Recently in Food Category

The USDA is currently accepting public comments on the issue of allowing a Genetically Modified Alfalfa plant developed by Monsanto, which could, by the USDA’s own research, infect organic alfalfa farms, potentially causing them to lose their ‘organic’ labeling. Needless to say, many people are upset about it, not the least of which are the people at Food Democracy NOW!, who want your comments. Now, this product has made it past USDA environmental review, that, in theory, shows that the environmental impact of this GMO crop will fall within acceptable levels, however those are defined.

FDN is calling this something that ‘threatens the very fabric of the organic industry.’ Now, I think that battle was lost years ago, when Organic was defined in such a way that the biggest players in Organic are companies like Kraft and Heinz, but the real issue here, in my opinion, is the danger of these GMO crops. Not that they’ll cause health issues with those who consume them, but rather the danger to the ecosystem, particularly when you look at the docket and realize that this GMO is only meant to be herbicide-resistant. A so-called ‘Roundup Ready’ crop.

It is the nature of agriculture to support the cultivation of certain plants at the cost of others, however, with these ‘roundup ready’ crops, it encourages wholesale dumping of these chemical plant-killers in manners that don’t necessarily control the application of the chemical very well, which can kill plenty of plant life that is found in areas external of the GMO crop, further reducing plant diversity (and most likely insect/animal diversity by extension) in those areas. Plus, since the plant has been modified to be difficult to kill, when it does spread to non-GMO versions, it becomes impossible to seperate the GMO version from the non-GMO version, further reducing biodiversity. It is this cross-breeding between GMO and non-GMO life, and the fact that the non-GMO life is almost guaranteed to be the dominant form over time, that worries many ecologists.

The monoculture present in modern agrictulture is already worrying, but has, until recently, still been based on traditional selection, with change in an organism happening slowly over many generations, based solely on selecting traits based on what was most desirable in the current generation. With GMOs, we can greatly change very fundemental things about an organism in a single generation, and the question that hasn’t been answered in a manner that is acceptable to macroecologists is if it’s even possible to do that in a way that doesn’t have potentially expensive ripples. I suspect that the answer to that question is that no, we can’t have GMOs that don’t have a severe impact on the ecosystem around them, and I don’t think we’re ready to be excercising those changes.

As reported by the New York Times and Change.Org’s Sustainable Food Blog, researchers at the University of Toronto and Washington University have devised a means to make mammals insensitive to pain. So far, they’ve only worked on mice, but the protien that they’ve genetically engineered away from the mice is common to pretty much all mammals.

The writers reporting on this are discussing the development due to how it could impact commercial animal production in the US, which is rife with animal cruely abuses, like veal production in boxes, or docking of pigs tails to keep them from biting each other’s tails. The argument is that by making the animals insensitive to pain, they are no longer as effected by the unpleasant conditions in which they live. Of course, it could cause issues with the animals not moving away from potentially dangerous situations because they are simply not bothered by pain. For instance, part of the reason pigs tails are docked as so that they’ll fight back if their tail gets bit. Without sensitivity to pain, they’re not likeyly to fight back, which raises the threat of infection to the animal.

However, the biggest problem is that this research, while interesting, wouldn’t actually solve the problem. From an animal rights perspective, it probably encourages even more egregious abuses, since poor handlers will likely be rougher with the animals than before, simply because the stimulus they were providing is no longer effective. Plus, how does the lack of perception of pain make the actions any less offensive? But ignoring the issue of animal rights and cruelty, this solution does nothing to solve the problems that modern commercial animal production causes elsewhere.

The environmental impact of CAFOs? Could get worse, since the animals insensitivity to pain encourages even higher densities. Which encourages greater centralization. Which increases the food safety risk. While the removal of this protien is unlikely to have any negative health effects on it’s own, and animal breeding is easier to control than plant breeding, there isn’t much risk of some of dangers of genetically modified food that are often raised, but the most likely end results of this technology are highly negative.

