Eating Liberally

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Pet Food Politics, What to Eat and Food Politics:)

Kat: The FDA announced last week that it was detaining a wide variety of milk-based Chinese products--everything from candy and baked goods to, once again, pet food--in order to verify that these foods aren't contaminated by melamine. But as an op-ed in Monday's New York Times revealed, melamine turns up in our own domestic food supply, too, and the FDA appears to be pretty blasé about it:

If melamine-tainted milk from China poses a potential hazard, why is the use of melamine in American agriculture acceptable?

Dr. Nestle: It is most emphatically not acceptable. The FDA says this quite clearly on its website:

This means that if farmers are using it as fertilizer, they are doing so illegally. And they are doing it stupidly. Melamine may be rich in nitrogen (67%), but bacteria in soil break it down very slowly so the nitrogen isn’t very available. It would just sit there for a long time. As I discovered during the research for my book Pet Food Politics, the main use of the nitrogen in melamine is to fool tests for protein into thinking that pet food, animal feed, and, for that matter, infant formula, has protein when it doesn’t. So any time you find melamine in pet food, animal food, human food, or fertilizer, it is there because some unscrupulous person has committed fraud. It is not supposed to be there at all, ever.

The FDA’s standard of 2.5 ppm as a “safe” level for melamine in food is a tacit admission that the situation is out of control. I agree that 2.5 ppm is unlikely to harm anyone, even babies. As I discussed in my book, the levels that caused crystals to form in the kidneys of sheep in the 1960s and cats and dogs last year were 100 times higher. But the kidney crystals are formed from melamine and its breakdown product, cyanuric acid. When both are present, crystals form at 32 ppm; the lowest level at which crystals form has not been defined.

Melamine should not be in American—or Chinese--food, feed, or fertilizer at any level whatsoever. If it is in our agricultural system, it’s time to put a stop to it before any more harm gets done.

As for human food: Last week, the FDA issued an import alert on a long list of Chinese foods ranging from milk to candy to pet food because of suspected contamination with melamine. This week, the FDA opened an office in Beijing. While waiting for all this to do some good, it’s probably a good idea to be careful about what you buy from China. Or, as the concerned designer Sokie Lee would say, don’t buy anything at all until China cleans up its food safety act. (see above illustration).

Even our most progressive presidents can be addled by Agribiz propaganda. President-elect Obama--thanks to his corn-fed constituents, we presume--is regrettably fond of ethanol, unlike his rival, John McCain. And McCain's not the only Republican who slams the grain-for-gas scam. Arch conservative P.J. O'Rourke airs his aggravation with industrial ag in the current Weekly Standard:

But Obama wouldn't be the first liberal leader to be conned by Con Agra & co. Jed Bartlet, that wildly popular--though sadly fictitious--West Wing populist, once called the Butterball hotline seeking expert advice on how to cook a salmonella-free stuffing, and gushed "I think this is a wonderful service you provide."

And maybe it is, but there are some not-so-wonderful aspects to Butterball's signature product, America's top selling turkey for more than forty years. In a concession to our obsession with big breasts, American turkey breeders created an avian abomination. As Barbara Kingsolver noted in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:

Ah, but no such reluctance on the part of Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton and co-author of The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Singer and his co-author Jim Mason actually got themselves hired to work for Butterball's artificial insemination crew in Carthage, Missouri, to experience first hand this foul method of poultry propagation.

Singer and Mason lasted exactly one day. Their description of what the job entailed, from extracting semen from the "toms" to working as "breakers"--i.e., grabbing panicked hens so the inseminator can inject them--is gruesome. A breaker has to wrestle with each hen to insert a tube, whereupon the inseminator releases a blast of compressed air, blowing the semen into the hen's oviduct. Singer and Mason describe this revolting ritual in fittingly coarse terms (sorry, Dad, but I'm just quoting an illustrious Princeton professor):

On the bright side, this is one job that can't be outsourced to India. On the other hand, do you really want to make this miserably manufactured creature the centerpiece of your Thanksgiving feast?

But, you ask, what else is there, beside the ubiquitous Butterball?

Well, before the Broad-Breasted White came along and gobbled up the market, we relied on ordinary, normal-sized turkeys whose modest proportions enabled them to strut, fly, and, yes, engage in good old-fashioned turkey sex. These "Heritage" varieties were bred for flavor, not size, so while they're smaller, they're far tastier.

