Eat. Drink. Better.

One of the more delicious ways to eat locally is to drink local milk. For most of us, this means raw (unpasteurized) milk. Unfortunately, raw milk is illegal to buy or sell in many U.S. states.

But often there’s a way around it: A herdshare program. Drinking raw milk from a cow you own is not illegal. When a milk drinker joins a herdshare, he’s buying a part of a cow — usually 1/25th of a cow — and paying each month a fee for that partial-cow’s board and care.

I own 3/25ths of a cow (a Jersey named Cinnamon), which I purchased from a local dairy farmer for $50 per share. (If I ever decide to sell my shares, the farmer will buy them back from me for the same price I paid.) Each month, I pay my farmer $22 per share for my portion of the costs of Cinnamon’s care, and each week I drive out to the farm (in Ohio, it’s illegal for my farmer to deliver my milk to me) and pick up 3 gallons of beautiful whole unpasteurized milk. It works out to $5.08 per gallon, which just a few months ago might have seemed like a lot to pay for milk. It was worth it to me because I wanted to buy my milk from a local farmer raising cows on pasture without rBGH — cows living the way cows are supposed to live — and in my area that means raw milk. It’s worth it to others because they want raw milk in particular.

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  CORE TRUTHS
A Book Review

Have you ever been challenged by someone about why to buy organic produce? If you’re like me, you can rattle off some good solid answers pretty quickly, but when they demand scientific reasoning you might not be able to cite research studies so readily.

The Organic Center has done this homework for us!

Their mission statement reads, ‘To generate credible, peer reviewed scientific information and communicate the verifiable benefits of organic farming and products to society.’

And they’ve done an excellent job of it so far. This non-profit was founded in 2002 by leaders in the organic food industry. Among their extremely impressive list of Board Members is Dr. Andrew Weil. I would encourage you to go and see this list of power-house organic industry experts and scientists.

Listed high among its goals, is to disseminate information and promote awareness and understanding to the general public about the benefits of organic agriculture.

One of the ways in which they’re achieving this goal is through Core Truths: Serving up the Science Behind Organic Agriculture. It is based on a compilation of research and is boiled down to some simple and easy-to-understand (or convey as it were) facts.

Here are 5 ’core truths’ or reasons to buy organic foods:
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Home canning is all the rage. Eating locally is in, and doing so year-round pretty much requires some kind of food preservation. No one’s freezer space is unlimited, and home canning is a great way to preserve the harvest. It seems every food blogger is canning and offering recipes for the foods she’s canned.

Unfortunately I’m seeing a large number of unsafe canning recipes posted on various food, recipe, and local eating blogs, and we aren’t talking about just the kind of unsafe canning that gives you a few days of gastrointestinal misery. We’re talking serious neurotoxins, botulism, paralysis, and death.

Here are a few key bits of knowledge, useful whether you’re canning yourself or are the recipient of a home-canned gift. Read the rest of this entry »

When my publisher and literary agent were speaking with various people about providing an endorsement for my cookbook, The Sustainable Kitchen, I received an interesting response from an older 70’s/80’s television chef. His note said he would be happy to endorse my book but only if we changed our view on sustainable seafood and aquaculture. His position was seafood, in general, is a high-protein, low-fat food. For health reasons, people need to eat more seafood in order to increase their intake of omega-3 fatty acids (the good fat) and reduce their intake of omega-6 fatty acids (the bad fat). Now, I am not one to contradict a celebrity, of course they must be right, but seems a bit short sighted to me. Read the rest of this entry »

The European Union has traditionally been more cautious of genetically-modified (GM) foods than the rest of us. They require more scientific study than other food safety organizations before approving individual seeds and ban a significant number of GM seeds as well. This stands in stark contrast to U.S. policies that encourage GM crop growing through subsidies. According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, 92% of Minnesota’s 2007 soybean crop and 86% of its corn crop came from GM seeds.

Now, mounting pressure from both Europe’s farmers and global food aid organizations have caused the high courts of various EU countries to reconsider. Read the rest of this entry »

Among the decidedly ungreen luxuries I allow myself is a small collection of magazine subscriptions, one of which is Gourmet - the Conde Nast foodie rag that is, to be honest, hit or miss. But this month’s issue was a favorite of mine, mostly because of a moving account by two young chefs of a trip they took to Madani Halal butcher in New York in search of a goat to serve at their summer barbecue. The chefs - Ian Knauer and Alan Sytsma - picked out a grass-fed, free-range goat and watched as the butcher thanked the animal for its life and then killed it in what is considered the most painless way possible. The chefs reported back that watching their animal die added a level of responsibility to their cooking. Not only did they want to create a delicious meal for its own sake, they felt a need to honor the sacrifice of the animal’s life.

