Jakob's Bowl

Just Another Day At The Factory (Farm)

All that year the animals worked like slaves. But they were happy in their work; they grudged no effort or sacrifice, well aware that everything they did was for the benefit of themselves and those of their kind who would come after them, and not for a pack of idle, thieving human beings.

Animal Farm
George Orwell, 1945

I originally intended this post merely to note Dr. Dean Wyatt’s testimony last week before a House Committee - as reported by Jean-Pierre Ruizon on Examiner.com - about “how the agency supports unhealthy practices at the national slaughterhouses and endangers the nation's meat food supply.” Dr. Wyatt, a public health supervisory veterinarian with the USDA's Food and Safety Inspection Services (FSIS) testified “to numerous instances where FSIS executives overruled his and other inspectors' citations of slaughterhouses' abuses…” and “that he was directed by his superiors to "drastically cut back" the time spent on ensuring that animals destined for food were treated humanely.” This piece reminded me of a television commercial I had seen a week earlier promoting the ‘natural’ line of sliced deli meats from one of the largest industrial processed meat producers!!! This momentary mental connection amused me at first, but then it ticked me off leading to even more recollections about Big Ag factory farms. It was quite amazing what I found online when I searched on phrases like ‘cow abuse.’

One of the points of Dr. Wyatt’s testimony in part concerned Bushway Packing, a slaughterhouse in Vermont, An clandestine video - WARNING, it is graphic - was shot by an undercover Humane Society agent at Bushway last October that depicted the normal course of business at this industrial calf slaughterhouse. USDA inspectors are in the plant when much of this video is shot. According to the Examiner piece “Prior to his testimony, Dr. Wyatt had issued orders to shut down of Vermont’s Bushway Packing on three different occasions. Each time, Dr. Wyatt’s superiors overruled his orders and allowed the plant to reopen without it addressing the underlying health and humane issues.”And if you are interested their is the video - WARNING, it is graphic - taken by Mercy For Animals in early 2009 at Willet Dairy in Locke, New York, the state’ largest dairy factory farm. Of course, none of this treatment affects the quality of the milk or the hamburger that these poor dairy cows eventually become after they are milked dry in just 1/3 of their traditional ‘pastured’ lives.

Salmon Sal(i)vation: A 'Big Fish' Story (Part 1)

Only when the last tree has died
and the last river has been poisoned
and the last fish has been caught
will we realize
we cannot eat money.

Cree Saying

Despite the best efforts of the friends the oceans and of wild salmon in particular, the public tends to forget, or ignore, the naked facts about salmon farming unless they are constantly reminded of them. I would suggest that this ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality is exactly what Big Aquaculture and its PR consultants count on. A seemingly insatiable appetite for this pink fleshed fish has had us on a roller coaster ride for several decades now with the steepest and scariest drops having occurred in the last half dozen years. Damien Gillis’ film Farmed Salmon Exposed, was posted online last week as part of the Pure Salmon Campaign's Global Week of Action, - yet another round of serious ‘in-your-face’ truth telling about farmed salmon, just as retail giant Target has pledged to stop selling ‘farmed salmon.’ This startling film reminded me of an episode of celebrity chef Eric Ripert’s Avec Eric that I saw online a few weeks earlier. This three Michelin Star chef is one of the masters of preparing fish, and he typically offers only wild fish in his restaurant. I was stunned that he was touting the “improved” flavor of ‘organic farmed salmon,’ in this episode on Star Ingredients. He was promoting a type of ‘industrial farming’ that still has serious unanswered ecological, economic, and health questions attached to it. It set me to wondering if any other ‘star’ chefs were offering farmed salmon on their menus along with free-range chickens.

In A Pig's Eye

I try to buy pasture-raised pork when I can find it, and failing that I buy pork from one of the small local or regional farm operations such as Pure Country Pork in Ephrata, WA. Unfortunately, it seems that a growing number of outlets here in Seattle have switched from carrying pork produced by small to medium regional meat processors to carrying the “PrairieFresh” label. This is the ‘brand’ of Seaboard Foods, the third largest industrial pork producer in the country!