But, you say, that "Heritage" label sounds so hoity-toity. Surely, they're more expensive? And when so many of us are struggling with rising food costs, is it fair to urge folks to splurge on a fancy fowl?

Well, yes, it costs more to produce poultry in a sustainable and humane way. The small family farmers who raise these Heritage breeds don't benefit from the economies of scale enjoyed by the industrial turkey producers. You could argue--and many do--that factory farms are more efficient and give us cheaper food.

And sure, exploitation is more economical--just think of all the tax payer dollars we saved using slave labor to build The White House. Some things are just wrong. Factory farming abuses animals, workers, and the environment in the name of efficiency. It breeds disease, and depends on toxic pesticides and chemicals and hormones and antibiotics and genetically modified organisms--causing untold damage to our health, and that of the planet's.

That's why I'm asking you to please join the Thanksgiving Local and Organic Food Challenge co-sponsored by Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, and the Eat Well Guide, North America’s premier free online directory for finding local, sustainable food (and for whom I sometimes consult, in the interests of full disclosure.)

As challenges go, this one is modest but meaningful. The Local and Organic Food Challenge simply asks you to include one dish--or even just one ingredient-- that's fresh, local, and sustainably grown, in your holiday feast. And by partnering with The Eat Well Guide, Consumers Union makes it supremely easy for you to participate. There's no need to embark on a marathon foraging expedition to hunt down organic cranberries or locally grown squash, because the Eat Well Guide’s comprehensive online tool does the searching for you--you just have to do the gathering!

The Challenge invites you to share your locally-flavored recipes, and offers additional recipes and inspiration from legendary chefs Alice Waters, Mario Batali, and Dan Barber. Waters recommends that you "roast a delicious Heritage organic turkey. These birds are slow growing and spend a large part of their lives grazing and foraging which results in a deep and complex flavor. You will be supporting the poultry farmers who are raising special breeds, like Narragansett and Bourbon Red, in a sustainable way that cares for the land."

But what if you're on a budget, and you're not ready to bag the Butterball? Well, OK--you can still spring for some organic sweet potatoes, say, or whip up a sustainable stuffing with some Granny Smith apples from the farmers market, and maybe some locally milled cornmeal. As the Eat Well Guide's director, Destin Joy Layne, explains:

If only President Bartlet had known about the Eat Well Guide. Instead of putting in a call to Butterball, he could have flipped open his laptap, logged on to the Eat Well Guide, and punched in his area code to find dozens of stores in his own neck of the woods where he could find a free-range Heritage turkey raised the old-fashioned way. And then he might have said, "I think this is a wonderful service you provide! My fellow Americans, say buh-bye to the Broad-Breasted White and bonjour to the Bourbon Red." Now, there's a slogan for us sustainable socialist types--better off red than overbred.

I'm just too immersed in the foodie activist world to be able to gauge how effective a film like Food Fight is at explaining the bizarre state of the American diet. This movie strives mightily to explain how we arrived at this sorry state in which our government's policies (i.e. your tax payer dollars) have managed to foster a system of agriculture that enables big food companies to make a killing while quite literally killing us with their disease-inducing "food" products.

I put "food" in quotes because food is defined as a "source of nutrients" or "solid nourishment," and much of the processed crap that fills the supermarket shelves not only doesn't meet this definition, it's so bad for you that it's practically poison.

That's why real food fanatics generally heed the advice of Michael Pollan, the dean of clean food and one of Food Fight's stars, to steer clear of conventional supermarkets. We prowl our farmers' markets instead, scooping up vegetables so fresh that the soil still clings to their roots. We buy our other basics at the local health food store or Whole Foods, or maybe Trader Joe's.

But, once in a while, we run out of toilet paper or cat food or some other staple and, in a pinch, we dash to the supermarket across the street. Whereupon we are confronted, aisle after aisle, with the reality of what the average American eats--and, quite frankly, it freaks us out.

That's not to say that you can't find healthy food in the supermarket. It's there, as Food Fight notes, on the periphery in the produce department, or in the "ethnic" aisle with the soba noodles and dried beans. But most of the stuff that's sold in supermarkets is of negligible nutritional value and loaded with salt, fat, sweeteners and all kinds of additives to make it taste better. For too many Americans, wholesome foods are hard to find, and even harder to pay for.

