Chews Wise

The Class Trip to the Slaughterhouse, Yes, Really

This guest post is by Joe Cloud, who co-owns T&E Meats in Harrisonburg, Va., with Joel Salatin, the farmer in Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Image: Joe Cloud at T&E Meats

By Joe Cloud

It is no secret that a lot of the energy driving the local food movement is connected to schools. Much of that energy has coalesced in the past several years into organizational focus and legislative action to get more locally produced whole foods into local school systems. At the same time, institutions of higher learning are experiencing an unprecedented push from within the student body to offer more local foods in the dining halls. The breadth and depth of the energy driving these movements is astonishing, prompted by concerns about childhood obesity, climate change, farmland preservation, nutritional density of foods, animal welfare, and local living economies, as a short list. 

This movement has certainly affected our work at T&E. We have begun sending local meats to the dining services at Washington and Lee and Virginia Tech universities. Last year, the Harrisonburg School System built its annual local food meal around 1,000 pounds of locally-raised ground beef from T&E (produced by a Holstein steer from a farm in Elkton, Va., and a Holstein cow from an organic dairy in Dayton, Va. – how’s that for knowing where your food comes from?). This spring we hosted a group of students – both graduate and undergraduate - from the University of Virginia, who are part of a large multi-year project studying local food systems in central Virginia. They spent the afternoon touring the plant and learning about the potential and limitations for production of locally processed meat.

Recently a group of high school students from a local private school connected to Eastern Mennonite University came through. That week was a mid-semester break for them, and a teacher was taking the opportunity to teach a week-long class on local food systems. They went around to local farms, dairies, poultry plants, distribution centers, and T&E. The students came through on a day when we were running the kill floor. They joked around nervously as we put everyone into process-room hair nets and butcher wraps, as required by our sanitation procedures. I led them through the process room and the coolers, and their eyes got big looking at the hanging carcasses and the meat cutting underway. Then we went on to the high point of the tour – out onto the kill floor where, that day, we were slaughtering pigs.

With Tomatoes Failing, Why Are Mine Alive?

I've seen many articles about the tomato blight hitting the northeast, though what I find curious are the plants that avoid it, like the sungold tomato above. It's a hybrid variety though not immune to late blight.

In my community garden, many plants have succumbed to the disease but several in my plot are growing, the tomatoes maturing, including heirloom varieties. My yield though is down from last year.

In my sheltered backyard, where I grow sungold and heirloom chocolate cherry tomatoes in large pots, with nary another tomato plant in sight, I've no blight at all. Is it the variety? Is it the sheltered location? My friend, Jim Crawford, a Pennsylvania organic farmer, says: "No question, location makes a huge difference."

George Ball, who heads up Burpee Seeds, argues on his blog that heirlooms are least resistant to the disease:

If the spring and summer of 2009 is followed in succession by similar seasons in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013, we could face a complete extinction of many—not all—of the old-fashioned heirlooms and open-pollinated tomato varieties that folks in the Northeast have come to enjoy since those varieties were reintroduced in the early 1980s.

Now Burbee sells a lot of disease-resistant hybrids, which gardeners must buy each year because they are not open pollinated. But I see no reason why open-pollinated versions will fail to develop resistance on their own. Why not get a healthy heirloom standing tall in a field of failed plants and then breed it?

That's exactly what Crawford is doing. "We've got one field of Brandywines, which went completely brown, but in the middle are four plants that are green from top to bottom," he said. He's saving the seed for next year -- something you can't do with hybrids.

This dovetails with something Jim Gerritsen of Wood Prairie Farm writes about in his seed company's newsletter:

I know organic seed growers and breeders often prefer open pollinated varieties because type selection is fully within their control. This allows a practical and decentralized way of developing regionally adapted varieties that excel and resist disease pressure and certainly that's what we need as was made very clear by this year's cold wet conditions in the Northeast.

Who knows. Maybe one's even growing in my backyard. 

- Samuel Fromartz

Postcard from a dairy crisis: Anatomy of a farm sale

Barry Estabrook over at Gourmet.com has a poignant piece on a sixth-generation Vermont dairy farm that went under the auction block, unable to cover its costs. It starts this way:

Last Friday, for the first time in 144 years, no one at the Borland family farm got out of bed in the pre-dawn hours—rain, shine, searing heat, or blinding blizzard—to milk the cows. A day earlier, all of Ken Borland’s cattle and machinery had been auctioned off. After six generations on the same 400 acres of rolling pastures, lush fields, and forested hillsides tucked up close to the Canadian border in Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom, the Borlands were no longer a farm family.

The story is well-worth reading. For another perspective, check out Lisa Hamilton's op-ed piece on the dairy crisis at Christian Science Monitor. 

