! I love your sweet, cud-chewing faces, but your owners have issues!

According to the Humane Society, 17% of the U.S. beef supply comes from spent dairy cows. These cows no longer produce financially viable quantities of milk and are sold at steep discount to slaughterhouses. In fact, prices for dairy cows can be as little as one-tenth the price of a well-fed beef steer on the meat market. This partially has to do with net meat gain: the dairy cow is bred for optimum lactation, not muscle mass. The price differential also has to do with condition: the dairy cows tend to be older and more feeble, depleted of calcium and afflicted with a multitude of bacterial infections, the result of sedentary, unifunctional lives.

Um. Look I don’t want to be an alarmist or anything. But. Um.

See, I’ve got kids? And, see…they’re kind of…energetic enough? I mean really, truly. Spend five seconds in my house and you will see: they are doing just fine bouncing off the walls of their own accord. So, I’ll thank the world for not encouraging them to bounce off the ceiling, as well.

Oh, but I can‘t thank the world, because apparently the world is instead choosing to fill them with caffeine when I’m not around.

As this great article from Metroactive explains, “these days, constraints on caffeine consumption for kids and young teens are nonexistent. Kids are having caffeine early and often.” It’s not just in their drinks, apparently. Candy bars? Increasingly filled with the stuff.

Excuse me while I step up on the soapbox. Ahem. I’ve been chided before about being too political on my food blog. More recipes, Woman! But the thing is, food is all tied up with politics, and there are a few things we eaters need to understand about this. For our own safety. So we can make better choices. This is a pretty short primer on the basics, but there are a lot of great links in here that can help you get the full picture of our food system.

How does food policy impact the safety of what we eat?
I mean, it’s just legislation, right? Laws that are supposed to keep the food supply safe. The basis for these laws was established in 1906 by Theodore Roosevelt in response to the publication of Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle. Ironically, one of these laws, the Meat Inspection Act, was supposed to eradicate the use of “4-D” cattle in meats, meaning dead, diseased, decaying and downed. Over 100 years later we are still facing the same issues.

The other act, the Pure Food and Drug Act, was designed to insure the safety of drugs and non-meat food items. However, the two agencies overlap. A raw egg, in the shell, is the responsibility of the FDA. Once the shell is broken, the USDA is in charge. If a processed sandwich is to be inspected, the USDA would have jurisdiction over the meat, the FDA over the bread. Makes all kind of sense, right?

Learn what you need to know about food safety, policy and what you can do as a consumer after the jump.