Food Fight rounds up all the usual suspects to decry this rotten food system; along with Pollan, there's Alice Waters, Dan Barber, Wolfgang Puck, Marion Nestle, etc. There are a few fresh faces, too--most notably Tom Philpott of Grist and Growing Power's Will and Erika Allen, the true foot soldiers in the battle to make real food available to all of us, regardless of income or region.

There's a lot of talk about how locally grown foods simply taste better, and are better for you. All well and good. But as the Ethicurean's Bonnie Powell noted in her excellent, even handed review, the film lingers a little too long at the altar of Alice Waters. Treehugger's Kelly Rossiter had a similar take, giving the film high marks overall but lamenting Food Fight's excessive "focus on the charismatic chefs and marveling at the array of beautiful vegetables at the farmers' market."

I would have liked to see a greater emphasis on the disastrous environmental consequences and inhumanity of factory farming, or even a passing reference to the link between meat consumption and climate change. I was troubled, too, that the film suggests that hunger is a thing of the past in our country. As Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, recently noted at a World Hunger Year forum in NYC, "there will be 40 million people going hungry in the richest country on earth by the end of the year". And don't forget the folks who, thanks to our toxic food chain, manage to be both obese and malnourished at the same time. I can't think of a more damning indictment of our agricultural policies.

To be fair, Food Fight gets a lot of things right; I was especially gratified that it hammers home the fact that Agribiz is wedded--or should I say welded--to the military industrial complex. And it's great to see my personal heroes like Tom Philpott and Will Allen getting their due--Allen's just received a much-deserved MacArthur genius grant, by the way, for the extraordinary work his foundation, Growing Power, has done to promote urban agriculture as a viable way to nourish our inner city communities.

So although I share my fellow foodie bloggers' reservations about this film, I think you should see it for yourself--and if you live in Los Angeles, you'll have your chance soon: Food Fight premieres this Saturday, November 8th, at a free 3:15 pm screening at the AFI (American Film Institute) festival in Los Angeles, at Mann's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.

(photo from Yes We Cake)

We went to vote at 6 am this morning and arrived to find a line already stretching around the block. The cafe on the corner had created a window display just for the occasion:

It took us about a half hour to cast our votes, and by the time we left the line had doubled in length. We headed to the local diner, where Jon Stewart sometimes eats breakfast with his wife and kids. Didn't see him today, though--presumably he's getting ready to dig in to the next administration:

(photo from Yes We Cake)

Thanks to NYC's Local Gourmand Jeanne Hodesh for tipping us off to Yes We Cake, a website devoted to Obama-themed baked goods. Here's another of my favorites from their site:

Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish posted this yummy-looking pie from a reader in Ohio:

Finally, it's not exactly edible, but here's a tasty tidbit from an imaginary interview with Obama posted on Monday by Daily Kos "Cheers & Jeers" author Bill In Portland Maine:

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Pet Food Politics, What to Eat and Food Politics:)

Kat: Last Tuesday's New York Times reported that kidney stones, "once considered a disorder of middle age, are now showing up in children as young as 5 or 6." One of the primary culprits appears to be excess consumption of salty processed foods. The problem is especially bad in the "so-called stone belt, a swath of Southern states with a higher incidence of kidney stones."

You noted in What To Eat that because the food industry--especially the snack food sector--relies so heavily on salt to make its products taste better, it's pretty easy to exceed one's recommended daily allowance for salt. The Center For Science in the Public Interest calls salt "perhaps the deadliest ingredient" in our food supply, because excess salt consumption is a major cause of heart disease and strokes.

That's why the CSPI has been petitioning the FDA for years to revoke salt's "GRAS" status--i.e., "generally recognized as safe," and reclassify it as a food additive, as well as establishing limits for its use.

But the government is notoriously reluctant to advise Americans to consume less of anything, as you noted earlier this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Meanwhile, the big food corporations are trying to score reduced-fat, low-sodium brownie points by adopting new, improved nutrition standards for their products under the "Smart Choices Program," which will supposedly make it easier for consumers to make healthy selections at the supermarket.

With our kids up to their hineys in brine, do these kinds of voluntary measures do enough to address the problem, or is the CSPI justified in calling for greater regulation of salt?

Dr. Nestle: Pity the poor food industry. First the makers of junk foods are under siege over sugars and childhood obesity and now they have to deal with salt-induced kidney stones.

We are talking junk foods here. Without sugars and salt, nobody would buy this stuff. That, at least, is what food company executives tell me. When they reduce the sugar or salt level below the “bliss” point, sales drop. This, of course, is because we are so accustomed to a junk food diet that it takes more and more sugars and salt to stimulate our taste receptors. Try two or three weeks on a low sugar, low salt diet. Do that and you will soon see that processed foods now taste unbearably sweet or salty.

