Month: February 2008

If you were to randomly come across a commentary entitled “Stop Supporting a Tainted Food Supply,” where would you suppose you were? Alternet? PETA? Some random editorial that happened to get picked up by Buzzflash?

How about financial news site TheStreet.com?

After giving us the quickie-version of the latest massive meat recall — which the USDA says shouldn’t concern us because most of the meat has already been eaten and what we don’t know can’t hurt us — the author tells us:

I’m taking a stand and putting my money where my mouth is — literally. My five-person family consumes about $1,300 of food per month — $15,600 per year — including the meals we eat at home and at restaurants. I can easily divert at least a quarter of that money to farmers and meat producers in my own community.

Now, just as a point of curiosity, how is that going to help? Even if we go out on a limb and assume that her community has farmers and meat producers that sell locally, what guaranty does the author have that locally produced food is free of the problems of corporate farming? Just because it’s local doesn’t mean that the animals have been humanely treated, or that the vegetables are free from contaminants, or that any of it has been handled in a sanitary fashion. Even the most vile of factory farms and slaughterhouses are “local” to somebody.

Ah, now here’s someone who has a grip on the problem: the Faithful Penguin points out the false premise that “the markets are a regular libertarian paradise of goodwill and bonhomie where no capitalist would dare engage in shoddy or dangerous practices because the market would ‘self-regulate;’ therefore, no rational businessman would take those risks as they’d be run out of business.” In fact, he reminds us that the current regulations — the ones that have been systematically undermined since the Reagan Administration — were passed into law in 1906, after “Upton Sinclair published The Jungle. Written to awaken the consciousness of America to the plight of immigrant workers, the horrific and dangerous conditions in Chicago’s slaughterhouses were exposed, causing the public to worry about its own health.”

In the end, that is what regulation is supposed to do: protect us from the excesses of unbridled corporatism. Some people say regulation costs jobs. I say deregulation has cost a lot of jobs in such diverse areas as air travel (bankrupt airlines), telecommunications (bankrupt providers like WorldCom), energy (bankrupt and corrupt companies like Enron), and food production (family farms). Sure, some regulation goes overboard, and some other regulation is actually a gift to the industry being “regulated,” but a whole lot of it is reaction to somebody somewhere saying “there oughta be a law.”

In closing: stock market danger; sign this stack of papers, including the one that lets your tax preparer sell your returns; make your own ginger beer; Iron Chef or Not Iron Chef; I’m late to the coverage, so I’ll let Jill say “duh” on late diagnosis of cancer; Duhpartment of Research tells us men can live longer by “abstaining from smoking, weight management, blood pressure control, regular exercise and avoiding diabetes” (anybody know how to avoid diabetes? “weight management”, “regular exercise”, and have the right relatives!); the “education gap” and social mobility; awesomely elegant wrapping; why doesn’t the border fence go across the golf course?; Word to Mrs. Clinton, it’s not that you’re a woman, it’s that you’re you!; thanks to Pharyngula for pointing out 41 hilarious science experiments; and strange economic portents, economic indicators will no longer be published due to budget constraints, and the attack of the expanding dollar menu.

Cross-posted at The Moderate Voice.

I have some new cookbooks.

Specifically I have some new vegetarian cookbooks. I am not a full vegetarian, but I do try to make healthy food for my family. And “healthy” means plenty of veggies. Furthermore, meatless dishes are often (but not always!) higher nutrition for lower calories, and very budget friendly as well.

One of the new books is How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. One feature I love is that vegan, fast, or make-ahead recipes are clearly marked. Frankly, this is an improvement over the original How to Cook Everything, and I hope future editions of that book will utilize similar markings. One thing you will not find in HtCEV is a lot of recipes that use fake meat. Sure, there are tofu recipes and seitan recipes, and 10 pages on making your own veggie “burgers”, including adaptations for “meat”loaves and “meat”balls. And sure, there are recipes that use alternative-but-still-natural sweeteners such as agave nectar or maple syrup. But no Gimme Lean, no Liquid Amino Acids, no TVP, no Tofurky, no Quorn, no Morningstar Farms, no Boca Burgers, no Gardenburgers, no frozen meatless beef/chicken/pork substitute patties, in fact nothing that should be capitalized or have a trademark symbol.