The research is interesting, and the knowledge of the mammalian pain experience could be used to generate some new pain treatments. However, as a technology with reasonable application in modern commercial animal production….I don’t see it. And I see it making things worse.

Several weeks back, on January 13, Michael Pollan spoke at Washington State Univeristy as part of this years Common Reading program. Having read both The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Eater’s Manifesto, I was excited to have the opportunity to listen to the man speak (though, like an idiot, I forgot to bring my physical copy of the Manifesto for signing). I’ve failed to write about this sooner, primarily because I haven’t taken the time, but I did post during the event to my twitter.

At it’s source, there wasn’t a whole lot of surprises in his talk to people who’ve read his work. He’s been beating the same drum for quite a while, that modern food production is simply unsustainable.

However, it was really interesting for him to be talking to a research institution with a rich history of agricultural research. He focused a lot on the role that an organization like WSU could play in reinventing agriculture, moving away from modern industrial practices to a method that is at the same time more traditional but also based on new, as yet undone, research into what makes the most effective post-Organic farming.

In the agri-system Pollan envisions the farmer becomes an intimately involved steward of the land, ensuring balance between plant and livestock raising. For instance, one Argentian farm he described had found that growing several years of nitrogen-fixing cover crops, and raising grazing stock on those fields, allowed several years of nitrogen-stripping crops (wheat and others) to be planted in a field without requiring any additional chemical support for the farm.

He spoke of an Urban Farm in Detroit that employs (with good wages) over a half-dozen people, and feeds many more, which is run mostly in greenhouses, using vermicomposting to heat their facilities. They are even able to raise fish and watercress in a symbiotic system that, according to Pollan, produces nearly zero waste (I’d have to see it to believe it, but it’s an interesting thought). That particular farm is also covered in the most recent Urban Farm magazine, which looks to be a promising publication.

Pollan spoke often about creating a ‘post-industrial’ form of agriculture based on this research, but I think that he might be downplaying the fundamental understanding of land management that almost all farmers had before the agri-revolution post-World War II. Still, codifying that understanding through the scientific process will be necessary to prove the viability of these methods.

Pollan did discuss this briefly, but I think it needs to be focused greater on the necessity of changing the overall structure of the Western Diet. We need more farmers. We need to spend more on our food. And we need to eat less meat. Meat production is always going to be more resource intensive than growing vegetables. Catherine and I have tried to have at least two meals a week vegetarian. It’s been working well, though I’m not terribly well versed in cooking without meat.

What Pollan didn’t focus on as much as I thought he should, was the message that our expectations about food are not reasonable. We can’t eat meat every day of the week. We can’t expect to get any produce at any time. It’s about expectation management, and I don’t think Pollan expressed that enough. He did talk about it a bit, but fundamentally, it’s the biggest problem, and the one that needs to be addressed to most.

Nearly a full year after the initial publication of the findings, UK newspaper, The Times Online, published a story covering a bit of research done at the University of California - Davis which was published by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2008, entitled Endocrine and metabolic effects of consuming beverages sweetened with fructose, glucose, sucrose, or high-fructose corn syrup. In the study, principal investigator Kimber L Stanhope performed a study where they fed two groups of people very similar diets, one group using glucose as their primary sweetener, the other using fructose.

And their findings, are really telling. The short version, is that there appears to be a very distinct difference in the metabolic processes that break down fructose compared to glucose. But the short version, isn’t very interesting. If you’re like me, and work on a College Campus which grants you access to a multitude of journals, or you can go to a nearby college to peruse their library, the article is written in fairly simple language, and is only a few pages long, so I do encourage you to read it if you can.

The research supports the hypothesis that consumption of fructose is a factor in the development of diabetes (specifically Diabetes mellitus), which can most simply be described as a selection of conditions where a person’s insulin systems are broken in some way, either by not producing enough insulin, or responding abnormally to the presence of insulin. The studies show that the body produces less insulin and leptin, two hormones which are used as signals to the brain regarding energy balance. Essentially, with this system in place, our brains have trouble knowing how much energy we have derived from our food, leading us to eat more (to gain energy), and move less (to conserve what energy we have).