Food companies are responding to pressures to reduce calories, saturated fat, sugars, and salt with their Smart Choices Program. This is designed to replace the PepsiCo Smart Spot, the Kraft Sensible Solutions, and other such company self-endorsements of “better-for-you” junk foods—an oxymoron if I have ever heard one. The way these programs work is that each company sets up its own nutritional criteria for qualifying for the logo.

The Smart Choices program works the same way except that participating companies have agreed on a unified set of nutritional criteria. These, as you can see on their website, are not especially stringent.

The salt standard is a good example. It is the same as that of the American Heart Association—a remarkably generous 480 mg of sodium per serving, or 20% of the Daily Value maximum. Salt is 40% sodium and 60% chloride, which means that 480 mg sodium corresponds to 1.2 grams of salt per serving. This, for example, allows salty soups to qualify.

But if you want to try to eat less salt, just try and get food companies to cooperate. Processed foods are by far the largest source of salt—90%--in American diets. What you add at the table hardly counts. This is because food companies are addicted to salt. Adding salt is a great “eat more” strategy. Salt heightens flavors and extends shelf life. It is cheap. Even better, it binds water and makes foods weigh more, and companies can charge more for heavier packages. Unfortunately for them, just about every scientific group that has examined the evidence says salt raises the risk of high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease—and now premature kidney stones--at least in a significant fraction of people. And now even kids are getting salt-induced kidney stones.

To me, the salt issue looks like one in which I have no options except not to eat processed or restaurant food at all. This is completely backward. If people want their food to taste saltier, nothing stops them; all they have to do is pick up a salt shaker. But the rest of us have no choice. Someone else has already made the decision for us. Salt, and usually lots of it, has already been added to the foods we are served or sold. As I see it, the responsibility lies squarely with food companies. I wish they would lower the salt in their products, starting right now. The generous salt allowances in the Smart Choices program won’t help much.

What that program really is about is preemption of the traffic signal approach for labeling food products, under serious consideration in Australia. Food companies hate the idea. Too many of their products will qualify for red (don’t eat) and yellow (once in a while) labels.

One final thought: Why am I thinking that lawyers will be most interested in the relationship between salty products marketed to children and kidney stones?

Halloween's one of my favorite holidays--in fact, Matt and I chose to get married on Halloween, and today's our thirteenth anniversary. I can't help thinking how lucky I was to find a true partner who shares my passions and humors my hissy fits. It just confirms that I really made a great choice when I decided to be heterosexual. Oh, wait!--I didn't decide. I was just born that way.

And thank goodness, because I really appreciate the sense of security that comes with having a legally and socially sanctioned union. Imagine what it's like for life partners who are denied the same benefits because they happen to be gay. So many folks who oppose gay marriage claim they do so in the name of family values--as if gay people don't value their families, too. They argue, absurdly, that sanctioning a marriage between two men or two women would somehow devalue the whole institution and open the door to all kinds of aberrant combinations, like people and their pets embarking on a menagerie à trois, or something.

Speaking of animals, it's great to see that 60 percent of Californians currently favor Proposition 2--the bill to free farm animals from the most cruelly restrictive cages--while 27 percent oppose it.

But a frightening number of Californians--44 percent--apparently wants to shove gay couples back into the closet via Proposition 8, the measure to ban gay marriage. The latest polls show that 49 percent of Californians are against Proposition 8, so that contest is too close to call. Evidently, concern for penned-in poultry is greater than compassion for same-sex soul mates. How scary is that?

(Image courtesy of Wonkette)

It's not even Halloween yet, but a bunch of folks masquerading as Christians descended on Wall Street the other day to fondle the horns of that famous bronze bull statue and pray to God "to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems."

What makes them think God's not minding the store now? How do we know this economic collapse isn't just part of His master plan to drive his wayward, wealth-worshipping flock back to a less-consumptive, more redemptive way of life?

I was raised in a Christian Science household, so I grew up believing that (a) a Pulitzer-prize winning newspaper offering outstanding international coverage is worth paying a premium for, and (b) God is a pretty spiritually oriented kind of entity who's not so hot on stockpiling stuff.

