Jakob's Bowl

A Voice Lowing In The Wilderness

Before we all go hailing the recent decisions by McDonald’s, Burger King, et al for removing the ammonia treated slaughterhouse scraps normally unfit for human consumption, aka "pink slime," from their burgers, tacos, and god knows what- as reported on the Huffington Post this past week, let us remember that the New York Times reported on the existence of this execrable substance, and its presence in fast food burgers as well as burgers being offered in school lunch programs over two years ago!!! (See my January 2010 post Kitchen Cleaners Anyone?)

While I am aghast that it took a documentary, the public attention of a celebrity chef, and over two years time to move BIG FOOD to action, I am even more disturbed by the fact that the USDA approved the use of this 'Soylant Pink.' in 2001...10 years ago. When I think of how many millions, or billions, of these burgers were consumed over the decade my head sets to spinning...what will they think of next.

Talkin' 'Bout Food Talkin'

Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more
Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more
Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Pick a little, talk a little, cheep!

The Music Man, 1957
Meredith Wilson

I say we’ve got trouble, right here in Big Ag City, with people talking about how food is produced we’re definitely on the road to perdition. Maybe it’s the deferential, almost reverential, way those often identifying themselves as - and I shudder at the word – 'foodies' speak about the who, what, when, where, and how their food is produced that makes them the easy butt of so many jokes and so much satire these days. Or it might be the fact that they always seem to be talking about the food they buy and eat. Of course, it also might be a subconscious fear by the vast majority who are not in this fraternity, a fear that they should know more about the way their industrial food chain works coupled with the fear of what this would mean. I recently sat through one of the first episodes of Fred Armisen's Portlandia, and Portland’s very vocal food community was sent up in an extended skit. This reminded me of my post responding to Tony's Baloney rant in last year’s episode on the food scene in Rome – according to Tony, Roman’s don't talk endlessly about where their ingredients come from, they just buy and eat them. Where do I begin…with the positive, or the negative?

Seventy years ago or more when a larger percentage of our population lived in the agrarian parts of this country, back when much of our food production was regional, people didn’t spend a lot of time discussing how the crops and livestock were raised since they were a lot closer to the sources, which were very transparent and roughly similar throughout a given region. It was common knowledge, even though their were literally hundreds more varieties of crops being grown and hundreds more breeds of livestock being raised. There was one significant exception to this, that is, the County Fair when everyone gathered to observe, taste, and judge the best of this or that for the season.

As the population migrated to the metropolitan areas to work in factories, this direct connection and knowledge was gradually lost, or better yet, traded for the time and money saving convenience of industrially processed and packaged foods provided in super markets and fast food chains. As a part of this transition quantity seemed to have supplanted quality for much of the consuming public. The principles of Economics, Industrial Efficiency, and Food Chemistry were eventually applied at every step of the traditional agrarian food chain with the intertwined goals of lower prices to spur demand and lower costs to spur profits. This has all led Big Food to ever more twisted machinations, taking lower and lower quality crops and livestock and a bigger and bigger chemistry set to make 'stuff' that appears to resemble traditional foods. They now fool the vast majority of the population, several generations or more removed from real food. Highly stimulated taste buds and ever expanding waistlines at a cost that seems to decrease year after year keeps the consumer from delving too deeply into the mysteries of food production - of course billion dollar advertising budgets bombarding them with the notion that our food is only getting better also helps. What they don't know, or can't remember, won't hurt them, or Big Food.

Given all the misdirection and misinformation provided on Big Food’s and Big Ag’s packaging and in their advertising campaigns, it is no wonder that the average consumer has little to no understanding of the means and methods used to produce their industrial offerings - that is, how the cheap and tasteless ingredients produced by Big Ag are turned into ‘appealing’ products by Big Food through the use of industrially produced thickeners, stabilizers, preservatives, ‘natural’ flavors, and of course plenty of salt and high fructose corn sugar. (Heinz’s "Grown Not Made" ketchup campaign is a perfect example of this.)