Organic in France - La Vie Verte

If you want a green view of what's happening in France, check out the blog La Vie Verte by my friend Denise. She covers a wide range of topics, with a recent post on how farmers in the rural southwest of France are faring with the organic label. It seems that for some, the costs and inspections aren't working and a few are letting their AB (Agriculture Biologigue) label lapse in favor of a more local emphasis. In many ways, it mirrors some of the issues faced by small farmers in the U.S.

She also talks about an exquisite French flour milled on site by a local farmer -- the baker in me is pining for it but shipping flour from France doesn't make a lot of sense. Plus, we have great artisanal flour here from places like Anston Mills, which any serious baker should try.

And while you're at La Vie Verte, get a load of that black gascony pig.

- Samuel Fromartz

Video: Where the Copper River Salmon Come From

Here's a short video I shot while in Alaska, giving a thumbnail sketch of the Copper River salmon fishery.

Review: "Deeply Rooted" by Lisa Hamilton

For farmers, summer is probably the worst time to recommend a book. Working in the fields, they barely have time to eat, let alone read. But for people who kick back in the summer, this is the best time.

And if, like me, you're curious about farmers' lives, I can think of no better place to start than with Lisa Hamilton's Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness (Counterpoint). I know the author; her work has appeared on this blog, which is why it would have been awkward to write about her book had it not been so engaging.

Hamilton's been writing about farming for a decade now, traveling throughout this country and overseas. Her work has appeared in magazines like Orion, Gastronomica and Harper's as well as more specialized venues. She's not a farmer, but an astute observer who seems to have an asset so lacking these days – the patience to sit still, observe and listen and then put it all down on the page beautifully. She's also a photographer (here's a slideshow related to the book), which may account for the rich portraits in this book.

But if you had to ask me what the book was about, I wouldn't say it's about farming. What the book really is about is the relationship that farmers have with the land, their families and the communities in which they live.

While so many books focus on growers who populate farmers' markets near big cities, Hamilton wisely spends time with folks deep in the shrinking rural pockets of this country -- those whom we don't get to see that often.

The three narratives in the book center on an organic dairy farmer in Texas, a livestock rancher in New Mexico and a grain and seed farmer in North Dakota. Like most farmers, all are outspoken and  independent but being "unconventional" adds another layer of complexity. What hooked me was her uncanny ability to capture these farmers' struggles hoeing a different – and more challenging -- path. She writes in the introduction:

These were the ones trimmed off long ago, or at least by the industry's prescription, should have been. As we sit and talk, the topics are sometimes technical, often political or economic, and always, ultimately, philosophical. And personal. If we start with a discussion of soil microbiology or a comparison of turkey breeds, inevitably we end up in family, history, ecology, faith, beauty, morality, and the fate of the world to come. For them, all these things are linked.

Harry Lewis, a black farmer, is one of the handful of remaining dairy farmers in Sulphur Springs, Texas. His family's local roots go back to the post-Civil War era, when former slaves migrated to the area. To stay viable, he's largely eschewed all the investments and fixes thrust to him except for one – to go organic. He follows this path because it works for the scale of his farm and is in line with the way he was already farming.

When Hamilton notices young calves still with their mothers, Lewis explains: "The mothers take care of the calves better than we can. I mean, we could bottle-feed them, but that's more labor on our part."

"From the beginning," Hamilton writes, "the Lewis farm has run on the mathematics of frugality — that's what has kept this business afloat for more than fifty years. As much as possible it runs on what's available for free: grass, rain, family members."

Lewis could have sold out like other neighbors, but feels the pull of the land and a way of life. As a young man, he left for the city only to return – his relationship with this ground too strong to easily sever.

The second profile focuses on a New Mexico rancher, Virgil Trujillo, who truth be told is a rancher without a ranch. He is trying to maintain a place for cattle on land that has gotten increasingly pricy and divorced from its near four-century role as grazing land.

Trujillo's certainly a maverick in Abiquiu, one of seven families still working a 16,708 acre-parcel that the King of Spain granted to the settlers in the area in 1754. He's a descendent of the original deed holders but is having a tough time of it.

While he dreams of expanding the ranch and working on it full time, he depends on a salaried job at a religious retreat. You can't help but feel that no matter how committed, no matter how strong his tie to this place, he's swimming against history. He may be the last in a long line of ranchers, or perhaps against the odds will live his dream.

The last profile is the most optimistic, focusing on the Podoll family in La Moure, North Dakota. David Podoll set out in the 1974 to prove organic agriculture wrong, but in the process he became convinced it was right. He now grows organic grains on the farm – wheat, tricale, millet -- as well as organic vegetable seeds, selected at the kitchen table according to what tastes best.

