Eats
Want to Beef Up Your Local Chops? Try Meat-Sharing
Published November 21, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Does the locally raised, grass-fed meat you find at the farmers market trump your budget? The cost of sustainable meat is high, which is good since it means we might view it as a little more precious and occasional than many Americans do. But is there some way to directly support local farmers and get meat a little cheaper?
Why not try meat-sharing? The concept isn't new — it's basically a community-supported agriculture program for meat — but its popularity is picking up steam as interest in local food soars. The Oakland Local introduces readers to the Bay Area Meat CSA, which advertises itself with the straightforward tagline "buy good, healthy meat directly from local ranchers."
Mark Markovich, a satisfied customer who had bought 70 pounds of meat with some friends from Morris Grassfed Beef, ticked off a list of benefits: keeping money local, helping ranchers support themselves, reducing your carbon footprint. "You’re helping support the entire ecosystem," he told Oakland Local. "People talk about eating within a 100-mile radius of their homes. We can do that here. From field to fork, I know exactly what is going on with the food I’m eating.”
The Website Local Harvest lists CSAs by zip code, including many that provide meat.
Photo courtesy of tvol via flickr
My $80 Thanksgiving Turkey
Published November 13, 2009 @ 11:08AM PT
The argument can be made that paying $80 for a turkey this Thanksgiving is just a typical example of elitism in the sustainable food movement. And that might be somewhat true.
However, I say that it is an example of paying for what's important to you, and for me, that's knowing not only who raised the bird on my table but how it was raised as well.
This Thanksgiving, I'll be serving a 10-12 pound heritage breed turkey from EcoFriendly Foods, a cooperative that sources sustainably produced meat from small farms throughout the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia; and here's why.
Somewhere around 99% of the turkeys consumed in America every year are the genetically engineered "Broadbreasted White" variety. These turkeys, the ones you find in the grocery store, are raised in (I omit "on" for a reason) factory farms, and have been manipulated to the point that they cannot even stand on their own most of time.
In Ohio, Local Food Is In Business
Published October 28, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
In an abandoned building in Wooster, Ohio, the future of local food is taking shape. Thirteen intrepid souls have formed a board to direct the Wooster Local Foods Cooperative, which will operate Local Roots Market and Café in what used to be, appropriately, a CorningWare store, according to Farm and Dairy.
The idea is to create a year-round onsite and Internet farmers market based on a cooperative model. “Our goals,” the Local Roots blog states, “are to encourage healthy eating, expand local economic development, promote community involvement, and sustainable living.” Hurrah!
With a $60,000 Specialty Crop Promotion grant from the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, the venture is slowly taking shape — the organizers are busily procuring refrigerators, cash registers and sorting bins, and plan to start opening on Saturdays in November.
Will customers knock down the door?
Buying Local--- Slightly Easier
Published July 17, 2009 @ 11:27AM PT
First in a three part series on buying local.
Nutritionism and Guilt vs Coffee
Published July 07, 2009 @ 12:52PM PT
This is some weapons-grade nonsense:
... Coffee is a toxin that shuts down the cleansing process of the body and locks other toxins such as fat inside the body. Therefore, it is wise to quit drinking coffee if you are serious about losing weight.
Just a day ago, I was reading about how my beloved (yeah, I'm objective) coffee can help reverse the effects of dementia in old age, some toxin,* and this relates sidewise to understanding why describing fat as a toxin is just plain ignorant.
In fact, fat has a lot of bearing on the proper function of the brain and our bodies, notably in the myelin sheathing that surrounds our nerve cells.
Myelin is made primarily of fats and lipids and its destruction in diseases like multiple sclerosis slows nerve impulse transmission so badly that victims begin to lose all functions mediated by the brain and spinal cord. It's the electrical insulation properties of fat that are responsible for the fact that "nerve impulses in unmyelinated neurones have a maximum speed of around 1 m/s, [while] in myelinated neurones they travel at 100 m/s."
