Holiday Meats

This blog entry was written for FeelGoodNow. If you'd like to read that version, click here. Sorry for posting it late, but the message still applies :)

What to serve? What to make the centerpiece of the table for family and friends this Christmas? Admittedly I have to beg the forgiveness of vegetarians and vegans as I’m going to focus on meat for now. Thanksgiving was a no-brainer for most, roasting a turkey was the obvious answer. Yet I know for me growing up I never had a traditional Christmas meal. We had ham a few years, turkey some others, and I even remember throwing some steaks on the grill in the snow one year. But since I’ve started learning more about where our food comes from and how it’s processed, I’ve been forced to reconsider the question of what kind of meat, if any, to serve.

Though there has been a lot more awareness raised in recent years as to the sorry state of our food industry and in particular our meat industry by well-known authors and filmmakers like Michael Pollan (Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, etc), Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Robert Kenner (Food Inc.) and Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me), much of the relevance to each of our personal lives has unfortunately remained elusive every time we walk into the grocery store. The food we eat literally shapes who we are. And because of its centrality to our culture today, meat has a special potency to either enrich our health, or destroy it. Because overconsumption of meat leads to heart disease, obesity, hypertension, and other illnesses, we must first choose to consume less meat. Then, once we’ve reached moderation, choose the meats which in and of themselves offer the highest of qualities with the smallest of costs to our personal health, the public health, and the environment which sustains us.

So we return to Christmas dinner. Pork? Turkey? Beef? Chicken? Though an in-depth analysis of each of these merits its own thesis, I’ll do my best to highlight the basics here:

·      Pork. Unfortunately, only four massive companies produce over half the pork consumed in the United States through Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), where pigs (not uncommon numbers for the industry are 25,000 swine) are so crammed together and so stressed that the managers of the firms have to chop off their tails to keep them from biting them off one another in their panic. But don’t fear, there are local producers which allow pigs to roam in their natural state and act as only pigs can before providing them as humane a death as possible.

·      Turkey and chickens. Not the same, but both awkward birds that can’t fly. Some 99% of all poultry grown in the States is genetically modified to grow faster (life spans for meat chickens is down to only 48 days). They live short, brutish lives crammed together by the thousands – up to 100,000 – under one roof for meat birds, called broilers, or confined to one-foot square cages for egg laying hens, called layers. There are local producers of chickens and turkeys, though they are certainly only found through famers markets or direct farm-to-consumer programs.

·      Beef. The vast majority of cows in this country (dairy and beef) are grown in CAFOs. There, they are fed mainly grain diets, which increases the amount of e coli viruses in their gut and increases the amount of fat in their muscles. If you’re planning a beef BBQ for the holidays, search for grass-fed and finished beef. This way you’ll know that at least the cows ate a diet for which their bodies were designed. This meat will also be more lean and healthy for you!

In general, purchasing USDA Certified Organic meat is a step up from regular meat. This certification, while not necessarily changing the living conditions of CAFOs, prevents the harmful overuse of antibiotics as well as avoids the synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides in the food chain to result in less toxic meat, happier animals, and a healthier environment. It is always best to buy meat directly from a local producer. This increases the accountability between producer and consumer, usually means the farmers don’t use CAFOs to produce their meat, and supports the local economy.

So, if you’re looking for meat to serve this holiday, give it a second glance: a second thought. If we rethink how we buy, tending towards healthier, leaner, more consciously grown meat (and less meat in general!), the producers will produce meat which is grown in accordance with nature, not against it. For Denver residents, I strongly suggest a visit to In Season Local Market for all your holiday food needs. They source all their food from within 250 miles of the store and have done all the research for you. I’ve fact-checked their meats and the farms they source from are top-notch. You’ll fiind them up on 32^nd and Wyandot in the Highlands. For those outside the Denver-metro area, check out eatwild.com to find the nearest source of natural meat.

Happy holidays and all the best.