These figures were based on essentially a pair of one-day observations of the subjects, so some people are inclined to deny the findings out of hand, but while the logistics of doing a meaningful long-term study with all the variables controlled are basically impossible, it’s still a telling result, and this lab, and others, appear to be moving forward with similiar research on other primates. On rhesus monkeys, they found, over the course of a year, that the monkey’s fed on fructose as opposed to glucose tended to put on nearly 30% more weight, and (over the short term, at least) exhibited significantly less energy expenditure. The were lethargic. Now, after the 12 month mark, the glucose monkeys were almost as lethargic as the fructose ones, but these rhesus monkeys were getting over 40% of their daily calories in the form of sugar, and the dramatic reduction the 6 month and 12 month calculation in activity for the glucose monkeys (which took them from a ~.5% drop to a ~7.5% drop (where the fructose monkeys were at 6 months), does warrant further inquiry, that I’ve no doubt is being worked on. In the same period, the fructose monkeys went from ~7.5% drop in activity to a ~9% drop, significant, but not nearly as dramatic. It is most probably that gaining 40% of your diet from any sugar is going to be highly damaging, but at the very least, glucose seems to be less damaging in the short term, making it a better candidate for using in moderation.

More frightening was the findings regarding lipid metabolism. While both fructose and glucose encourage the production of fat, over a 10 week study, where each group recieved 25% of their energy requirements from sweetened beverages, the fructose group saw a dramatic increase in their levels of plasma triacylglcerol, a key component in most animal and vegetable fats. Further, the fatty deposits are consistent with medical evidence of the precursors of Atherosclerosis, or the buildup of fatty plaque on the inside of arteries, commonly believed to be a precursor to heart disease.

Incidentally, even though we talk about ‘high-fructose corn syrup’ (HFCS), HFCS is not actually pure fructose. The most common form is only about 55% fructose, the rest being made up of glucose. Up until the 1970s, the primary sweeteners used were about 50%-50% mixes of fructose and glucose, so while the evidence put forward by this research suggests we’d be better served by reducing the fructose level instead of the glucose level, as a sweetener goes, HFCS isn’t the most chemically evil sweetener in the world.

The problem with HFCS, is that it’s insidious. It’s everywhere. Currently, the estimated mean consumption of added sweeteners by Americans is 15.8%. That number is based on a study published in 2000, which was based on data from the mid-1990s. Now, this number is well below the suggested maximum intake from added sugars of 25%, but the trend being seen among younger people is getting dangerously close to that (in my opinion frighteningly high) level anyway. More recent surveys of just beverage intake suggested that college students were getting ~25% of their daily caloric requirements from sugary beverages every day, and 13 year-olds were seeing at least 15%. And that is just from soft drinks, fruit drinks, and juices with added sugar. I’m frankly scared of what the figures would indicate when you start including the fact that even the most basically processed food you’ll find at the grocery store or chain restaurant almost certainly has added sugar as well.

I’m looking forward to seeing what the results of more study on the rhesus monkeys are, since it appeared that the glucose monkeys lethargy were converging with that of the fructose monkeys (and giving the sharp uptick of the curve, had the potential to surpass it). At the end of the day, the study tells us little about the current dietary world. Yes, fructose is worse metabolically than glucose, but, chemically speaking, table sugar is not much different than HFCS anyway (I’d love to see a similar study comparing table sugar to HFCS-55, though I suspect the findings would show minimal difference). Ultimately, long term exposure to Glucose was starting to show effects similar to fructose as well. From a health perspective, the answer isn’t to switch sugars, it’s to reduce them. By how much? Well, without accurate data on sugar consumption, it would be pretty damn hard to gauge, but cutting out those sugar-added beverages would be a good start.