A human body that regarded fat as a toxin would destroy its own nerve casings. Therefore, if coffee really prevented your body from recognizing fat as toxic, the proper response would be to have it all the time.
But does caffeine affect fat retention one way or another? As a stimulant, and stimulants are generally appetite suppressants, you might even expect it to cause weight loss. Katherine Zeratsky, a registered dietitian at the Mayo Clinic, says coffee has no measurable effect on long-term weight, except that excess consumption of high calorie coffee drinks has the same likely effect as consuming lots of other high calorie foods.
So, to recap - Fat isn't a toxin. Coffee doesn't seem to affect weight, but the things you add to it might.
So what's left to say? That there's an endless market for hashing over every little facet of people's diets looking for hidden guilt using unsupported assertions that can contradict basic biological principles. That it's humorously easy to jump the gun and assume that something people like, coffee, is by definition bad for us. Meh.
Take away some of those unfounded assumptions and there isn't anything to that article but the idea that a person needs to be 'cleansed.' Sounds like a bunch of distracting, pseudo-religious claptrap to me. You want to worry about a toxins that improperly accumulate in the body, worry about bisphenol A or pthalates, or any of the other weird chemicals that leach out of our ubiquitous plastic food packaging.
Again, again and again: Guilt culture and nutritionism act as a hindrance to sensible discussions about food and sustainability. They are wasteful diversions from serious questions concerning recent declines in public health, which you would think people would know better than to blame on foods that humans have been ingesting for millenia.
* To be extremely clear: Dementia is multi-causal and I found no mention in publicly available news articles linking coffee's anti-Alzheimer's effects to fat regulation. When causation is first established in health studies, it can take quite a lot of work to determine the mechanism because living systems are complicated and we don't understand them as well as we'd like. It wasn't my idea to connect these concepts together, hence, the debunking.
(Photo credit: Il Quoquo on Flickr.)
Persian Eggplant Stew
Published July 05, 2009 @ 11:54PM PT
I got a cookbook from friends, "A Taste of Persia", by Najmieh K. Batmanglij, for my birthday this year. I just tried my first recipe out of it and omfg, it turned out very good, so I thought I'd share it.
I didn't stick entirely to the recipe due to not having the exact ingredients and seeing it made with slight variations previously, as will be explained below. This dish is a good introduction to Persian cooking and in spite of an hour and a half minimum cooking time, fairly simple to make.
The Persian name for it is given as Khoresh-e bademjan, literally, stew of eggplant. It's got a citrusy tomato base, the eggplant ends up very soft and savory, and it's been one of my favorites since the first time I tasted it years ago.
World According To Monsanto, pt 7, Informed Consent
Published June 24, 2009 @ 07:24AM PT
Would it be all right with you if your parents, if you are an adult on your own recognizance, were still allowed to decide what cities or towns you could live in? Would your answer be any different if your parents were real estate agents and would probably make good decisions?
Would it be all right with you if the government made up a national menu and required you to eat only that food to conform? Would your answer be any different if the menu contained your favorite foods?
Well, I think I'd have to say no on both counts, and in case of both contingencies.
Believing in self-determination, free will and informed consent as I do, I couldn't approve of such policies. This is the level of choice that I see being removed from each of us when the government refuses to require the labeling of transgenic foods.
By way of self-reported studies and captive university research laboratories whose future grant funding depends on the favor of the biotech industry, the FDA has approved numerous transgenic crops that are processed in the regular food supply and sold to an unsuspecting marketplace.
They've been allowed to patent self-replicating, living organisms and release them into the wild without the public even having a chance to debate the implications.
'Oh,' the biotech folks will say, and have said in the comments at this blog, 'but you can buy organic food.'
First, it's as ridiculous that I should have to pay a premium to have food that wasn't sprayed with poison in the first as that I should have to pay a premium in order to know what I'm eating. Second, I can't be sure that I know what I'm eating, not even if I buy organics.