Urban Agriculture

“Urban agriculture is an oxymoron. People that believe in that are just fooling themselves.” This was the response of a man who was presenting to my Peace Corps program group during a training session recently. He had asked for us each to say our name, where we were from, and if we had any experience with agriculture. Given my experience with Revision International’s program Re:farm Denver, I said that I have some experience in urban agriculture. The man, we’ll call him Bob, was a Ph.D. biologist who specialized in high-output greenhouse vegetable production. He had been brought to Moldova by an amazing program that brings experts in different agricultural fields from the States to consult and help Moldovan farmers for usually around 15 days.

Although his session was extremely informative and it was obvious he had an abundance of knowledge about how to get the most production out of any given greenhouse setting, I couldn’t help but ponder his somewhat upsetting comment about urban agriculture. Indeed his sentiments are nothing new. I’ve seen the same thoughts tracking across the faces of most farmers whom I’ve told about the work we do with Re:farm Denver in the city; they simply think we’re not doing real work. Their looks say that if we’re serious about feeding the world, we’d go lease 1000 acres, get a John Deere tractor, sprayer, and combine to plant, inundate, and harvest a single commodity crop which would then more than likely make its way into the stomachs of animals who weren’t meant to eat that kind of food anyway before the fat on their bones makes it to our mouths. The only exception to this has been my father-in-law, a South Dakotan farmer who has shown a genuine interest in my work with food in the city.

Don’t misunderstand me, large-scale farms (perhaps not as large as today’s farms though), technical equipment like tractors, ploughs, combines, etc, do indeed need to play an important role in the future or our food. Yet, with the global population creeping (read: racing) away from the rural lifestyle and toward the urban and suburban cityscapes, we must engage those settings with the question of how to feed themselves. Oil is dwindling worldwide; fossil-fuel based fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, are growing ever-more expensive; and the transportation to fly, ship, and drive food from the farm to the table is today longer and therefore requires more inputs than ever before in history. All this put together means that using the spaces which are available to us in the urban setting to grow what we can is more than simply not an oxymoron, it is a vital component of creating a future for our children when oil runs out.

It is also important to remember that we (most people in ‘developed’ nations) are forgetting both what real food is, and how to grow it. With grocery stores packed with tens of thousands of combinations of the compounds thought up by food scientists, and an increasingly urban population, we’ve firmly lost touch with where our food comes from. Unlike here in Moldova, where every family has a garden as well as a small plot of land on which they grow corn, grapes, sunflowers (for the seeds and the oil), having a garden in the States is largely considered a luxury or a hobby. Less than 2% of our population are farmers, and that number is still shrinking as my generation grows up and wants to leave the small towns for the big cities. Programs like Re:farm Denver are reteaching people about food. Reshowing people what it means to eat healthy. Reminding people that growing food is always cheaper than buying it.

All the families Revision works with for establishing household gardens are living at or below the Federal poverty line. They also live in food deserts, areas of the city where there is no grocery store. Where the only option for food is the junk food at the cornerstore. These families can’t afford to eat healthy thanks to our current national food system and policies (a topic for another blog), so they have higher rates of Type II diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. I have seen the difference a backyard garden can make in these families’ lives. When a family of four living on a household income of less than fifteen thousand dollars a year saves $40 per week by having a household garden, that is real. When kids are involved in growing their own food and now are excited to eat the vegetables they have helped grow, that is real.

So, urban agriculture can’t be an oxymoron. Cities can, do, and need to continue growing as much food as they possibly can within their own city limits. A very viable path for low-income families toward a healthier lifestyle is through relearning how to garden, which not only connects them with the Earth which sustains us, but also, inevitably, with their neighbors as they search for venues to share their surplus harvests.

Join the movement. Grow some of your own food next year and volunteer or donate to an organization like Revision which helps low-income neighborhoods do the same.

