Monthly Archives: April 2011

Is your cheese vegetarian?

Posted on by
1

Haute Pasture recently received a lesson on rennet, and we were surprised that we, as supposed educated consumers, did not realize that all cheeses are not necessarily vegetarian. Rennet is a mix of enzymes found in a calf’s stomach that is used in nature to help the calf digest its mother’s milk, but is used in traditional cheese making to coagulate milk into cheese.

Milk-source-specific rennet can also be used; so, a lamb’s stomach could be used for rennet for sheep’s milk, and a kid’s stomach for goat’s milk. The argument against slaughtering baby animals for meat is for another post; one could make the point here that stomachs are a byproduct of veal/lamb/baby goat meat production, and it’s good that they can be used for something. This post will not dispute that, but rather discuss the alternative ways to produce cheese that do not involve the use of animal organs.

Vegetarian cheese can be made using vegetable rennet, microbial rennet, genetically-engineered rennet, or acid coagulation.

Vegetable and microbial rennets are enzymes or acids produced from plants and molds. These rennets can be difficult to obtain and may impart unwanted side-effects on the cheeses, so most cheeses in the U.S. are made using genetically engineered rennet. This rennet is produced by bacteria, fungi, or yeasts that were modified with cow genes to produce one of the enzymes in natural rennet. Vegetarian cheeses can also be made using acid coagulation, which is how cream cheese and paneer are made.

So, read the label before you purchase cheese. Whole Foods, for one, prints on cheese labels whether the cheese is vegetarian. Harris Teeter, on the other hand, lists the ingredient “enzymes” on their in-house cheese label, which could be animal-based. If in doubt, ask at the cheese counter. Or better yet, purchase your cheese from a local farmer’s market, where you can not only ask the vendor about rennet in the cheese, but also about the treatment of the livestock on the farm.

Source

Happy Earth Day!

Posted on by
1

On Earth Day, let’s pause to consider why sustainable farming is good for our planet. (There are other benefits of sustainable agriculture that are not environmental, but today, let’s focus on Earth!)

  • Soil: Factory farms abuse the land, overusing it without resting the soil, and douse it with chemicals in an attempt to replenish the soil’s nutrients. Sustainable farms carefully manage soils to increase nutrients and prevent erosion, through crop rotation and diversification, the use of manure, mulch, and other natural enhancers and protectors, and the planting of cover crops. Crop rotation and diversification naturally enrich the soil and keep crops healthier, without the use of chemical fertilizer. Manure and mulch increase soil moisture and biomass, and protect the soil. Cover crops increase the nitrogen in the soil, which is accomplished in conventional farming through the application of chemicals; cover crops also reduce erosion by creating a buffer between soil and rainfall, and their root systems anchor the soil in place.
  • Water: Large commercial farms contaminate water supplies with nitrogen, salt, and other fertilizer chemicals; pesticides; and animal waste. They also consume large quantities of water. Sustainable farms may use cover crops to increase the nitrogen content of the soil, thereby eliminating the need for nitrogen enhancements via water-contaminating chemicals. Cover crops can also be used for pest control, replacing chemical pesticides. “Trap crops” attract pests away from cash crops, and “habitat augmentation” uses cover crops that attract pests’ natural predators. Sustainable farms recycle animal waste back into the land as a fertilizer, rather than allowing it to pollute waterways. The rate of water consumption is less on sustainable farms than on conventional farms, as sustainable farming creates moister soil that is better equipped to retain water.
  • Air: Large farms contribute to declining air quality by emitting toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases into the air, spraying pesticides, and trucking shipments long distances. Decomposing manure tanks or lagoons emit gases such as ammonia, carbon dioxide, and methane into the atmosphere. Methane, which is a greenhouse gas, is also released from cows as they digest corn-based diets, which their systems aren’t built to digest. Sustainable farming practices rely on alternative pest-control techniques that don’t spray chemicals into the air. Farms that sell their produce locally require less fossil-fuel-based energy to transport their wares than farms that ship food to far-off places. And sustainable farms that feed animals diets based on foods they would eat in nature relieve the chronic indigestion that leads to massive amounts of methane production.
  • Wildlife: The wildlife that lives in soil may not get as much publicity, but it’s just as important. Healthy soil that is sustainably farmed hosts countless critters such as earthworms, arthropods, and bacteria. Sustainable farming is safer for fish, which are killed when runoff from factory farms pollutes streams. Wildlife drinking from waterways polluted by animal waste or fertilizer runoff from factory farms can be harmed by chemicals or pathogens. Fewer insects in the soil means less food for birds. The creation of huge factory farms displaces animal populations and destroys habitats, while sustainable farms with diversified plantings create an environment that encourages the growth of native plant, insect, and animal populations.
  • Energy conservation: Sustainable farms are less dependent on non-renewable energy sources, in particular petroleum, than large-scale agricultural businesses. They use fewer chemicals, which require a tremendous amount of fossil fuel-produced energy to manufacture. Sustainable farms generally do not produce processed foods, which take more energy to produce than whole foods. Farms that raise pasture-fed animals conserve energy by letting the animals do the work of spreading manure and feeding themselves.