Credit: I first had my attention to this story raised by the Sustainable Food Blog at Change.org.

I’ll admit, I was skeptical when Tom Vilsack was appointed US Secretary of Agriculture. Vilsack’s entire political career had been from the heart of the corn belt. He’s a noted supporter of corn-based ethanol. In short, he seemed like another Big-Ag shill who had taken over the chief role in US farm policy.

It appears I was wrong.

While I wouldn’t say that Vilsack is anti-big agriculture, he’s done a lot of work promoting farmer’s markets, and other activities that I do support, including the USDA’s new “Know Your Farmer” campaign, which provides support to small-scale local farmers, and even talks about the health importance of a diet based more around fresh fruits and vegetables and meats than the processed fare that many Americans, especially lower-income families, live on today.

Now, I’m still not a supporter of this administration. I think that the USDA needs to do more to revamp the agricultural system, but the work that is being done to encourage the development of local and regional food systems is exciting, and needs to be encouraged.

Apparently, this is going to be a particularly good year for Michael Pollan, at least in terms of book sales, as both Washington State University, and University of Wisconsin-Madison have chosen his books for their Freshman Common Reading programs. I don’t know what the freshman class at UW-Madison looks like this year, but at WSU that equates to around 3300 copies of the book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, just for Freshman. The Bookie was also offering 20% off list to anybody else who wanted to buy the book (Students/Faculty/Staff/Parents/Alumni/etc) so all told, I really have no idea how many copies of the book are now floating around the WSU campus, but it’s not insignificant.

And, it almost didn’t happen.

Due to financial shortfalls here in Washington, the University felt it was going to have to completely cut the Common Reading program, largely because the program has historically involved an author visit, but the school couldn’t afford it. There were rumours that the real reason for the cut was pressure from Agribusiness, which I’ve never seen any real credible proof of, though certainly Pollan’s book is critical of the sort of agriculture common in the Palouse (re: monoculture), an agriculture which WSU has been instrumental in creating through years of wheat genetics and hybridization. Universitry of Wisconsin-Madison, who chose Pollan’s later In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, is no doubt just as tied to Agribusiness as Washington State.

[Bill Marler], whom I’ve wrote about before, decided to provide a donation to WSU to keep Pollan on the agenda, and the Common Reading program has been moving forward, with a planned visit from Pollan on January 13th of 2010. Having read both of Omnivore and Defense, I’m looking forward to the visits, though I suspect that WSU’s experience with Pollan’s visit will be no less controversial than his visit to Madison.

Civil Eats has already broke this story down, and I’m planning on simply adding to what Paula Crossfield has had to say on the issue, though perhaps not as kindly as she has been.

First, the Defense of Farmers group. Anyone who claims that Pollan is anti-Farmer is a fucking idiot. In both Ominvore and Defense, Pollan routinely says that the small amount American’s spend, and expect to spend, on food is downright ridiculous. Currently, it’s about 10% of our disposable income. Prior to 1933, that figure was closer to 25%, per the Salem-News article linked above.

And what’s allowed for that? Mechanization. Hybridization. Specialization. The hallmarks of modern agribusiness, and they’ve done a fantastic job in churning out massive numbers of calories. However, the food that’s resulted, is quite easily shown to be not as good for us. We have the highest instances of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and a whole host of other problems than we ever have had historically (but the problems in the health care industry are totally the insurance companies, right?). These problems are effecting more people every year. And younger people. In the last thirty years, incidence of Diabetes among people under the age of forty has gone up a full percentage point, nearly three times. Among older people (45+), it’s at least doubled. And when you look at Type 2 Diabetes, the type most often linked to weight and nutrition, it’s figured that over 13% of African Americans, 9% of Latino Americans, and 8% of Caucasian Americans suffer from Type 2 Diabetes.