All of this food chatter that Tony Bourdain and others object to or openly mock is a form of self defense by individuals concerned with preserving what remains of our food heritage and reversing the dual trends of narrowing down our food choices and making food production processes so complicated that we become totally dependent on PhDs and secret industrial formulas, like adding ammonia treated slaughterhouse scraps to burger patties. Since real food cannot be produced in an industrially efficient factory, it is only by word of mouth that independent, small-holding farmers using traditional, sustainable methods can survive. The more often the uniformed hear about 'real' food from these incessant food talkers, the more likely they are to begin asking questions, and sampling the wares of 'real' farmers and 'real' food producers.

But there are even more fundamental reasons why all this food talk is a good for us...more to come

Filler Up: What's In Your Meat? 2

As I sit through yet another Taco Bell commercial, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry!!! They are still advertising their "beef" offerings in light of the just-filed lawsuit and recent revelations over what's actually in this "beef" filling. According to the story posted on Gizmodo early last week, in order for Taco Bell to advertise their products as "beef" products, it is required to be complying with the USDA definition of "ground beef":

Chopped fresh and/or frozen beef with or without seasoning and without the addition of beef fat as such, shall not contain more than 30 percent fat, and shall not contain added water, phosphates, binders, or extenders.

Instead Taco Bell appears to use an industrially made substance called Taco Meat Filling without fully informing the public exactly what that is. Gizmodo provides an ingredients list from a tub of Taco Bell taco meat filling, a list seen only behind the closed kitchen doors:

Beef, water, isolated oat product, salt, chili pepper, onion powder, tomato powder, oats (wheat), soy lecithin, sugar, spices, maltodextrin (a polysaccharide that is absorbed as glucose), soybean oil (anti-dusting agent), garlic powder, autolyzed yeast extract, citric acid, caramel color, cocoa powder, silicon dioxide (anti-caking agent), natural flavors, yeast, modified corn starch, natural smoke flavor, salt, sodium phosphate, less than 2% of beef broth, potassium phosphate, and potassium lactate.(emphasis added)

And if that weren't bad enough, the USDA also has a requirement that any product labeled "meat taco filling," should contain at least 40% fresh beef, and that's what the class action lawsuit is about. The Alabama law firm had the filling tested, and they alleged that their samples contained only 35% beef!!! If this turns out to be true, was it poor quality control or an intentional corporate decision to replace a small percentage of beef with one less expensive filler or another in the industrial "taco meat" formula to improve the bottom line?

Patties Or Links: What's In Your Meat?

This bit of video taken at Smithfield Foods hit the alternative media and the Internet in mid-December, - I'm a little behind in my reading - and I caught it on Yahoo News. I've posted about the many horrors of, and stemming from, industrial hog production several time in the last year, and as you can see we will never see true progress unless Big Ag is legally forced to change. They will be aggressive with their PR - a la the recent "corn sugar" campaign. What Big Ag cannot completely hide from the public, it may eventually eliminate some close confinement techniques such as 'gestation crates,' but it will do so only when it develops alternative methods to raise pigs even faster at lower costs, methods that it will tout as more humane, or hide behind even higher walls. You see, their model of inexpensive, plentiful food is dependent on keeping the consumers and the public in the dark about how they work their slight of hand.

Think about this video the next time you're running late in the morning and hit the drive-thru for those $1 egg, cheese, and sausage sandwiches, or when you head out for a grand slam Saturday morning with the kids.

Tony's Baloney

Last night I was channel surfing and stopped on a recently aired episode of the new season of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. Tony was in Rome, and even before the question of how he would reconcile Italian culinary tradition with last season's poorly written and spiteful San Francisco episode popped into my head, I had my answer. I only had to watch for a few minutes when Tony began verbally dancing out of the corner in which he painted himself last season with the sole purpose of trashing Alice Waters.

