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.

Understanding without Action

"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

- Martin Luther King Jr.

I want to revisit a specific section of the Birmingham Jail Letter written by King in 1963 in response to harsh public criticism of his chosen methods of protest from certain prominent Catholic and Jewish leaders. Its fascinating, reading about King's life in a biography written by Godfrey Hodgson, to gain a more well-rounded picture of the national hero most of us only know by parts of his "I have a dream" speech. I have come to find out that he was a man deeply afflicted with himself and with many of those around him. Yes, he was passionate about liberating the Negro through direct, non-violent, action, but as his experience and work grew, his sight became set much higher. He believed wholeheartedly in social democracy, in true justice and equality for everyone. With this in mind, let me perhaps be so bold as to ponder the excerpt above in a wider light than just the civil rights movement which had put King in jail in the first place.

As you know if you know me, I'm passionate about a lot of things, and I think that explains my fascination with King's life, passions, actions, and pursuits. Three particular but overlapping arenas with which I've become passionate about over the last few years are unchecked corporate power (and therefore, abuses); environmental degradation which harms (read: kills) people all over the globe; and the atrocities of the food industry (closely linked to both). Together, these are symptoms of a deeper sickness in our global society: people seem unwilling at best, and hostile at worst, towards truly taking action on behalf of the majority of people who lack the resources to take action themselves. Corporations enslave and 'employ' people to turn largely toxic materials into profits. Those few of us 'fortunate' enough to have the money to consume said toxic materials then pollute the Earth and thereby kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. We then apply this same, profit-driven mentality to the food we eat and then wonder why we're all overweight, sick, and killing our lands through agribusinesses.

In the Jail Letter just before the above quote, King says that the greatest obstacle for the Negro was not the Klu Klux Klanner, nor the venomous Southern politicians and 'law enforcement' officers. Instead the greatest threat to the goals of the civil rights movement was the "white moderate"; the person who understands and perhaps empathizes with the Negro but yet is unwilling to take action on his or her behalf. Unwilling to make the Negro's problem their problem with the understanding that an ill against another is an ill against oneself, or that what they do for the 'least of these', they do for God. Understanding without action is no understanding at all.

I have recently been challenged on this myself. I was talking with my brother about the lax standards of the USDA's Organic label and he said "well have you written a letter?" I had to stop and realize that no, I had not. While I believe that spreading awareness is absolutely essential to solving today's ills, what good is awareness without action? Is it simply 'understanding'? Perhaps I should take a cue from King and write that letter. Perhaps we should collectively start taking action on behalf of others. On behalf of those who need to focus on their daily survival. On behalf of the Earth, whose beautiful voice of Creation seems to be being drowned out by the global call to growth for growth's sake.

What are you passionate about? Does is help others? Will it improve the lot of the majority? Let's stop being the greatest obstacle to change and instead become that change.

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.