And why would the numbers be more prevalent among racial minorities? Generally these people are poorer than Caucasian Americans (this is a generalization, and one I don’t intend to discuss the reasons for here. It’s an injustice, a pretty disgusting one, but it’s also a completely different discussion). And heavily processed foods tend to be cheaper, so they tend to be consumed more by poorer people. If agribusiness were to be restructured along the lines presented in Pollan’s book (which is basically impossible, and possibly improbable), then these people would be getting more fresh fruits and vegetables, and less corn-derived food products. And, yes, they’d be paying more for it. Which might not be a bad thing. More money on food, less on Cable TV and other non-necessities.

And, there would be more jobs for farmers. Higher prices paid to farmers (particularly if Farmer’s Markets can become more prevalent). It might actually be possible for a farmer in the corn belt, or the heart of the dairy belt, to survive without government subsidy. And to make more money than they do now. And, we’ll be taking better care of the soil, and ourselves. No more hypoxic algae blooms. No more nitrate contamination of drinking water (There is no corroborating evidence of the so-called ‘blue baby syndrome’, but artificially high nitrate levels have been shown to negatively impact water life). And most likely, a decrease in the incidence of obesity and it’s host of related health problems that have begun to plague the developing world.

But we live in a post-consumer economy. It’s hard to sell people on the idea that we need, in the words of Arthur Sinclair to “get a lot of white collars dirty.” We need more farmers, and we need people who are willing to spend more money on food. And those two goals…might be tough to reach. Still, neither of those goals are anti-farmer. In fact, they’re far more pro-farmer than any agricultural policy than we’ve seen in a long time. They’re ideas that seek to make sure that Farmer’s can actually afford a living wage, and not be dependent on government subsidies, because the current food system is a boon to Monsanto, Tyson, and other large-scale agribusiness. Not to the American farmer.

The second point I’d like to address, are comments by John Lucey, Madison professor and food scientist, who was quoted by the AP as complaining about how Pollan says Food Science has merely broken foods down to nutrients, and completely missed the point of the work in the strides that food science has made in food preservation, food safety, and meal prepration time. Now, Food Safety is kind of a joke. Just read Bill Marler’s Blog, we have one of the most unsafe food systems in the world, and most of it is because of the work of modern food science, which has created this single supplier system we have. A food safety problem at a single plant, can make people sick nationwide, something that was never possible before the shelf stabilization and preservation additives that Dr. Lucey is claiming are so great. Which is to say nothing of the other risks such additives occasionally supply.

A lot of these problems are not the blame of food scientists. And not all additives have been linked to potential health risks due to overexposure (and it’s really easy to be overexposed to food chemicals these days). However, food science has not proven to be a panacea, and while there has been good things to come from it, it hasn’t made us any safer than we used to be. If anything, food science has caused most people to lose any sort of cultural knowledge of food, instead trusting it to the supermarket and the labels therein, which is the real crime in Pollan’s eyes.

Ethicurean blogger, Amanda Rose, recently had the opportunity to speak at a raw milk symposium in Seattle, WA last Sunday. This was a huge deal because this was one of the first of these symposiums to include raw milk advocates. Of course, quite a few food safety people, such as Bill Marler, were on the panel speaking against raw milk, but at least it was more even this time.

I’ve written about Bill Marler before, and I’ve had the pleasure of talking to Mr. Marler on the phone about both of our takes on food safety, where we tend to differ most greatly on the issue of raw milk. One thing we can agree on, is that a product like raw milk will never be 100% safe. Where we differ, is on the fact that Mr. Marler argues in favor of heavy restriction, if not outright ban on the sale of raw milk, while I argue that the product should be available, even though I would advocate investigating your dairy before purchasing from them, but then I believe we should be doing the same with the majority of sources of our food.

So, what the problem? Well, some groups, like the Weston A. Price Foundation, a group I generally agree with and who runs the Campaign for Real Milk, seriously downplay the potential risks in unpasteurized milk. To the point of actually misrepresenting research, as is demonstrated in Ms. Rose’s post linked to above. It this sort of misrepresentation of facts that led a California-mother to serve raw milk to her 7-year old son. The boy contracted E. coli O157:H7, and it is believed it was due to the raw milk. The instance resulted in a lawsuit, the outcome of which I’m not clear about.