So celebrate Earth Day by eating some locally grown produce and pasture-raised meat! If you’re lucky, like we are here at Haute Pasture, you can raise a glass of local wine with your meal!

Sources: UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, Sustainable Table, Cover Crops, Helium.com, Myth Six: Industrial Agriculture Benefits the Environment and Wildlife, Wildlife Friendly Farming Guide

Egg label primer

Posted on by
4

We at Haute Pasture do not often buy commercially-produced eggs, so while recently browsing the egg section of our local grocery, we were intrigued by a “certified humanely raised” label on an egg carton. Does that actually mean anything? We didn’t know, and maybe some of you don’t, so here is our egg label primer.

(First we went to the source, the USDA website. It is impossible to navigate. So the following information is compiled from various sites, listed below. These labels are only lightly regulated, mostly by 3rd parties, and are complied with on a voluntary basis.)

Cheat Sheet

Which labels explicitly prohibit beak cutting?

  • Animal Welfare Approved

Which labels explicitly prohibit forced molting? (Forced molting is the starving of hens to trigger an increase in egg production)

  • American Humane Certified
  • Animal Welfare Approved
  • Certified Humane
  • Food Alliance Certified
  • United Egg Producers Certified

Which labels require hens to have outdoor access? (Note that the amount and quality of outdoor access required is generally undefined, except for as noted below.)

  • Animal Welfare Approved (Continuous outdoor perching is required)
  • Certified Naturally Grown
  • Certified Organic
  • Free Range/Free Roaming
  • Pasture-Raised

Which labels require farms to allow hens to act like chickens (i.e., perch, nest, and dust bathe)?

  • Animal Welfare Approved
  • Certified Humane
  • Certified Naturally Grown
  • Food Alliance Certified (but outdoor access can be substituted with natural daylight)
  • Pasture-Raised

Which labels sound humane but allow for the cramming of hens into tiny spaces?

  • American Humane Certified
  • Natural (this label has no requirements for the welfare of the hens)
  • Omega-3 Enriched (this label has no requirements for the welfare of the hens)
  • United Egg Producers Certified
  • Vegetarian-Fed (this label has no requirements for the welfare of the hens)

The Labels

Animal Welfare Approved: Unfortunately, no producers currently adhere to these, the toughest restrictions regarding the welfare of the hens. The hens live naturally: they are able to nest, perch, dust bathe, and molt. Their living quarters must follow requirements regarding population density and nesting boxes. Beak cutting and forced molting are prohibited.

Pasture-Raised: The hens are raised outdoors, on grass, in movable structures. They are fed an organic diet, and are able to forage for the critters which are natural sources of food for chickens.