This type of thinking is an integral part of the current movement towards more ethical meat consumption that we often discuss on this blog. Consider below the similarities between Zibah - the Halal slaughter method - and members of the slow food movement. This similarity is not lost on Riaz, the owner of Madani, who told Gourmet that he believes Halal butchery can help many Americans to accept Islam through shared eating values.

According to the Halal Food Authority the following conditions must be met in order for meat to be considered passable: Read the rest of this entry »

The Organic Consumers Association announced Friday it was “expanding its boycott of Horizon and Aurora organic dairy products to include five national ‘private label’ organic milk brands supplied by Aurora, as well as two leading organic soy products, Silk and White Wave.” Aurora, who supplies “organic” milk for Costco, Safeway’s ‘O” brand, Publix, Nature’s Promise, and Wild Oat’s “organic” dairy line was found to be violating animal welfare law. In truth, Aurora operates like a factory farm, milking 2,000 to 10,000 cows, confining cattle to feedlots, ordering replacement cows, and potentially using antibiotics.

A farmer the OCA spoke with said “real organic dairy farms don’t need to buy replacement heifers.” The new cattle are brought in only on industrial scale farms where cows are pushed to high levels of milk production, sometimes slaughtered after only a year or two after they stop milking often due to stress. Check out the report to read more on how Bush kept Aurora rolling under the mask of the “organic” label. Read the rest of this entry »

The Latest on the Farm Bill
Michael Pollan sent an email to his subscriber list with his take on the Farm Bill that was finally passed after much delay, debate, a veto, a Congressional override. The short take is the bill contains no major subsidy reform. Pollan’s words on the subject:

Here’s what I think happened. Critics of farm-policy-as usual– and I count myself among them– did a much better job of demonizing subsidies than they did proposing alternative forms of farm support that would have won over some percentage of the farmers now receiving subsidies. The whole discourse depicting subsidies as a form of welfare — payments to celebrities, rich people in cities, mega-farms etc– convinced many farmers that the ultimate goal of the farm bill’s critics was to abolish subsidies, rather than to develop a new set of incentives that would encourage farmers to grow real food and take good care of their land. Had the reformers crafted proposals that were easy to explain and attractive to even just a segment of commodity-crop farmers, we could have made much more progress. Instead, faced with what appeared like a threat to their livelihood, the old guard hunkered down and defended the status quo, refusing even to negotiate on the central issues. Better alternatives could have split this block, and it was our failing not to devise and promote them. What the Old Guard did instead of negotiating a new system of farm support was what it has always done: pick off the opposition, faction by faction, by offering money for pet programs. The history of the farm bill has long been about such trade offs: Urban legislators support subsidies in exchange for rural support for food stamps. That Grand Bargain has now been extended to supporters of organic agriculture, local food systems, school lunch advocates, etc. The reason that, in the end, most of the activist groups wound up urging Congress to override the veto is that, by the end, they all had been given something they liked in the bill. You could put it more baldly, and suggest they’d all been bought off– that the $300-plus billion bill represents the exact price of buying off all the critics of the farm bill, plus the cost of maintaining the status quo. But this is how the game is played, and the fact is, some good will come of these programs, modest as they are– they will sow seeds of change and legitimize alternative food chains, or so we can hope. Read the rest of this entry »

Urban Agriculturalist is a series on the ways city and suburb dwellers use their land as a food resource.

With an ever shrinking topographical footprint and a population in perpetual flux, the modern city has some feeding issues. A recent article in The Globe and Mail described the frustration of farmer’s market organizers over the shortage of independent farmers who are able to open stalls. The demand, it seems, is far outpacing the supply on a small scale, but also on a large one: the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 80% of the earth’s agriculturally-viable land is already farmed, but the earth’s population is expected to grow by 3 billion by 2050 (NASA via verticalfarm.com). With the impending expansion of an already existent disparity, what can we do to feed all people? Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a look at a few interesting headlines as the world deals with the food crisis and debates on food technology.

Food Aid Also Gives a Helping Hand to GMO Agribusiness
As countries around the world try to grapple with the food crisis, the Bush Administration’s The $770 million aid package causes a bit of a controversy by including language that would promote the use of genetically modified crops in food-deprived countries. (Chicago Tribune).

Agribusiness Profits Rise Dramatically Alongside Food Prices
An article in The Independent discusses how major players in the agriculture industry are enjoying record increases in profits, doubling in a three month period in some cases, from both the demand for food and biofuel. Investor speculation plays a significant part in the profits, as well as in driving up food prices. (The Independent).

More issues and updates. Read the rest of this entry »