The mother claims now that had she known about the science that suggests that E. coli O157:H7 and other pathogens could thrive in raw milk, she never would have served it to her son (the boy did survive). And ultimately, as a parent she should have the right to make that decision, but she should also be able to have all the information.

Should the Weston A. Price Foundation be liable for misrepresenting the risk? Maybe.

On the other hand, the other side misrepresents the health benefits, and generally grossly overstates the risk of infection. Are they not any more blameful for that?

Personally, I’m wary about buying raw milk from a dairy I’ve never seen. Further, I’d need to know it was close, and that the milk was fresh. RigEthicurean blogger, Amanda Rose, recently had the opportunity to speak at a raw milk symposium in Seattle, WA last Sunday. This was a huge deal because this was one of the first of these symposiums to include raw milk advocates. Of course, quite a few food safety people, such as Bill Marler, were on the panel speaking against raw milk, but at least it was more even this time.

I’ve written about Bill Marler before, and I’ve had the pleasure of talking to Mr. Marler on the phone about both of our takes on food safety, where we tend to differ most greatly on the issue of raw milk. One thing we can agree on, is that a product like raw milk will never be 100% safe. Where we differ, is on the fact that Mr. Marler argues in favor of heavy restriction, if not outright ban on the sale of raw milk, while I argue that the product should be available, even though I would advocate investigating your dairy before purchasing from them, but then I believe we should be doing the same with the majority of sources of our food.

So, what the problem? Well, some groups, like the Weston A. Price Foundation, a group I generally agree with and who runs the Campaign for Real Milk, seriously downplay the potential risks in unpasteruized milk. To the point of actually misrepresenting research, as is demonstrated in Ms. Rose’s post linked to above. It this sort of misrepresentation of facts that led a California-mother to serve raw milk to her 7-year old son. The boy contracted E. coli O157:H7, and it is believed it was due to the raw milk. The instance resulted in a lawsuit, the outcome of which I’m not clear about.

The mother claims now that had she known about the science that suggests that E. coli O157:H7 and other pathogens could thrive in raw milk, she never would have served it to her son (the boy did survive). And ultimately, as a parent she should have the right to make that decision, but she should also be able to have all the information.

Should the Weston A. Price Foundation be liable for misrepresenting the risk? Maybe.

On the other hand, the other side misrepresents the health benefits, and generally grossly overstates the risk of infection. Are they not any more blameful for that?

Personally, I’m wary about buying raw milk from a dairy I’ve never seen. Further, I’d need to know it was close, and that the milk was fresh. Right now we go through a gallon of milk roughly weekly. If it was raw milk (which I’d love to be able to get), I’d want a fresh half gallon every three or four days. But I do believe that raw milk is healthier, despite the risks.

If I can find a nearby dairy to supply me with raw milk (and whom I trust), I may well get sick from it someday, but I acknowledge that risk, and I should be allowed to choose to take that risk. But, it’s also important that we get complete information on the issues out to everyone, so that they can make the most educated decisions possible.ht now we go through a gallon of milk roughly weekly. If it was raw milk (which I’d love to be able to get), I’d want a fresh half gallon every three or four days. But I do believe that raw milk is healthier, despite the risks.

If I can find a nearby dairy to supply me with raw milk (and whom I trust), I may well get sick from it someday, but I acknowledge that risk, and I should be allowed to choose to take that risk. But, it’s also important that we get complete information on the issues out to everyone, so that they can make the most educated decisions possible.

Saturday marked the beginning of our Gardening Season with the first public work day at the Pullman Community Gardens. Catherine and I went for a couple of hours and helped clear weeds from the main path, and go through the new gardener’s orientation we didn’t get last year.

