Tonight we had the mushroom soft tacos with succotash for dinner (and let me just add that they were awesome! and Jeff ate six!) As I chopped the pound of mushrooms it called for, it occurred to me that tonight’s post would be a good excuse to look into something that I’ve been wondering about recently.
One thing I have always felt a little silly buying at the grocery store are organic mushrooms. In fact, if they had conventionally grown ones at my natural foods store I probably would have chosen those instead, but they don’t. I assumed that organic mushrooms simply meant they were grown in organic matter. I mean, mushrooms don’t get pests, do they?
I’m not sharing this to convince anyone else they should be buying organic mushrooms, but because I was feeling a little gullible for buying them myself. I’m happy to know there is an actual difference in the growing conditions of the organic mushrooms compared to the conventional ones. What difference does it make? Sounds like the topic of another post!
I was a vegetarian all through high school and my freshman year of college. Why? Because a friend loaned me a copy of Diet For A New America. I don’t remember being particularly moved by the health information, perhaps because being a vegetarian for health reasons was quite familiar to me, but after reading about the way animals raised for food were treated I decided I didn’t want to be a part of it. It was a book that convinced me to start eating meat again too; I’m a little embarrassed to admit it was The Zone.
Now many of the meals I plan and prepare are vegetarian because the meat I trust is expensive. It’s worth it to me to know that my beef is local and that my pork comes from a co-op of family farms. One thing in my refrigerator that is still a bit of a mystery to me, however, are my eggs.
Once, early in the summer I found pastured eggs at our farmers market. The rest of the time my eggs come from the glass-doored cooler at the grocery store. They’re definitely packaged to make me feel good about buying them–the ones I have now say they are “the product of our cage-free operation and vegetarian feed based on grains and soy beans. The hens live in open ‘community houses’ where they have feed, water, nests, roosting poles, and plenty of area to exercise.”
Community houses! Room to exercise! Can’t you just picture the chickens walking around scratching in the dust and making chicken noises? Lifting weights and running laps? It’s like college!
Yeah. Not quite how it works.
While these chickens’ living conditions are no doubt beaks above those of battery hens, this explanation of egg labelling terms from the Humane Society makes it clear that the living conditions of these chickens could be improved, and scale of the farm probably means both the chicken feed and the chicken waste are likely hard on the environment as well.
I know this isn’t news. In fact, Michele Knaus even gave a Ignite Portland presentation about egg labeling last spring–most of the information she presented is available in other places too (like the documents linked above) but what was really interesting was her research about how many people *thought* they understood egg labeling when they didn’t have a clue. Also, Ignite presentations are just fun to watch:
I don’t think we have any local buying clubs like the one she describes in the video. As renters we’re not really in a place where we can raise our own chickens, but I’ve decided I’m willing to pay a little more for better eggs (or at least look a little harder: hey look there are local eggs for sale on craigslist! And they’re actually *less* expensive! That wasn’t hard at all….)
I just don’t want to pay more for better-looking packaging.
I have to admit, when we moved here almost four years ago from Seattle we did bemoan the absence of Trader Joe’s. I made it a point to visit one whenever we hit Eugene or Portland, usually making it my last stop so that I could tote home frozen potstickers and Greek yogurt along with my dried fruit and cans of coconut milk. At some point, the novelty wore off. I still go occasionally, but I’ve pretty much stopped using it as a way to bond with all the other people who have just moved here.
I’m going to assume it’s a general lack of local excitement that has made Trader Joe’s front page news in Bend, as they are today, for almost two years. (update: I just looked at the paper version of the paper and it appears that the story is not on the actual front page, just featured on the website. Sorry for the hyperbole. But still.) An article from the Bend Bulletin on April 21, 2006 reported that the Cascades Village Shopping Center had submitted plans that included a Trader Joe’s although at the time a spokeswoman for the company “declined to confirm” the news. While I’m all for cheap wine, I think I can safely say the build up on tomorrow’s grand opening has been (well) over the top.
This is not to say I won’t shop there. It seems like they’re a great company that deserves their reputation for treating their employees fairly (unlike, say, REI.) They do have some things that have been difficult or even impossible to get locally without mail order (oh please tell me they have pomegranate molasses, I’ve become addicted to the stuff and can’t find it anywhere in town.) But you won’t find me there peering in the windows tomorrow morning. I’ve made it this long without easy access to Baked Jalapeño Cheese Crunchies and Flax & Honey Flatbread, I’m not going to wait in a traffic jam to get them now.
I know I’m hungry when I briefly contemplate mugging a defenseless woman for her taco meatball ring. While it’s true those three words should never be in such close proximity to one another, if I’d had the strength left, I might have tried it.
