The CAFO Reader

I know it's 4th of July weekend and everyone wants to have their barbecue and ignore its environmental cost too, but we've found a new book for the summer reading list and it's all about CAFOs. The who's who of the sustainable food movement got together and penned a fearless collection of essays on factory farming for The Cafo Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories. Favorite of ours, Anna Lappé, contributed a chapter on the link between livestock and the climate crisis. Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser contributed as well.

The University of California Press summarizes:

These essays analyze and vividly depict the devastating impacts and current conditions in and around factory farms. The collection also provides a compelling vision of  “putting the CAFO out to pasture,” in which food systems become more healthy, humane, and sustainable. The CAFO Reader will quickly become an invaluable educational resource in the battle to reform the tragic state of industrial livestock production. It will also inform and influence the growing public movement of activists, farmers, policy makers, and consumers who are aiming to make our food healthier for ourselves and the planet.

Word on the street is that a larger photographic volume fit for a coffee table will be out this fall.

Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein Recall

If you follow us on twitter, you'll know that we predicted a massive recall due to contamination just a few short days ago. Not only because contaminations are happening more and more often, but because founders, family, and friends of JustSaying have been hit with an awful stomach flu that has yet to be officially pinned on H1N1 or the restaurant a few of us recently dined in. The Washington Post reports:

"The company at the heart of a growing recall of processed foods knew that its plant was contaminated with salmonella but continued to make a flavoring and sell it to foodmakers around the country, according to inspectors at the Food and Drug Administration. Managers at Basic Food Flavors of Las Vegas learned on Jan. 21 that samples taken a week earlier from their Nevada facility tested positive for salmonella, a potentially deadly bacterium, but they kept shipping their product to foodmakers, according to FDA inspection records. The company makes hydrolyzed vegetable protein, or HVP, a flavor enhancer used in a wide variety of processed foods, from potato chips to sweet and sour tofu. The additive, which comes as a powder or a paste, is mixed into foods to give them a meaty or savory flavor -- similar to the use of monosodium glutamate. Basic Food Flavors tested surfaces near food-processing equipment throughout its plant twice in January and once in February, and each time the samples showed salmonella contamination, according to FDA records. The company continued to ship products and to make more HVP without cleaning the plant or the equipment in a way that would have minimized contamination, the records said."

Take a moment to review the latest recalls and list of affected products found here, and read more here and here.

And please remember, we aren't doctors here folks. Just a couple of people trying to promote health and well-being for ourselves and our environment. Sure, I may have snacked on some potato chips while on a long car ride last week, but that doesn't mean I'm just going to sip on Alka Seltzer and skip tomorrow's doctor visit.

Bagged Salad - Still Not So Clean

Recent testing by Consumer Reports revealed that "prewashed" and even "triple-washed" salad greens sold in bags contain unacceptable levels of fecal contamination and bacteria that are common indicators of poor sanitation (coliforms, enterococcus, etc). Brands that they tested included Dole, Earthbound, Farm Organic and Fresh Express. Read more about the results here and how to best care for your greens and prevent cross contamination here. Most importantly, wash greens yourself regardless of packaging claims, keep them away from raw meat that could easily cross contaminate, and opt for bags that are the farthest from their use-by date.

(thnx DW)

Joel Salatin interviewed by The Guardian

Since being highlighted in Eric Schlosser's film Food, Inc, local food movement hero Joel Salatin is bringing much needed attention to horrors and human arrogance of industrial farming and then to the chemical-free farming methods Michael Pollan praised him for in The Omnivore's Dilemma.

The Guardian recently interviewed Salatin and oublished an incredible article. Find it here. Here are some highlights:

From The Guardian's Gaby Wood:

"...in the 1970s, the top five beef packers controlled 25% of the market; now the top four control more than 80% – meaning that if ever meat is tainted by bacteria or chemicals it has the potential to reach vast numbers of people; in 1972, 50,000 food safety inspections were conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration, and three decades later that number had gone down to 9,164; 70% of all processed foods have some genetically modified ingredient; in 2007, E coli from food affected 73,000 Americans – something the film correlates directly with the increase in consumption of processed foods and the scale and cleanliness of the country's huge industrial slaughterhouses."