Healthy Food for Healthy Us

Back to food. Back to meat. Back to what makes sense. Many of the things I want to touch on I think many of us have heard faintly before, but perhaps we haven't gotten the full story or made connections which would inspire learning more or eating differently. So here we go, just a few reasons we should take a deeper look into our meat-eating habits and where that meat came from.

I was driving around Denver the other day for work and I had the opportunity to hear a segment on NPR about public health and new and mutated 'super-bugs', or strains of 'resistant' bacteria, which are popping up all over the world. The experts on the segment focused mainly on the much under-reported topic of the overuse of antibiotics in our society today, in particular, in factory farming (which happens to supply the vast majority of all the meat we eat). In the United States, humans consume about 3 million pounds of antibiotics annually. But a staggering 17.8 million pounds (a low, industry reported number) are fed to livestock annually (Foer, 2009). So let's look at the place where all this takes place, the factory farm.

Many proponents of factory farms say that they are an incredibly efficient way to produce a lot of meat which society needs to stay healthy. However, it is sad how little research and common sense it takes to prove every facet of this argument wrong.

At first glance, that common sense goes something like this:

The animals are taken off the lands and diets they were designed to live on and shipped to a factory farm, where they are fed genetically modified food -- which itself has been shipped to that farm, cannot be consumed directly by humans, requirs vast amounts of non-renewable resources to produce (think pesticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers), and requires government subsidies to pay the farmers who grew it.

Then, because the living conditions in that factory farm are so deplorable that hundreds of thousands of animals die from infections or are so mutilated from eating the food their bodies can't process that they are turned away from slaughter (or just mixed in at slaughter, as has been widely documented as happening), all the animals are fed millions of pounds of antibiotics 'nontheraputically', which then ends up creating massive spending on public health to address the outbreaks of never-before-seen illnesses.

All this not to mention that back at the factory, the millions of pounds of highly toxic, chemical and antibiotic-laced excrement gather in vast lagoons which, when not properly managed (as is generally the case) seep into the ground water thereby sickening yet more people unnecessarily.

So now what the proponents are really saying, no-one can deny: the only thing factory farms are good for is quickly producing profit for a startlingly small number of huge corporations who are not sufficiently regulated and who know that taking public health as a serious priority would mean a serious cut into their quarterly statements, not to mention the deconstruction of this vastly in-efficient system they have built.

The argument for continuing the practice of factory farming falls short on every front. Why would we continue to strengthen bacteria by mis-using antibiotics when the meat those antibiotics are producing is actually weakening those who eat it? Why should we continue to subsidize a system which creates profit for a few while the many of our society have to foot the bill to clean up the mess? When will enough be enough? How much money do we need to spend on public health, on the environment, on medical bills and funeral arrangements until we demand a change?

Let's start now. The American Dietetic Association puts in conservatively when they say:

"Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for all individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes."

Let's start saying no to meat unless we know who grew it, where and how it was raised, and where and how it was slaughtered. Not only that, but let's start telling our friends to do the same. Only when we the 'consumers' start changing will the industry finally recognize that they can no longer tell us what to eat.

Ignorance Is NOT Bliss

How unfortunate it is that this title is even necessary. How telling it is about the society we have all built together. One in which we would tend to shy from the truth instead of change our habits or be challenged to re-think our paradigms. Although I am just as guilty of this as many, I have found a topic that is simultaneously intentionally hidden from us, and drastically harms the environment, our personal and public health, and the ability of God's created animals to live decent and natural lives.

When it comes to the food we eat, ignorance is not bliss.

The way the vast majority our food, especially meat (we'll talk veggies another time) - easily over 80% for all types of meat, but 99% for poultry - is produced today would be unrecognizable to the farmer of the early 1900's. Perhaps the only thing that farmer would recognize are the animals themselves. Although maybe not, since hundreds of thousands (industry numbers) of cattle, pigs, chickens, and turkeys are either so deformed from disease and genetic manipulation, or mutilated by living conditions by the time they reach slaughter, that they are a far cry from what nature helped that early farmer grow.