Honestly, I knew the Taste of Home Cooking School probably wasn’t going to be exactly my style of cooking, but I figured it would be fun since I knew I would be in good company. I wasn’t wrong; I actually had a blast, since snark is by far one of my favorite activities and there was even more good company than I expected. What I didn’t expect, however, was the complete lack of food in evidence at this cooking event. I (foolishly) came snackless and straight from work for an event that started at 6pm. I watched Kristi, our culinary specialist, truss game hens, cut out fondant flowers, and promote paper towels. I learned helpful information like “fresh lemon juice is better than bottled,” and “tomatoes don’t belong in the refrigerator.” There was probably even more good information as the night wore on, but for about the last hour or so I was too hungry to take in any more. I was too famished to snark. Had I been handed a two-hour old Buffalo chicken lettuce wrap I would have snarfed it down right there, cooked cucumbers and all.
Perhaps that was the point, but since they really weren’t selling anything (a la Pampered Chef) I’m not sure whose interest a crowd of ravenous door-prize crazed people serves. I called Jeff as I headed home: “did you eat yet?” “Ok, can you put the bacon in the oven right. now.?” I didn’t even know I narrowly missed waiting behind a train until I read Jen’s far more thorough review of the evening. It’s probably a good thing they *didn’t* have wine–I don’t think I would have made it.
I could try to come up with a more eloquent title for this post, but this story really is totally gross. Veg(etari)an friends, you might as well stop right here, unless you’re willing to subject yourself to a story that includes “aerosolization of brain tissue.”
This story from the New York Times about a strange disease plaguing some people who worked in pork processing plants reads like a story from Eric Schlosser, though it’s not. The description of the way the brains were removed from the pigs’ skulls made me gag. I’m impressed that the company moved fairly quickly to halt the procedure that seemed correlated with the strange illness the workers developed, but it seems like yet another reason to avoid factory-farmed meat. Even though there’s no evidence that actually eating the pork has caused any problems, the toll on these workers is problem enough.
I was excited to get my hands on the book, and read it in less than 24 hours. First in line for a library copy, four weeks later it’s overdue (bad librarian!) and I’m still trying to figure out what it was about the book that left me flat. I can’t imagine arguing with his “eat food…” premise, but I’m not so sure about the way Pollan gets there.
Pollan spends much of In Defense of Food decrying “nutritionism,” a term he found in the 2002 article “Sorry Marge (.pdf)” that criticizes of the “use of and reliance on nutritional categories, and this whole framework of analysis, to guide us in our everyday quest to eat well.” Instead of science, Pollan writes, he relies “mainly on the authority of tradition and common sense” to tell us “how to eat.” This philosophy he contrasts to “letting scientists decide the menu,” “a mistake,” he tells us, because “they simply do not know enough.” It seems that here he either misunderstands or misrepresents scientific research. Science is in the business of describing our best understanding of the world up to this point. It changes, and rightly so. Each individual study adds a tiny building block of knowledge to all the others that came before it, and no single finding alone means as much as the synthesis of the findings together. The food industry, on the other hand, and is more than willing to cherry-pick the science that will help it sell food, and government agencies seem happy to turn a blind eye to the behavior. This is a relationship Pollan does not fail to discuss, yet he seems to ultimately hold science to blame. The distortion of science is not a good reason to reject science itself.
An assignment I always like to see coming through the library is one where students are asked to find an article in a popular source like Time or Newsweek that reports on a recent scientific study. Then, they have to find a copy of the actual scholarly article, the primary source, and compare the conclusions drawn in the two articles. Typically they find that the scientists are fairly circumspect, qualifying their conclusions and noting the limitations of their studies, while the reporting on the studies tends to simplify (and therefore distort, in many cases) the findings. These students are learning to read critically, and they’re learning how we synthesize data into knowledge, skills that are in short supply. The trouble with nutritionism is not bad science, it’s an inappropriate use of science, egged on by marketing, supported by government agencies like the USDA, and made possible by low scientific literacy.
The end of In Defense of Food covers Pollan’s recommendations for how to eat. These are suggestions like “don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does” or “cook, and if you can, plant a garden.” These are the kinds of suggestions that can’t possibly hurt anyone who chooses to follow them, whether they do it because they don’t trust science or because they make sense given what we know about diet and the human body up to this point. Trouble is, the food industry is just as happy to use Pollan’s advice to promote their products as they are to use science. The Salt Institute picked right up on the “don’t trust all that science-y stuff, just eat what you like” message when “Unhappy Meals” was published last January. Caveat lector.
One of the first things I remember eating (or drinking, actually) from the natural foods store was peach-flavored Nancy’s kefir. This must have been in the early eighties, but I can still remember exactly what the carton looked like. Fast-forward to 1995 and I’m in the natural foods store near my NYU dorm on 3rd Avenue telling the proprietor he should really carry Nancy’s yogurt. He was friendly enough, but explained that it probably wasn’t distributed on the East Coast. Sad days. Now I’ve been back in the west for almost ten years and take my Nancy’s access for granted, but I just ran across this 2003 Seattle Times article about Nancy’s Yogurt’s expansion to East Coast markets. Hello, my East Coast friends. This yogurt comes highly recommended.