And from Salatin:

[Quotes Joel Arthur Barker on paradigms] "...every paradigm, he says, exceeds its point of efficiency. Agriculture is always the last sector to join the new economy, because farmers are very conservative. So only now has the industrial paradigm in agriculture come to the end of its workability, Salatin explains. "What happens is all these things we're seeing – campylobacter, E coli, mad cow, listeria, salmonella, that weren't even in the lexicon 30 years ago – that is the industrial paradigm exceeding its efficiency. So these Latin squiggly words that we're learning to say – bovine spongiform encephalopathy – are nature's language screaming to us: ENOUGH! And the question then is: what will it take for us to listen? And my contention is that Wall Street is still wearing conquistador mentality and uniforms, and nobody is listening to the pleadings of nature saying: 'Enough.'"

And Salatin's five reasons why we should eat his meat:

1.) "...it's safer from a bio-security standpoint. If you eat our stuff, it's gonna be only sold real close right here. There's a short chain between field and fork, and the shorter that chain is – the fresher, the more transparent that system is – the less chance there is of anything from bio-terrorism to pathogenicity to spoilage. You wanna get diarrhoea? Eat industrial food." 2.) "Number two is what I would call your own personal immune system." The more antibiotics are given to the animals we eat, he explains, the less responsive we become to antibiotics when we need them for medical reasons. "You've been drugging yourself at dinner every day." 3.) "Thirdly, he goes on, they've had their meats checked, and they are unequalled in their nutritional density and power, however you want to measure it – "Omega 3, omega 6 ratios, riboflavin, polyunsaturated fats, vitamin A…" 4.) "It tastes better." 5.) "It's better for the environment. It's a very landscape-therapeutic production model."

(Thnx MP)

State of the Mooooooooonion

So apparently the Great Recession has shrunk the U.S. cattle herd to its smallest size since 1958 but fear not, meatatarians. According to Jim Robb, the director of the Denver-based Livestock Marketing Information Center, an industry and government-funded researcher (hmmmm...), there will still be plenty of beef to go around. "We're forecasting that beef production in 2010 won’t be the smallest since 1958, because the average animal processed now weighs twice as much,” he told Business Week. That's right, folks. The weight of an average catle for slaughter has doubled in the last fifty years.

Read all about the state of the meat and dairy industries - and the corn industry that they rely on - here.

(What you see in the photograph accompanyng this post is a revolving platform at a dairy "farm." It was this image or one of a slaughter house so enjoy the lesser of two evils.)

Yes, this really exists.

This is just plain silly. And lacks the capacity for dinosaur shaped pancakes. Yet the makers of ChefStack Perfect Panless Pancakes think it's a revolution in the making. From their website:

"[It's] the worlds first automatic pancake machine. The patented process cooks hot, fresh pancakes in a matter of seconds. From an all-natural batter, 97% fat free pancakes emerge at a rate of up to 200 per hour!"

Playin' cards and makin' love

Writer, scholar and documentary filmmaker Douglas Rushkoff talks about his book, Life Inc. How The World Became A Corporation And How To Take it Back, with Stephen Colbert and it sounds wonderful. Check it out. I mean that literally. Check out the clip then check out the book from the library. And then check out activities that aren't just economic stimulus. Oh and of course check out Life Inc The Movie on Rushkoff's website.

excellent resource

I'm not sure if I've alerted you all to the interactive the NY Times put together for their special series called Choking on Growth. It's a collection of articles, photographs, maps and data examining the pollution crisis in China and an excellent resource for anyone interested in gaining a broader understanding of the global impact of industrialization.

blue revolution

Mark Bittman for the NY Times, writes about the future of fishing:

The [industrial fish farming industry] spends an estimated $1 billion a year on veterinary products; degrades the land (shrimp farming destroys mangroves, for example, a key protector from typhoons); pollutes local waters (according to a recent report by the Worldwatch Institute, a salmon farm with 200,000 fish releases nutrients and fecal matter roughly equivalent to as many as 60,000 people); and imperils wild populations that come in contact with farmed salmon.

There's good news though. Plenty of scientists are agree that a turnaround is possible. If fisheries are managed well, even declining species can quickly recover. Read all about it here. And check out this awesome (although not really related) picture of my friend Nick with a Strawberry Grouper (catch and release of course):