He prefers to get close to the soil, to smell it, too see it. He bemoans “brute-force agriculture” where farmers rely on numbers with nary a thought to the soil – or to the changing climate, which has already altered the dynamics of his farm.

“Farmers today with the big machinery go from one half-section to another without ever getting out of the cab, without ever smelling or feeling the soil, or even getting it on their boots,” he says.

For these kind of farmers in a deep and permanent relationship with the land, such distance is impossible. As Podoll tells Hamilton, what he’s doing isn’t about “organic” or “sustainable” farming, it’s about farming that endures. Really, it's about relationships that endure -- relationships that ultimately feed us all.

- Samuel Fromartz

Whole Foods to Emphasize "Health"

In an interview with the WSJ, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey unveiled a new health emphasis at the company, saying the company is going back to its roots and away from its 15-year emphasis as a foodie Mecca. (Frank Talk From Whole Foods' John Mackey - WSJ.com.)

Mackey: The biggest thing that is going to happen is beginning in the fall. We're going to begin a Healthy Eating Education initiative. We've just added a seventh core value (to the company's mission), which is Healthy Eating. Basically, we used to think it was enough just to sell healthy food, but we know it is not enough. We sell all kinds of candy. We sell a bunch of junk. There will be someone in a kiosk to answer questions, they'll have cookbooks and health books, there will be some cooking classes. It will be about how to select food, because people don't know."

WSJ: Will you get rid of the unhealthy items? You have aisle after aisle of absolutely delicious looking candies and chocolates and fudge and cakes and then you'll have someone up front at a kiosk looking through cookbooks?

Mr. Mackey: "Customers, we hope, are going to vote them out. You're just seeing the most tentative efforts at this point because the details are not ready for public release. You need to be fair. I've got to plan the revolution."

The key statement -- "customers, we hope, are going to vote them out." It's clear in the current recession that people are holding back from the more expensive food items, but my question is whether they will actually shift towards the whole foods and bulk bins that Mackey notes were a key component in the company's early days. Now those foods represent just 1% of sales and he recognizes that people aren't cooking -- hence, the plethora of prepared foods that the company also sells. In a nearby store in Virginia, for example, the prepared foods section now takes up perhaps 20% of the store, far bigger than it had until a renovation in the past year. Will bulk foods now be given more store real estate and be easier to navigate? Will the company reduce the number of packaged goods?

To push this initiative, Whole Foods will also have to become more transparent on the contents of its prepared food  items (like providing calorie labeling in addition to an ingredient list at its salad bar and prepared foods counter). That seems like an easy fix, with more information steering people towards healthier choices.

As Mackey says, "Americans are sick of being sick and fat." That's true but whether this sentiment will prompt them to cook -- as Michael Pollan advocated in his Times piece this Sunday -- and thus lose weight is another issue altogether. I, for one, hope so, and will be curious to see how Whole Foods fares with this new strategy.

- Samuel Fromartz

A Cook, Not a Foodie, with a Taste for Onions

Among friends, I've been called a foodie because I'm into food and love to cook and bake. But I don't think of myself that way -- I'm not really into following the top chefs, don't watch the food shows on television and am not on a perennial search for the latest hot restaurant. I do enjoy a good meal once in a while, but I'm very careful -- I've had too many experiences where you lay out a big chunk of change for a meal and then wonder what you've spent it on.

I just like food, simply made, that tastes good. So I rate a couple of ethnic places near DC, like Hong Kong Palace, as the most enjoyable places to eat (with the best value), along with a couple of fine dining places, like Palena. But mostly, I've found I like to cook at home. Ingredients can count for 90% of the result. Like the cucumber I picked from the garden yesterday, sliced up and sprinkled with a pinch of salt. Or the Copper River sockeye salmon I recently had the pleasure of eating up in Alaska, fresh out of the water. "With fish like this, the only thing you can do is screw it up," a chef said. Visiting a fisherman's house, we ate the fillets off the grill with a bit of seasoning and not much else. Perfection!

I've thought about this reading Michael Pollan's essay in the Times magazine, "Out of the Kitchen, onto the Couch," which points out that people have forgotten how to cook. Food has become largely about entertainment, rather than engagement. You watch, rather than participate. This doesn't apply to everyone, but it is the story for many. More and more people are buying prepared foods, eating sandwiches, not cooking.

How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.

I take Pollan's point. As an avid bread maker, it's clear to me that most people have forgotten what real bread tastes like, if they've ever had it. But once they do, especially kids, there is an element of shock and awe. Now bread making is viewed as an arcane craft, but once people made bread regularly at home. It doesn't take a lot of time or work (the bread rises on its own). It's just intimidating.