I realized that the production schedule for No Reservations probably bore no resemblance to the broadcast schedule, so I didn’t find it odd last season to see middle-class and well-to-do Venitians and Sardinians supporting local farmers whose families had been sustainably growing produce and livestock for hundreds of years. Following ancient custom and the rhythms of the seasons led to ‘a little bit of heaven on earth’ to paraphrase Tony’s exuberance in those episodes. Northern Californians who supported the 'local’ and 'sustainable' at Farmers’ Markets, on the other hand, were elitists. At the time, I assumed that the San Francisco episode was produced after those in Sardinia and Venice.

Last night I could hear Tony doing his best to reconcile the modern Romans’ passion for local, seasonal ingredients with those people in this country who feel the same way. It seems that the Romans don’t talk about 'local,' 'sustainable,' and 'seasonal;' they just just follow their heritage and...eat them. However, since the folks in the Bay Area talk about these things ad nauseum, and spend countless hours blogging about them, they are 'elitists'! But then again, doesn’t Tony spend more time talking about food than eating it!

Now, I suppose we should forgive Tony for not remembering that the Romans have unbroken culinary traditions that stretch back a thousand years or more, while in this country, Big Ag, Big Food, and the Mega Supermarket have done their best over the last three decades not just to disrupt our culinary traditions, but also make us feel that the way food was produced and consumed in the past was inefficient, unhealthy, and not nearly as tasty. The local and sustainable movements in this country are trying to revitalize the farming and culinary traditions that almost disappeared, and 'word of mouth' is the only advertising they can afford to compete with the ubiquitous supermarket and big box store.

I still cannot figure out why Tony neglected to show us where the underclass in Venice, Sardinia, and now Rome buy their food, since he took such great pains to do so with the underclass in the Bay Area last year…

Eggs Benedict...Arnold

 

Miss Edie: But suppose someday it happens. Suppose someday there weren't any chickens. Oh, Babs, what could I possibly do? And then the eggman wouldn't have...he wouldn't have a job. It might happen, Babs. What could I do?

Babs Johnson: Now, Mama, that's just egg paranoia. I think you're being very silly. There will always be chickens. Why, there are so many chickens now... that we can eat some and let some of them live... in order to supply us with eggs. Chickens are plentiful, Mama. The world will never be without chickens. You can be sure of that.

Miss Edie: Oh, Babs... IT COULD HAPPEN! IT COULD HAPPEN!

Pink Flamingos (1972)

I suppose it’s not the eggs’ fault, or the poor battery chickens for that matter, but Big Ag trying to squeeze their stooges for lower and lower costs with the latter trying to make it up by producing greater and greater volume. It was less than ten days ago when the first egg recall was issued for Wright County Egg in Galt, Iowa on eggs produced on three of its five farms that it had shipped since May 19th - that’s right almost three months worth of egg shipments! The initial recall was for approximately 228 million eggs, and this recall by Wright County Egg has since been expanded to 380 million eggs (32 million dozen or so) produced by all five of its farms with hundreds of people sickened across the country. When I read the initial report I assumed that the recall only affected the Midwest since Big Ag has significant industrial egg operations in both California and Washington. Wrong…Wednesday’s Seattle Times reported that:

Eggs affected by the expanded recall were distributed to food wholesalers, distribution centers and food service companies in California, Colorado, Minnesota, Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Oklahoma, Oregon, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin.

What’s a few thousand miles to an industrial egg, anyway? By the end of the week the recall was expanded again to include 170 million eggs from Hillandale Farms of New Hampton, Iowa, making the total recall 550 million eggs. According to the Marler Blog, the brand names these eggs were sold under include Albertson, Boomsma’s, Farm Fresh, Glenview, James Farms, Kemps, Lund, Mountain Dairy, Pacific Coast, Ralph’s, Dutch Farms, Hillandale, Lucerne, Shoreland, Sunshine, and Trafficanda.

I hope this causes more than a few people to pass on the $0.99/dozen eggs, or send back the runny scrambled eggs that came with their $4.99 breakfast special!!! (Or maybe Big Ag will just pay Congress to pass a law requiring us to cook our eggs to 200 degrees...)