While placing my usual order from Relay Foods for local squash, zucchini, onions, and eggs, I did a search to see what local fruits are on sale this week. I got an apple result, but also about thirty local wines, including some fun-sounding fruit wines from Peaks of Otter Winery. Blueberry? Pumpkin pie? Apple & chili pepper? Might have to head down that way for some hiking and wine tasting.
See how fun it can be to support local agriculture?
From The Market: “Greetings from the Non-Barcode People”, p 259-260
This is precisely the mission that Slow Food has set for itself: to remind a generation of industrial eaters of their connections to farmers and farms, and to the plants and animals we depend on. The movement, which began in 1989 as a protest against the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome, recognizes that the best way to fight industrial eating is by simply recalling people to the infinitely superior pleasures of traditional foods enjoyed communally. The consumer becomes, in founder Carl Petrini’s phrase, a “coproducer”–his eating contributes to the survival of landscapes and species and traditional foods that would otherwise succumb to the fast-food ideal of “one world, one taste.” Even connoisseurship can have a politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig. It’s all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.
For more info on Slow Food, see Slow Food USA.
Do the definitions of “CAFO” and “factory farm” differ?
According to About.com, BloggerNews, and others, a factory farm is an AFO (animal feeding operation), and the largest, as determined by EPA guidelines, are CAFOs (concentrated or confined animal feeding organizations). But many sites, such as Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, use “CAFO” and “factory farm” interchangeably.
The Wisconsin Sierra Club site lists the baseline numbers of animals for a facility to be considered a large CAFO. It’s pretty horrifying.
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
–Gandhi
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/the_greatness_of_a_nation_and_its_moral_progress/189870.html
(and lots of other animal sites, with slight variations)
What? How can a diet that encourages eating large quantities of meat be considered a friend to the anti-factory farming movement?
The Paleo Diet preaches the consumption of pasture raised, humanely treated meat and eggs. The emphasis is on the fact that these foods are more wholesome, and therefore better for humans than factory farmed meats and eggs, but the side effect of supporting humane farms is a welcome one.
Animals raised on pasture and slaughtered humanely produce healthier food: more vitamins, a better fat profile and fatty acid ratios, no unnecessary antibiotics, and less stress hormones.
In short: eat only happy, healthy animals (or products from those animals) and you will be a happy, healthy human! Remember: you are what what you eat eats!
Links:
http://paleodietnews.com/1264/%20usda-study-says-factory-farms-are-worse-for-the-environment-than/
(From Slaughter: In a Glass Abattoir, p. 235)
Like fresh air and sunshine, Joel believes transparency is a more powerful disinfectant than any regulation or technology. It is a compelling idea. Imagine if the walls of every slaughterhouse and animal factory were as transparent as Polyface’s–if not open to the air then at least made of glass. So much of what happens behind those walls–the cruelty, the carelessness, the filth–would simply have to stop.
Moral: It’s just another reason to buy meat and dairy products from your local farmer. A farmer who knows that customers could appear at anytime has extra incentive to keep the farm clean and humane.
(From Grass: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pasture, p. 197-198)
In fact, grassing over that portion of the world’s cropland now being used to grow grain to feed ruminants would offset fossil fuel emissions appreciably. For example, if the sixteen million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the United States became well-managed pasture, that would remove fourteen billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road.
Moral: consumers have the ability to create change through purchase power. Make a difference by avoiding corn-fed beef and support your local farmers who raise cows on pasture.
If you plan to hit a salad bar for lunch, and aren’t sure if the meat is humanely raised, take your own hard boiled egg. I boil 5 eggs on Sunday and keep them at work, just in case.
Today’s eggs were purchased from Relay Foods!
No-fail cooking technique from Cook’s Country magazine: fill a pot with water, drop in some eggs, bring the water to a boil, then remove the pot from heat, cover, and let sit for 10 minutes. Transfer the eggs to an ice water bath to cool, and refrigerate. Two other tips from my experience: boiling eggs that are a couple weeks old will produce hard boiled eggs that are easier to peel, as oxygen has worked its way beneath the shell and separated the shell from the inner membrane; and if there’s a “power boil” setting on your stove, don’t use that for boiling eggs as the faster heating could cause them to crack.
(From Big Organic chapter, p. 183)
The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate. And while it is true that organic farmers don’t spread fertilizers made from natural gas or spray pesticides made from petroleum, industrial organic farmers often wind up burning more diesel fuel than their conventional counterparts: in trucking bulky loads of compost across the countryside and weeding their fields, a particularly energy-intensive process involving extra irrigation (to germinate the weeds before planting) and extra cultivation. All told, growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally, according to David Pimentel, though that savings disappears if the compost is not produced on site or nearby.
Moral of the story: eat local foods! Another bonus–food that travels less distance will be fresher and tastier!
(from the Big Organic chapter, p157)
Along with the national list of permissible synthetics, “access to pasture,” and, for other organic animals, “access to the outdoors” indicate how the word “organic” has been stretched and twisted to admit the very sort of industrial practices for which it once offered a critique and an alternative. The final standards also demonstrate how, in Gene Kahn’s words, “everything eventually morphs into the way the world is.” And yet the pastoral values and imagery embodied in that word survive in the minds of many people, as the marketers of organic food well understand: Just look at a container of organic milk, with its happy cows and verdant pastures. Thus is a venerable ideal hollowed out, reduced to a sentimental conceit printed on the side of a milk carton: Supermarket Pastoral.
Was going to stop there, but an interesting counterpoint follows:
Get over it, Gene Kahn would say. The important thing, the real value of putting organic on an industrial scale, is the sheer amount of acreage it puts under organic management. Behind every organic TV dinner or chicken or carton of industrial organic milk stands a certain quantity of land that will no longer be doused with chemicals, an undeniable gain for the environment and the public health.