American Grassfed: This applies less to poultry than to ruminants whose natural diet is grass. American Grassfed certified meat generally means the animal was raised on a diet consisting of only grass and its mother’s milk. The rules are a bit different for poultry, as a grass-only diet isn’t natural for birds, so grass only needs to be a portion of what they eat. Specific standards are not available online at this time.

Certified Naturally Grown: Animals must be primarily pasture-raised, eating pesticide- and medicine-free food. They put an emphasis on locally-sourced food, so don’t require that feed be certified organic.

Certified Humane: The standards dictate that the hens get free access to vegetarian food and fresh water, and they may only be fed antibiotics if medically required. Forced molting is prohibited. Rules dictate space, air quality, and lighting requirements. The hens may stretch their wings and dust bathe. Outdoor access is not required.

Certified Organic: The hens are cage-free indoors, with required access to the outdoors. The amount and quality of that outdoor access is undefined, however. Beak cutting and forced molting are allowed. The hens’ diet must be organic and vegetarian, and pesticide- and antibiotic-free.

Food Alliance Certified: Hens are cage-free and must be able to nest, perch, and dust bathe, and have outdoor access OR natural daylight. Forced molting is prohibited, but beak cutting is allowed. Rules govern space per hen, perching, and nesting boxes.

Free-Range/Free-Roaming: There is no standard definition of free-range in the egg industry. The hens are generally cage-free and have some outdoor access; however, the doors may be small and the window of opportunity to go outside may be so short that the hens never actually get outdoors. There are no dietary restrictions for free-range egg-producing hens. Beak cutting and forced molting are permitted.

Cage-Free: This simply means the hens are not kept in cages, nothing more. While the hens may move around and stretch their wings, beak cutting and forced molting are permitted.

American Humane Certified: Descriptions of rules are vague for this label, and their standards documents are unreadable. They certify caged environments, cage-free, and free-range. Some sources claim that this certification allows hens to be stuffed in cages, where they can’t spread their wings. However, the Massachusetts SPCA endorses the certification, saying the hens must be cage-free. Forced molting is prohibited, but debeaking is allowed.

United Egg Producers Certified: This standard allows hens to be stuffed into a tiny space in a cage, where they cannot spread their wings, perch, or nest. Forced molting is prohibited, but debeaking is allowed. From the Humane Society’s website:

The United Egg Producers is a trade group that represents egg factory farms and promotes the confinement of hens in cages. Although the UEP certifies cage-free facilities, it mostly certifies factory farms that cage birds—an abuse that some top egg-producing states have made illegal and are phasing out, and that consumers and numerous major companies oppose.

Fertile: The hens lived with roosters, which means they were probably cage-free. There are otherwise no restrictions for this label.

Vegetarian-Fed: This label only relates to the diet of the hens. The hens are fed a diet that contains no animal byproducts, except for eggs.

Omega-3 Enriched: This label only relates to the diet of the hens. These hens are fed a supplement, such as flax seed, to increase their Omega-3 intake.

Sources: The Humane Society, CertifiedHumane.org, Humane Food Labels, Cage Free Eggs, American Humane Certified article in Natural News, MSPCA, American Grassfed, Certified Naturally Grown, EggIndustry.com, Eat Wild

Iowa legislators support animal abuse and food poisoning

Posted on by
Reply

Iowa may be on the verge of passing a bill to make illegal the production, distribution, and possession of video or picture footage taken inside a factory farm without the owner’s permission.

Because factory farms are under-regulated and closed to the outside world, undercover investigators from animal rights groups sometimes take a job at a farm, only to document any health or animal treatment violations to release to the authorities and the public.

That sort of publicity is obviously not in the company’s best interests, but it IS in the public’s best interests: unsanitary conditions in factory farms can lead to outbreaks of food poisoning; and it’s in the animals’ best interests to have their living conditions improved. Happier animals also produce better food, but that’s a different argument.