We also discovered to our chagrin that our plot was not where we thought it was, since it turned out our neighbors from last year. Who were good neighbors, didn’t have a 20’x20’ lot, but rather they were using a 20’x30’ lot (not to mention the roughly 5 square foot melon mound in our plot), so we had to remeasure. Luckily, we are getting ground that was worked last year, so aside from the weeds, it’s proved fairly easy to work.

Our plan this year is to dig our our beds lower than our paths, so that we can practice flood irrigation on our beds. Our hope is that will make the watering not only easier, but also require less water. However, this is a fairly large change from last year, so it is requiring a fair amount of soil moving. I expect many more days of sore muscles before we’re done.

In other Garden News, we’ve started our first set of seeds in our apartment. Plenty of salad greens and chard, some tomatoes, peppers, a bit of corn, and a few other things. We’re hoping to have the salad greens in the dirt before the end of the week, but I’m not sure when we’ll get everything out, since frosts can hit at the garden until late March, but even if we can’t plant everything, we should have a really good start this year, and once we get the beds built, I think our workload should be fairly light this year, save for waterings.

A few weeks ago, there was a ton of discussion in the blogosphere about a recent study that suggested that grass-fed beef produced 50% more carbon emissions than grain-finished beef. With all the discussion regarding the environmental damage of the feed-lot system, this news really surprised a lot of people. The reason of course, was simple. Grass-fed cows live longer, and therefore fart more. It doesn’t help that Cows are particularly awful at the task of converting feed into meat.

Of course, in my opinion to look at the CO2 and methane emissions of a single cow over it’s lifetime woefully oversimplifies the environmental picture of the food system. The vast lagoons of animal waste so toxic that no one would dream of spreading them on food crops. The relatively high-acid rumens of grain-fed cattle which encourages the growth of acid-tolerant strains of bacteria (E.coli in particular), the high levels of antibiotics present in feedlot beef. At least with grass-finished cattle, they tend to be raised in smaller herds and can therefore provide a closer-to-real-nature ecosystem.

However, when compared to other animals, perhaps the real problem is simply stated: There are simply too many cows. Go to your local supermarket, and you’ll generally see three main kinds of land-based meat prominently displayed: beef, pork, and chicken. And it’s not uncommon for the beef section to be larger than the pork and chicken sections combined. Now, I love beef. And we eat a fair amount of it. Compared to chicken and pork (and the wide variety of other animals we could choose to eat), we eat more beef than any other meat. However, we are looking at converting our beef to locally raised heritage cattle (Belted Galloway’s), which will support a healthier poly-culture in the beef world, as well as hopefully having less environmental impact than the meat-factory breeds favored by most cattlemen today.

Still we need to be looking at other sources of meat as well. I’ve yet to find a local source of Pork, but the same person who sells the Belted Galloway’s also sells chickens at reasonable prices. When we have our own house, my wife and I certainly plan to raise chickens (mostly for eggs), and have also discussed raising rabbits for meat as well. The rabbits thing is particularly interesting, not because I’ve been told I would be the one responsible for the actual slaughter, but rather because it wasn’t terribly long ago that rabbit was a reasonably common meat. My father remembers raising rabbits for food when he was young, but my only experience with rabbit was in the form of a cassoulet I had at a Pullman restaurant over a year ago. Luckily for me (I think), my University offers a helpful document on raising rabbits in Washington State, which actually mentions raising Rabbits to supplement your family’s meat supply. Not surprisingly, the document is originally dated 1914.

Like I said, most people these days have never really thought about these animals as food, I guess.

I understand a lot of people would have a mental block with eating rabbit meat. I would have some trouble being comfortable with eating dog or cat. For me, the greater point, is that we need to diversify our meat production. Personally, I think it’s worth doing some of this raising on our own, but then I think that most people are simply too far removed from their food.