To my parents' eternal disappointment, I left the fold (but kept the subscription--thanks, Dad!), but my religious upbringing did instill in me a belief that happiness comes not from acquiring material goods but in doing good deeds and nurturing friendships.

Now, millions of maxed-out Americans find this tide of global woe sweeping them straight up to the altar of The Church of Stop Shopping . They may have trouble adjusting, as will our economy--"Consumers Drag Economy Down," Floyd Norris, the New York Time's chief financial correspondent, blogged on Thursday.

But don't despair, all you kooky, spooky "prosperity gospel" goofballs! Shed your pseudo-Christian costumes, stop stroking your pagan bull, and forget about asking God to grant you treats. With Thanksgiving and Christmas just around the corner, I ask you to heed the words of a real fake Christian, the Reverend Billy, founder of the Church of Stop Shopping. Here's the sermon he preached to the people attending Disneyland on Christmas Day, 2005--right before the police arrested him and took him to the Anaheim prison, as documented in What Would Jesus Buy:

I'm with you, Rev! But can I please have my Christmas present early? Say, on November 4th?

Will Barack Obama use socialist tactics to spread the vegan agenda? Red meat-lovin' red-staters will really be seeing red after watching this clip from Talking Points Memo, which caught Obama on Wednesday confessing to a crowd at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina that, as a kindergartner, "I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

Oh, sure, it sounds innocent enough. That's because you haven't heard about a shadowy group of subversive sandwich shillers called The PB & J Campaign. No, they're not a bunch of bread boosters, or a front for the peanut lobby, or the jelly industry. The PB & J Campaign is a nutty group of "private citizens concerned about the environment" on a feel-gooey mission to convince Americans to "fight global warming by having a PB&J for lunch."

The PB & J Campaign's website is full of pro-plant propaganda illustrating just how much kinder to the environment a plant-based diet is than the resource-hogging, planet-polluting, livestock-based diet that most Americans eat. Their diagrams make the case for shortening our food chain, i.e. eliminating the middleman--or, rather, cow, pig, or chicken--and consuming plant foods directly:

(Images courtesy of pbjcampaign.org)

The nut-lovers at The PB & J Campaign have crunched the numbers:

We've already had one pro-peanut president, and you know how that turned out. Jimmy Carter had that crazy fixation with energy independence, slapping solar panels on the White House roof and flaunting his woolly cardigan agenda.

In fact, the peanut has long been the preferred legume of liberals, going back to the mid-19th century when African American scientist George Washington Carver made it the foundation of his sustainable agriculture agenda for the South. Carver, a brilliant botanist, came up with something like a hundred different products made from peanuts, "including cosmetics, dyes, paints, plastics, gasoline, and nitroglycerin."

Another one of Carver's goals, according to Wikipedia, was to undermine "through the fame of his achievements and many talents, the widespread stereotype of the time that the black race was intellectually inferior to the white race."

So now, once again, a smart, ambitious black man is promoting peanuts. Is Obama part of a plant-based plot to conserve land and water and feed people more efficiently instead of pigging out on animal products at the expense of the entire universe? Has he secretly taken the PB & J pledge? When he talks about uniting red states and blue, is it some kind of coded reference to grape-jelly purple?

Look for the folks at Fox to get to the bottom of this--they may not know about eating low on the food chain, but they do know how to go low.

Image courtesy of collegeotr.com

Memo to Maureen Dowd: if you're going to make an issue of out of Sarah Palin's out-of-touch handlers for playing Caribou Barbie dress-up, try not to reveal your own disconnect with the "real" America in the process. Dowd's column in Sunday's New York Times suggested that Palin wouldn't have been raked over for her makeover if only she'd "popped into Penney’s to buy some new American-made duds."

It's been awhile since I set foot in a J.C. Penney's myself, but I'm fairly certain that patriotic shoppers would have difficulty locating a single item of clothing bearing a "Made In The USA" label at Penney's--or any department store in this country, for that matter. With the exception of niche operations like American Apparel, and some high-end couturiers, we don't really make clothes in this country anymore. In fact, we don't even make clothespins. Go to your local five-and-dime, if you still have one, and you'll see--even the clothespins are made in China. We've moved on to bigger and better things--like fabricating phantom fortunes and manufacturing market meltdowns. Making actual stuff that people really need? That's so last century.

The satirical saga of an entrepreneurial tyke who pairs two of America's finest traditions--the bake sale and the attack ad. From the Onion:

Precocious Youngster Sells Cookies To Buy Attack Ad