Big agriculture is a huge industry in the Midwest, so it makes sense that legislators are pressured by lobbyists and constituents to support factory farming. According to Food & Water Watch, Iowa ranks first in the country in number of factory-farmed layer hens (averaging 1.3 million hens per farm–more than double the national average), first in factory-farmed hogs, and fourth in large cattle feedlots. Florida and Minnesota are considering similar bills. These bills are detrimental to food safety, and therefore public health, and should not be passed.

This quote from a New York Times article sums it up nicely:

“If they have nothing to hide and they are operating ethically, they should have no fear,” [Senator Matthew W. McCoy, Democrat of Des Moines] said.

Zero-grazing=poor man’s factory farming?

Posted on by
Reply

While perusing our new issue of WorldArk, the magazine of Heifer International, we stumbled upon a new (to us) concept: zero-grazing. Zero-grazing is primarily used in areas where grazing land is scarce, or where predators are a problem, such as in parts of Africa. Fresh food and water are brought to the livestock, who live in a sheltered enclosure. Processes such as milking are easier to perform, as the animals are kept corralled. Manure is collected from the enclosure and used as fertilizer for growing crops.

Zero-grazing can be helpful to rural farmers who lack grazing lands or have depleted the nutrients from their crop-growing soil, but we don’t like the idea of the animals sometimes being kept indoors their entire life; standing in their manure; and being fed corn, which they are not equipped to process properly. How can the animals stay healthy? What is their quality of life? Is this just factory farming on a small scale?

We could stop here, at the level of the poor African farmer. Zero-grazing systems do help pull some farmers out of extreme poverty by allowing them to produce milk on land that cannot otherwise support livestock; and when a farmer owns only a few animals, he will likely tend them carefully, as losing one would be detrimental to his income. Unfortunately, the term zero-grazing is also applied to  mega factory farming. Perhaps the programs that train rural Africans how to build small dairy businesses should adopt a new term for the farming system they promote, that doesn’t make one think of an industrial feedlot.

Can industrial agriculture feed the world?

Posted on by
Reply

A recent article on alternet.org (What Would the World Look Like If We Relied on Industrial Agriculture to Feed Everyone?) explores what the world might look like if industrial agriculture is chosen as the worldwide solution to feeding the hungry. Popular belief holds that industrial agriculture is the only viable solution for keeping people fed as the global population explodes; but that doesn’t take into account the significant drawbacks, including contribution to global warming, soil nutrient depletion, water over-consumption, and the loss of small family farms.

An example is cited: Punjab, India, which saw a big increase in wheat production in the 1970s from the use of industrial agriculture:

But according to a 2007 report put out by the Punjab State Council for Science & Technology, “Over-intensification of agriculture over the years has led to water depletion, reduced soil fertility and micronutrient deficiency, non-judicious use of farm chemicals and problems of pesticide residue, reduced genetic diversity, soil erosion, atmospheric and water pollution and overall degradation of the rather fragile agro ecosystem of the state.”

Indian farmers who fell into debt while trying to compete with the industrial agriculture companies sometimes saw suicide as the only way out: “Since 1997, over 200,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide.”

Conversely, local farms practicing sustainable agriculture would be kinder to the environment and a boon to their communities. This sums up the argument nicely:

Agroecology is not a return to some traditional past, it is the cutting edge of farming. It mimics nature in the field, and uses resource-saving techniques that can be of greatest benefit to cash-strapped farmers and to women, for whom access to credit is most difficult, and who cannot afford to run high levels of debt.”

The bold is ours–what an important concept! That and other points raised here were covered in a talk we recently attended by Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms. Stay tuned for a post about that!

CSPI’s Food Day: Celebration of sustainable and humane food practices, or something more sinister?