So why do we still think farming takes place on the 'family farm'? The answer is simpler than many would have us believe: because the meat and agribusiness industry want us to think that. Their meat and dairy products wouldn't sell as well if, instead of a cow on green pasture on on their packaging, they showed a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) and a slaughter house that lets animals be scalded alive or bleed out while flailing, fully conscience, upside down. Yea, that might hurt the quarterly report.

So I'm going to be writing more about the food industry in subsequent blogs. I'll start with what I hope is a good enough reason to re-think your meat consumption by itself: personal and public health. Then I'll move on to the real and terrible ways our environment and animals are affected for those who need more convincing (I'll be honest, when it came to the burgers I enjoy so much, it took all three of these to change my mind for good).

My hope in writing about this is not to be a 'downer' or to guilt anyone into anything. My hope is to open our eyes. To help us realize that it is our right and responsibility to know not only where our own food comes from, but where our children's and parents' food comes from as well. Let us start tipping the scales in the way we purchase food to show the meat (and agribusiness) industries that we actually care about the way they treat what we put in our bodies. Let's unite in common concern for our brothers and sisters not only in the US, but all over the 'developed' and 'developing' world.

Food matters. It is literally what sustains us. So let's start buying it like it does. There are FAR more things to consider at the grocery store than our wallets or bank accounts. Far more important things. Join me.

Learning Food

Imagine drawing an exponential growth curve on a graph (hopefully this doesn't bring back any traumatic memories from high school Algebra). The curve meets zero and then slowly departs as you move to the right. Your pencil creeps upward, denoting gradual increase. Then, without much warning at all, the curve departs from rationality and begins a journey into the unknown of rapid, self-multiplying, growth. Infinitude is implied by the arrow you place on the end of the curve as you run out of paper. Where exactly the curve will lead, you're not sure, but it is accepted that it is important to follow.

You have just drawn my learning curve about a particular topic over the course of my life so far. This topic is absolutely central to every single human being and yet as my journey has shown me to date, we know sadly little about it: the food we eat.

The graph you still see in your mind is comprised of time (horizontal axis), and knowledge about food, its origins, its value, and its moral implications (vertical axis). Growing up, my mum (hi!) insisted on feeding me as much 'natural' and 'organic' food as possible (yes, I had to buy Fruit Loops with my own allowance money). I remember only really understanding that this meant I wasn't eating 'chemicals', whatever those were. My learning curve would gradually increase as I learned that my mum's whole wheat cookies were better for me than the Chunky Chips Ahoy, or when I found out that the eggs we ate came from the chickens I saw running around in my friends' yard (hi Molly!). But my learning was never intentional. I never really decided to ask the question "where does this burger come from and how did it get to my plate?" I also never intentionally tried to find the answer to this question and questions like it (its interesting and another blog entry entirely as to why these questions are even necessary in the first place seeing as how they weren't necessary a hundred years ago). But all that started to change about a year ago when the organization I co-founded, Revision International, started growing food with and for low-income communities.

I started off slow, reading "Omnivore's Dilemma", by Michael Pollen and watching "The Future of Food", a documentary directed by Deborah Koons. These confirmed for me why people got squeamish when I said I wanted to know where my food came from. They opened my eyes to the reality and horror of our modern-day food industry and what I learned will not let me close my eyes ever again. I have found that ignorance is not bliss.

The journey and learning curve continued with documentaries like "Food Inc." (Robert Kenner), "King Corn" (Aaron Woolf), and now is in full exponential swing with the book "Eating Animals", by Jonathan Safran Foer. Just as the arrow on the top of the curve your drew shows, this journey is far from over and is only gaining momentum. Where exactly it leads, I don't know. I hope that it involves opening others' eyes though. I hope it involves advocating for more knowledge, more transparency, healthier food, and more quality lives. I hope it contains more learning.