Tag Archives: food

Brookville Restaurant

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Last night we had a fantastic dinner at Brookville Restaurant in downtown Charlottesville. Brookville is dedicated to using local (within 100 miles of the restaurant), seasonal food, and the resulting dishes are delicious. One thing we particularly appreciate is the indication on the menu of foods that are not local–and there aren’t many. See the (poorly-lit, taken with a no-flash iPhone) photo below for the “Not a Local Product” note:

Highlights from Brookville’s blog:

  • “So I believe that there are many responsibilities that come along with owning a small business. The two most important are supporting your local community and giving money to those who are doing research to make the world a better place.”
  • “I strongly believe that the animals we eat must be cared for and live in the best possible conditions. That means chickens should be required to have pasture grazing time and not kept in huge houses that become a breeding pool for animal disease.”

Support local farmers by patronizing the restaurants who buy from them!

Great Harvest Bread Co.

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A Great Harvest Bread Co. just opened in HP’s town, Charlottesville VA. Yum. When we visited, we were pleased to see a notice announcing that the store sources its eggs locally, and Kath, the proprietress, told us she’s working on finding a local provider of sandwich meats. Looking around their website, there’s more good stuff:

For more than three decades we have been a friend to family farms located in Montana. We know our
wheat farmers on a first-name basis

And from the corporate website:

We also provide you with the best bread-baking wheat available by identifying suppliers who meet our strict standards for wheat quality and business practices. The Franchise Agreement requires you to buy wheat only from our approved suppliers, which maintains quality standards and helps you produce the freshest, most nutritionally rich and phenomenal-tasting bread!

Good luck to Great Harvest Charlottesville!

Edible Blue Ridge

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Just picked up the Spring issue of Edible Blue Ridge. Yes, we are a little behind. Highlights:

  • The editor describing a 60 Minutes segment where Leslie Stahl got giddy over a simple breakfast cooked for her by Alice Waters
  • An article about Virginia Truffle Growers, who are selling oak seedlings that were inoculated with the spore that produces truffles
  • A description of goose, duck, and quail eggs, in comparison with chicken eggs
  • A short story about Jon Hampton, who creates stencils for the powdered sugar faces that sometimes grace the pancakes at Blue Moon Diner in Charlottesville
  • An ad for Bridgeport Construction, LLC, a local company that makes Eco Cottages. The pictured cottage is adorable, and only 250 square feet!
  • A recipe for candied mint: spray mint leaves with vegetable spray; dredge in sugar; microwave for a minute on a plate covered with plastic wrap

Is your cheese vegetarian?

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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

Can industrial agriculture feed the world?

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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?

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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?

Pret A Manger

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Haute Pasture recently took a field trip to London. When we’re in London, our favorite place to get lunch is Pret A Manger. Pret strives to keep their food preservative- and additive-free, keeping it fresh and wholesome. And the food is delicious and cheap!

They don’t throw around the term “natural.” The most important things they do, according to Haute Pasture, are:

  • We serve organic milk, eggs, coffee, tea, citrus juices, chocolate and popcorn, and will continue to add to the list. Organic food is grown without chemical fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides or other toxic junk. Organic farming protects the environment and encourages sustainable farming practices.
  • Our chicken, turkey, beef and ham are never processed more than they have to be. It’s shocking what large producers are permitted to do (you really don’t want to know). We buy directly from small cooperatives and family-run farmers like Murray’s, Earthbound Farm and Niman Ranch, who share our beliefs. They never give their animals antibiotics or hormones, feed them only a vegetarian diet free of animal by-products and care about them and the environment in which they live.

(emphasis ours)

Kudos to Pret! Please patronize them!

How farms should be: Polyface, Inc.

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You may have heard of the Salatins and Polyface Farms from the farm’s feature in Omnivore’s Dilemma. Building their family farm from scratch, the Salatins formed strong principles regarding how a farm should treat both its denizens and customers. They believe that the earth and animals should be respected, so they allow the livestock free-range access to foods that they would naturally eat in the wild, and they compost and encourage healthy soil. They also respect customers, and do not ship food in order to give consumers the freshest possible food, and therefore the best possible experience.

All animals, including chickens, cows, turkeys, rabbits, and pigs, at Polyface are allowed to eat as much grass as they’d like. Cows are moved to new grazing areas daily, and chickens roll in behind them to enjoy the newly-cropped grass. As the chickens graze and scratch, they break up the manure, cleansing the ground. Pigs root through the fermenting hay and corn bedding in the cows’ shed, aerating it, and turning it into rich compost that is used around the farm. Poultry birds’ diets are supplemented with local grain, and the rabbits are specially bred to thrive on a roughage-only diet.

To get the best sense for how Polyface operates, visit the farm for a special tour, and if you live in the area, be sure to patronize restaurants that purchase Polyface products.

“A journey toward independence from an industrial food system”

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The Paleo diet and its relatives preach the importance of choosing free range meat and animal products over factory farmed options, for health reasons. Unhealthy, stressed animals have toxins and sickness flowing through their bodies, which are then transferred to humans upon consumption of the meat, eggs, or dairy products the animals produced. The Paleo argument tends to focus primarily on “think about what you’re putting into your body” and less on “think about the treatment of the animals.” However, FitFemaleForty has a reprint of an article written by Jeremy Gordon, a CrossFit instructor, that addresses the humane treatment of livestock to a Paleo audience.

http://fitfemaleforty.com/2010/07/21/paleo-diet-why-grass-fed/

The article presents some horrifying information about the effects of a grain diet on a cow’s digestive system. The grain raises the acidity in the digestive tract of the cows, who were built to eat grass only, which can lead to an abscessed liver and the introduction of E. Coli. From a nutritional standpoint, the fatty acid composition of the meat is negatively affected, and fat soluble vitamin content decreases.

Factory farmed meat eaters who aren’t concerned about the treatment of the animals could be swayed to change their ways based on the descriptions and evidence in this article.

Eat Well Guide

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This is an interesting tool:

http://www.eatwellguide.org/i.php?pd=Home

It accepts an address or zip code, and returns a list of nearby markets and restaurants that carry local food, along with lists of CSAs and farms. (One result for this little town: Chipotle.) For a responsible consumer traveling to an unfamiliar place, this tool could be a great asset. The site can also map a route and show you ethical food options along the way. Very impressive!