Back when it became clear that we were in the midst of a serious economic downturn, I wondered how it would impact small farmers and retailers that were producing ‘real’ meat, poultry, dairy, and produce - the local, the sustainable, the organic - and selling their products at prices that would allow them to put food on their own tables and to continue operating into the future. I suspected that many in the ‘market’ would start rationalizing the purchase of industrial organics and even products from Big Ag with ‘natural’ and other ‘down-on-the-farm’ sounding names. It would seem that this process is underway.

The ‘homey’ sounding name was a tip off when I first noticed the PrairieFresh brand, with a little red heart on the logo in place of the dot for the first letter 'i,' in a local high-end grocery a number of years back, and it didn’t take much research to find the facts behind the brand. Seaboard Foods has industrial pig operations, including CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation),  in the Midwest and Southwest, and it processes about 5 million hogs per year - it also markets and sells an additional 5 million hogs per year processed by Triumph Foods, the country’s second largest pork producer. Unfortunately today in the era of ‘boxed’ meat this level of transparency is not always available, especially when only select information makes it to the label on the cello wrapped white trays.

Don't Fence Me In

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

The Pasture
Robert Frost

Since it didn’t get much play in the mainstream media, or online for that matter you may have missed this little item from Friday New USDA Rules Establish Strong Organic Standards for Pasture and Livestock. Over the past decade family farmers, in part through The Cornucopia Institute, have been fighting good fight over Big Ag’s skirting of the organic regulations, especially with regard to pasturing livestock, actually blatant breach may be more appropriate, which has seriously tarnished the ‘organic’ label. Even though Big Ag - was found guilty of "willful" violations of the federal organic law by the USDA in 2007, the previous Administration merely slapped it on the hands. The strict new rules are set to take effect this June, and the current Administration is expected to take a more serious view towards enforcement - specifically, industrial farms operated by the Colorado-based Aurora Dairy, which "produces private-label, store brand milk for Wal-Mart, Costco and large grocery chains." The most significant of these new rules:

require that dairy cows and other ruminants be out on pasture for the entire growing season, but for not less than 120 days. It also requires that the animals receive at least 30% of their feed, or dry matter intake (DMI), from pasturing. In addition, organic livestock will be required to have access to the outdoors year-round with the exception of temporary confinement due to mitigating and documentable environmental or health considerations.

Let Them Eat Macarons

Alice: If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll, 1865

When is a cupcake not a cupcake? When it’s a macaron, silly!

If I read one more online article or blog post about French macarons as the new ‘cupcake,’ I might go ballistic. Yesterday’s post in SFoodie, posed the question again because of the writer’s discovery of Kentfield's Atelier Kawashima a new macaron shop in the Bay Area. This is at least the third time in eight months here on the West Coast that a discovery of this nature has been cited as a portent, as if at any moment you can expect macaron shops to be opening on every street corner - hopefully, at least the pastry chefs aren't loony enough to think this is the case!

These little meringue sandwiches are sometimes referred to as Parisian Macarons, since it was in Paris that they gained their international fame, specifically at Ladurée. Meringue is made with flour, sugar, ground almond, egg white, and a flavoring, and the ‘stuff’ in the middle is usually butter cream, ganache, jam or some combination. The technique and skill required to make the delicate meringues is said to have arrived in France via Italy, but I suspect that the ultimate source was the masters of creating confections with nuts, eggs, and sugar, the Arabs.

With Six You Get Egg Roll, And Maybe Melamine

When it comes to Chinese food I have always operated under the policy that the less known about the preparation the better. ... A wise diner who is invited to visit the kitchen replies by saying, as politely as possible, that he has a pressing engagement.

Third Helpings
Calvin Trillin, 1983

I guess the old joke extends farther away than your local Chinese restaurant. As we have seen over the last three years the problems with quality control in China extend beyond pet food and childrens’ toys. I don’t even recall now if any of the melamine-tainted Chinese milk made it into this country in 2008, but it sure did create havoc in China - killing six babies and making over 300,000 ill. As one can expect, the totalitarian government there took quick action to solve the problem and prevent it from happening again. In November of last year Marion Nestle reported on the Atlantic Online about two men being executed for producing or selling milk intentionally laced with melamine, and nineteen others were given long prison sentences - upwards of 20 dairies were implicated in the scandal. Problem over…or was it.