I often tell people interested in baking that you have to make a few bad loaves to learn how to make good ones. In baking though, the bad ones are usually edible. So you eat them and try again. But that applies to anything worth doing. Make mistakes, eat the bad stuff -- if you can -- and do better next time. (Sometimes, mistakes can even turn out quite nicely as they did for Susan at Wild Yeast, when her baguettes became ciabatta). 

You can also make really great stuff easily (and cheaply). That was the point of my previous post on home-made ice tea for 6 cents a glass. Cucumbers with a dash of salt is another. And here's another dead easy recipe, onions with vinegar, from Claudia Roden's The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. It's especially good with fresh onions now in season at the farmers' market.

Bassal bel Khal (onions with vinegar)

2 sweet  onions, red or white

2-3 tablespoons vinegar

1/2 teaspoon salt (or to taste)

1 tablespoon mint (optional)

Peel and cut onions in half. Slice thinly. Place in a bowl and sprinkle with the vinegar and salt. Stir. Cover and let sit for at least one hour. As Roden says, the onions "will become soft, lose much of their pungency and absorb the other flavors." I've made them with the mint and without. Both are good. This dish is especially good with grilled meat or fish or tofu.  (To avoid crying while cutting onions, cut them on a counter next to your stove and turn on the flame. It will burn the gasses that make you tear. Then turn off the flame!)

This isn't about being a foodie. It's about making good, simple, food. 

- Samuel Fromartz

Organic Study Making Waves Has Shortcomings

A study by British researchers finding no nutritional difference between organic and conventional foods has caught the media's attention. No doubt, detractors of organic food -- a powerful lobby -- are singing the praises of the study. Critics of the study also found it ignored significant nutritional elements.

I think a few things should be kept in mind:

The nutritional quality of any foods is affected by the soil in which its grown, the breed of the particular crop and the time between harvest and consumption. Grow two types of tomatoes in different fields, then test one at harvest and another a day later and the differences in nutrient quality will be dramatic. And not all the studies cited controlled for these variables.

But the biggest drawback in the study was what it failed to consider: the impact of pesticides used in conventional agriculture, which has been the most significant reason that people have chosen organic food, especially for children. As the study stated:

All natural products vary in their composition of nutrients and other nutritional relevant substances for a wide variety of reasons, including production method. Production methods, especially those that regulate the use of chemical fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides may also affect the chemical content of foodstuffs. Certified organic regimens specify the production of foodstuffs with the strictly controlled use of chemicals and medicines. The potential for any benefits to public and environmental health of these actions would certainly warrant further systematic review, but was beyond the scope of the current report.

Studies have consistently shown that organic foods have less pesticide residues than conventionally grown foods. Do those levels make a difference? That depends on the degree and length of exposure and the health and age of the subject. While it is known that chemicals have the most dramatic impact on fast-developing organisms (infants and children) the effects potentially develop over decades. 

While conventional producers have, in some cases, reduced chemical pesticide use in favor of more measured applications, other indirect effects are still prominent -- fertilizers poisoning drinking water sources being a prominent one in the Midwest. 

In short, the study will hardly be the last word on this issue. 

- Samuel Fromartz

Is Chipotle Greenwashing in Supporting Food Inc?

Tom Philpott has a thoughtful post over at Grist on Chipotle, which is supporting the film Food Inc. but is refusing to stand behind a coalition of tomato pickers in Florida to lock in a 1 cent per pound raise. I had wondered about this seeming contradiction too, so am glad Philpott looked into it.

Chipotle has a very forward-thinking approach to sustainability, supporting small farms, banning growth hormones and antibiotics in the production of its meat, and taking the extra step on animal welfare. That's why its position on worker rights is so confusing, especially given that McDonald’s, Burger King, Yum Foods, as well as Whole Foods and Bon Appetit Management Co. - a food service company -- have signed on to work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

I wouldn't say Chipotle's support of Food Inc. amounts to greenwashing, since the company is clearly ahead on sustainability. But it's position with the tomato workers, who have worked in "virtual slavery," is confusing. (Chipotle is escrowing the 1 cent per pound increase but not committing to a program with the workers' main representative).

As author Eric Schlosser, who appears in Food Inc., told Philpott:

I like the food at the Chipotle. I think their efforts on behalf of sustainability, animal welfare, and the misuse of antibiotics are terrific.  But I care more about human rights than any of those things.

If Taco Bell, Subway, Burger King, and McDonald’s can reach agreement with the CIW, I don’t see why Chipotle can’t. It will not cost much—and it will help to end human trafficking in Florida.

Talk about brand risk. Why can't Chipotle step forward and clear up this issue?