Though something with a nationwide distribution might not seem like “small food,” Nancy’s is still an independently-owned company that uses local milk and fruit to make real yogurt filled with lots of live cultures instead of sugar and gelatin. I usually buy the plain, lowfat variety and then sweeten it up with a little drizzle of honey, spoonful of jam, or a sprinkle of raw sugar. Sometimes I add cinnamon, fruit, and/or toasted nuts, but I really like the taste of the yogurt as-is. I keep a tub in the refrigerator at work, and if I haven’t eaten yogurt for breakfast, I frequently have it for lunch.
If you haven’t already spotted Nancy’s in a store near you, you can check out their store finder to see where it might turn up. This is good stuff.
(Whenever I write about products I always feel the need to point out that I’m not connected with the company in any way, and this post is not sponsored or paid or otherwise motivated by anything other than my personal experience with the product. In other words, yes I do just love this yogurt that much.)
I was (not seriously) ill for most of December and had little desire to eat. While in some ways December might be a good month in which to lose your appetite, it posed a bit of a problem for me since I’d promised to plan, purchase, and prepare Christmas dinners for three separate groups of family members. Suddenly, looking through recipes–especially rich, complicated holiday recipes–held little appeal. I’d basically selected the main dishes (a pork rib roast, a prime rib, and a lamb roast) but had no idea what I was going to do for side dishes, desserts, and drinks. In the end everything turned out just fine (photo evidence can be found here) but I’m still mostly subsisting on toast and unsweetened cranberry juice, neither of which makes for particularly interesting food writing.
I do, however, have some changes in mind for the food we buy, cook, and eat in 2008. While most people like to dismiss New Year’s resolutions as arbitrary, overly optimistic, and ultimately futile, I actually really like using the switch to a new calendar as motivation to reflect on the past year and plan some changes for the next. Last January a good look at our finances led to the grocery budget and meal planning I focus on here. This year I’m really hoping to improve the quality of the food we consume. Articles like Michael Pollan’s recent “Our Decrepit Food Factories,” books like Marion Nestle’s What to Eat, and the many food recalls over the past year or two have inspired me to be far more selective about what I put in my mouth. I want to know where it came from, I want to know how it was produced, and I want the list of ingredients to be short. I want food from small stores, small companies, and small farms. I want 2008 to be my year of small food.
Here’s hoping you find what you want in 2008. Happy New Year, everyone!
If you’re looking for information about what’s in season in your state, Sustainable Table might be a good place to start. Though not every state is listed on their “eat seasonal” page, there is lots of more general information available too, from the sustainable dictionary to sustainable shopping guides.
Looking at the weather outside, it’s hard to believe there’s anything in season; it appears to be snowing horizontally.
In addition to the impact big agriculture has on the nutritional value of our food and its impact on the environment, it also has a serious human impact on the people who work to move the food from the fields to the table. It can be easy to forget this sometimes, but Eric Schlosser’s editorial about tomato pickers in Florida in today’s New York Times is an unforgettable reminder of the real work that goes into food production as well as the true costs of cheap food. The article outlines a refusal by the Burger King Corporation to pay just one cent per pound more for the tomatoes they buy, a refusal that also undermined agreements Taco Bell and McDonald’s had made to pay the penny a pound.
While my first reaction to the behavior of both the tomato growers and to the Burger King Corporation was disgust, the well-developed skeptic in me wanted more information. Schlosser’s article raised some questions, so I spent some time this evening reading about the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group that has been working for almost 15 years to improve the working and living conditions of low-wage workers (mostly farmworkers, mostly immigrants) in Florida. I also spent some time looking at the webpage for the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange. It’s hard to know what to believe, but it’s very hard to believe that it’s “not about the money,” as Burger King officials claim in this Miami Herald article. It also seems highly unlikely that the legal problems cited by Burger King and the Growers Exchange went unnoticed by Taco Bell and McDonald’s when they agreed to the 1-cent per pound increase earlier in the year. It’s perhaps hardest to believe that last year’s average hourly wage for Florida tomato pickers was $12.46 an hour. It seems unlikely folks making that kind of wage with any regularity would find it worthwhile to fight for an increase of $.01/lb.. The PR put out by the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange was enough to make me dig deeper, and I’m sure I still don’t have the whole story, but something about their story just isn’t right. The only thing I’m fairly certain about is that fast food just isn’t worth it.
I think the greed upsets my stomach more than the grease.
I have no doubt that two people can eat for less than $75 a week, but can they eat well? More about this blog...
Here looking for menus & grocery lists?
I try to post a menu and accompanying grocery list each week that will feed two adults for $75. See all menus and lists.
You also might be interested in my "tools I use" posts that discuss how I put together my lists and try to stick to my budget. I will be adding to this list somewhat regularly.
I'm still working out some kinks in the menu posts, so if you have any questions about the posts or suggestions to make them more useful, please let me know.