Above all, just look at different alternatives. Rabbit, Lamb, Pork, Game, so much more. There are so many tastes our there that we’re potentially missing out on, and frankly, the more diverse our food system is, the healthier both ourselves, and quite possibly our planet, is likely to be.

We, as humans, love sweet food. Really, all animals do. Sweetness is a sign of simple sugars, which our bodies can easily break down for either quick energy, or long term storage for leaner times. Given our desire towards sweetness, and the cheap availability of artificial sweeteners like High Fructose Corn Syrup, it’s no wonder that the comment visitors to the United States (or Great Britain for that matter) most have regarding the supermarket fare available to us is about it’s sweetness.

We put sweetener in everything. At our local supermarket, all but one brand of Applesauce contains High Fructose Corn Syrup. You can find bags of frozen vegetables that contain HFCS. And there are very few national brands of soda which are still made with real cane sugar. Medical professionals talk a lot about the increasing waistlines of American’s, and how we’re killing ourselves. I myself am larger than I really ought to be, currently tipping the scales at just over 330 pounds. While my frame is larger, and therefore I can stand to be heavier than my 6’ height suggests, I know that I am still larger than I ought to be, and I feel that daily.

However, while I do come from a family of large people, the reasons behind my weight are simple. I ate too much, and I moved too little. My chosen career is even fairly sedentary. In short, my current health is my own fault, and I acknowledge that. However, when you look at the national trends in obesity and size, there has been a fascinating shift over the last century. Poor people are now, on the whole, fatter than wealthy people.

There is a reason that Gluttony is considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins. For the majority of human history, the only way a person could be gluttonous, and could reach the rotund proportions of obesity was through forcing others (and often many others) to go without. It required wealth and power. However, wealthy people could afford to eat, and eat more, and they did, feeding a biological imperative to eat. It is only in modern times, that we’ve had enough for everyone (at least, everyone in developed nations) to consume in this fashion, but that we’ve also realized the great comedy in our biology: That our desire to eat, and to consume, is not only killing us, but the very ecosystems we depend on for our food.

There is a difference, however, between the wealthy and the poor. While throughout history it was only the very wealthy who could afford immensely calorie rich foods, these foods are now widely available through the availability of inexpensive (or rather, seemingly inexpensive) sweeteners. And worse, these calorie-rich, but nutrient-poor foods are often the cheapest on the shelves. Therefore, the least financially sound are most able to afford those foods which bring little to the table buy high quantities of calories, but little else. It’s not just an issue of money, however. Those who become wealthy, particularly in the modern world, are not those who are born into it (necessarily), but rather those who desire it most. Even our current president was raised in a middle class family, only to gain great wealth and the highest office in this nation through his own ambition.

Sure, there are obese rich people. For my age, I’m doing fairly well financially (though I am far from wealthy), but after watching a few shows yesterday on the super-morbidly obese (like 900 pounds at 19 years old), I can tell you that these people generally appear to be, at best, lower middle class. And the foods that they tend to strive towards are foods which, for what they are, are far sweeter than we might traditionally think.

This is, in short, what Michael Pollan was talking about in The Omnivore’s Dillema when he mentions our National Eating Disorder. We live in a food culture where our own biological imperatives are skillfully marketed at, with many people either being unaware of the problem, or being unable to afford to get out of the vicious cycle our food system puts us in.

A lot of people like to blame High Fructose Corn Syrup for a lot of dietary woes. Some of these people claim that HFCS is simply worse for your than sugar. While there is evidence that suggests that real sugar makes us feel full while HFCS doesn’t, the real problem isn’t HFCS over Real Sugar, it’s the amount of sweetness we’ve come to expect from our food. I mean, when applesauce requires additional sugars, something is clearly wrong with our sense of taste.

Sweetness is a good thing, those sugars are certainly capable of bringing that quick energy we sometimes need, but if we’re going to improve our national health, we need to reboot our taste. We need to learn to appreciate our food for what it really it. And we need to force the food establishment in this country to stop making everything so damn sweet.