By contrast, I have another new cookbook that features only vegan recipes — for those who aren’t in the know, vegans not only don’t eat any sort of meat or fish, they don’t eat any animal-produced products (dairy, eggs, honey) either. You might think this is very limiting in a world where meat and eggs and dairy products are everywhere, even on our salads (mmGorgonzola). It is certainly challenging, and requires some thinking ahead. If you want to read more about that, I humbly refer you to Veggie Going Vegan and Fat Free Vegan.

Anyway, this cookbook talks seriously about eating healthy food: why the chemicals in coffee are bad for you; why refined sugar is bad for you but artificial low-calorie sweeteners are worse, and a new study supports that fact (ok, ok, giving up my Diet Coke, *sigh*); be selective about your grains, avoid ones that have “white” in the name, and why; the chemicals that go into modern farming of meat; it goes on. I really like the frank and irreverent tone of the book. I may not agree with everything they say — for example my experience with potato products is that they tend to make me gain more weight than white rice — but they do try to back up their opinions.

And then — 8 paragraphs away from a sentence summarizing the various drugs, pesticides, steroids, and hormones that end up in farmed meat and meat products — they point out that section of the grocery store dedicated to overpriced, frozen wad, chemistry sets known as fake meat. Sure, they admit that these products should only be eaten in moderation, and that they only sort of taste like meat. Oh, and that humble readers such as myself should make up their own minds.

The chemicals in dairy products? Bad! The chemicals that turn rice and soy into something that taste like dairy products? Inexplicably good! Eggs? Bad! Egg Beaters? Still bad! Vegan egg replacer made with starch and cellulose through some super-secret chemical process? Somehow good!

Listen, I am willing to concede that a diet of cheeseburgers is probably not good for you. But I have this strange feeling that switching to a diet of fake burger patties with fake cheese on a whole wheat bun isn’t much better for you. If you honestly can’t handle life without burgers, that’s ok. Really it is. Maybe a vegan lifestyle isn’t for you.

But you’ll just have to trust me that there are better things you can be putting in your mouth: for half the price of a box of frozen-burgerish-substance, you can make your own delicious meat substitute (and I bet you already have most of the ingredients in your pantry); you could be eating soba noodles in peanut sauce; you could be enjoying roasted veggies — you can figure out how to hack up some veggies and stick them in a hot oven for an hour, right?; you can make sloppy pinto-joes (sorry my recipe is simpler than any I see online) or black bean soup; just yesterday I had a lovely hummus and falafel platter for lunch; and we haven’t even touched on “exotic” ingredients like seitan and tempeh. Frankly, looking beyond a hunk of meat opens a freaking huge culinary world. After all, several cultures developed their own independent vegetarian cuisines in the complete absence of the latest scientific information on amino acids. There’s a lot of delicious and nutritious food out there. Why waste time, money, and calories on chemistry sets?

In closing: America Says Thanks for the gift card, I used it to buy “pasta sauce, diapers, [and] laundry detergent“; America Also Says the recession is already here; it’s one thing to walk away from the house, it’s another thing to walk away from the student loans, and America is doing both; at least we have homes to walk away from, one in six Iraqis don’t; Dear Hillary, grow up and smell the democracy; collegiate bloggers should read this now; deja vu; CNN shows their priorities by asking “So when are my shows coming back?“; another take on kids still don’t have employers; since the tourists are just here for the dollars, let’s not annoy them; somehow killing one out of five people doesn’t sound like a “peace” plan; Senate Traitors; and everything you will ever need to know about mattresses. Oh, and happy 200th birthday of Abe Lincoln.