Posted on by
1

The Haute Pasture office subscribes to the Nutrition Action newsletter published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), and we were pleased to see that they are planning a Food Day celebration for October 24, 2011. The aim it to celebrate nutritious, responsibly-sourced food, and further the group’s goals of helping citizens make healthier choices, and helping policymakers improve rules regarding food safety and quality. CSPI strives to do the following, as described on the CSPI site:

  • To provide useful, objective information to the public and policymakers and to conduct research on food, alcohol, health, the environment, and other issues related to science and technology;
  • To represent the citizen’s interests before regulatory, judicial and legislative bodies on food, alcohol, health, the environment, and other issues; and
  • To ensure that science and technology are used for the public good and to encourage scientists to engage in public-interest activities.

After reading the mention of Food Day in Nutrition Action, we went online to see if we could find more information about it. CSPI’s Facebook page has a similar brief description of Food Day, as does the site of the company developing the Food Day logo. Most interesting to us, however, was a blog post titled “CSPI Shills for World Food Day–A Monsanto Operation.” This post seems flawed in that it links the CSPI Food Day to an unrelated World Food Day, but the argument was intriguing enough that we continued researching.

As long-time subscribers to Nutrition Action, we were surprised to read about an alleged link between CSPI and Monsanto. It turns out many bloggers have written about CSPI being backed by major food corporations and basically being a PR group for the FDA. The posts and comments we read were from the angle of anti-big-government rather than anti-agrigiants. Listed as evidence of the evil of CSPI were: the support of the executive director of CSPI, Michael Jacobson, for the S.510 Food Safety Bill; Jacobson’s description of controversial Food Safety Czar Michael Taylor as “… extremely knowledgeable and public-health oriented”; Jacobson’s support of genetically-m0dified crops; and CSPI’s work with Walmart to remove HFCS and decrease sodium in their products.

Politics aside, we can see how the stance of CSPI regarding the above items could conflict with the best interests of small farms. The food safety changes needed to protect consumers should be made at the level of the large agricultural corporation; a small local farm which can be policed by its own customers should be allowed to sell raw milk without the government getting in the way. But where should the line be drawn between protecting consumers from the carelessness of agrigiants, and protecting family farms from the long arm of the law?

Natural Beekeeping

Posted on by
1

Can the idea of free-range farming be applied to beekeeping? Yes, say proponents of top-bar hives. Bees in nature build cells that are very different from what they construct in commercial hive boxes. Hive frames are intended to save the bees work and allow them to redirect their energy from building to honey production, but the frames force the cells to a uniform size (which is not natural) with the consequence of producing larger bees who cannot fly as well and have shorter life spans. Sustainable beekeeping should strive to return kept bees to a more natural, and therefore healthier, state.

In this Nonviolent Beekeeping article, Philip Chandler, a proponent of natural beekeeping, suggests three principles for beekeepers to adopt:

  1. Interference in the natural lives of the bees is kept to a minimum.
  2. Nothing is put into the hive that is known to be, or likely to be harmful either to the bees, to us or to the wider environment and nothing is taken out that the bees cannot afford to lose.
  3. The bees know what they are doing: our job is to listen to them and provide the optimum conditions for their well-being, both inside and outside the hive.

The top-bar beekeeping method is a more natural way to keep bees: the bees attach their comb to a slat and build out their colony as they see fit. This results in a smaller honey yield, but the hive is easier to manage, and requires less heavy lifting.

Natural beekeeping tenets remind us that keeping bees is like any other type of animal husbandry, in that the beekeeper is responsible for the external factors surrounding the hives, such as these, listed by a natural beekeeping blog:

  • move the hives to better pasture.
  • provide water or supplemental feed.
  • shelter from the wind.
  • shade from the heat.
  • protection from pests.
  • avoid pesticides and pollution.

and with the external variables being controlled by the beekeeper, the bees should be left to take care of their colony inside the hive themselves, as they do in nature. Top-bar hives may be the best way to enable this natural behavior. See The Barefoot Beekeeper for more information on top-bar hives.