THE OMNIVORE'S DIALOG

Participate in This

It’s been my experience that democracy is best when participatory and films are best when driven by the force of a fine director. But- maybe I’m just showing my age. New technology has give us lots of user generated content, but, if given the choice I’d still prefer to spend my viewing time watching a film crafted by a talented storyteller.

My fuddy – duddy attitudes will be soon put to the test when democracy and filmmaking are merged to produce FILMOCRACY - check it out.

PBS Independent Lens is inviting you to use footage from King Corn for an new-fashioned mashedup combined with images from Getty Images and some online mixing tools.

So, sign on to express your vision/view/attitudes about that subsidized crop that fuels our fast food nation.

Killer Corn and the Dead Zone

As if there weren’t enough bad news about corn agriculture in the Midwestern “Corn Belt”, scientists have now been able to document how recent increases in corn production for biofuels have put additional pressure on the Gulf of Mexico “dead zone”. This vital watershed area around the Mississippi delta (see NASA photo from 1999) is plagued by red tide algal blooms and algal die offs (the areas in green), causing catastrophic oxygen loss in the water to the point where higher organisms cannot survive.  The delta watershed is being monitored from space, and the growing extent of dead water now occupies an area about the size of New Jersey.  This according to an MSNBC-Environment interview from Andrea Thimpson with Dr. Simon Donner, whose group has just completed a landmark report on the phenomenon for the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

According to Dr. Donner, the normal pattern of alternating years of corn production with soy bean planting, stable for a long time in the Midwest, has been changed to a program of straight corn, brought about by subsidies and a government program determined to produce 15 billion gallons of ethanol from corn starch. Soy beans are down, and corn is up. Why that matters is that soy beans are a legume, and use nitrogen removed from the atmosphere, obviating the need for nitrogenous fertilizer, while corn is an especially greedy consumer of this product. (Soybeans also ripen solightly faster and require slightly less rainfall, thus are less risk in bad weather.) Unused and excess fertilizer dissolves in rain water, and runs off downstream, making the water unbelievably fertile for algae growth. The algal blooms engorge the river water with organic matter, and when the algae run out of minerals and die, their decomposition removes all the oxygen from the ocean floor, destroying the entire ecosystem.

Says Donner, “I look at this and it’s hard to be optimistic because you really need to break a subsidy structure to see [improvement] happen, and so the projection for the Gulf of Mexico is not good.” Unless, that is, somebody finds a way to make gasoline out of dead red algae.

In case you haven’t put the big picture together yet, soy beans are the big reason Brazil is burning off record setting areas of rain forest. The price of them, absent US exports, sets new records each year.  Soybeans are the basis of European biofuel production efforts, because the land is less suitable for corn agriculture, and presumably because they don't want the fertilizer runoff in the Danube or whereever. It seems that soy beans are a more “natural” source of ethanol than corn, but the American decision to use corn was based on the fact that we had so much of it sitting around. Well, not any more.

 

P.S. – I hope you get used to the strange buttery, bland flavor of farm raised shrimp, because that Gulf dead zone is where our wild shrimp used to live.

Warped Pasta Prima Vera

While we’re discussing convenience, I’d like to suggest a minor convenience that surprised me by being economical, organic and nutritionally superior to other similar non-organic products. To begin, I want to confess that slow food to me is like crossing starvation with an early death. With the commute, I work from 6 AM to about 5:30 in the evening, and the last thing I want to do when I get home is spend any time in the kitchen. I might tinker around with red beans and rice on an occasional weekend, but I normally rely on restaurant shortcuts and sauces made in the pan; things cooked at high heat for short periods and finished with reduction.

 

So when I get a craving for something more complex, like a pasta dish, I resort to ingredients tossed in a sauté pan, with a bottled marinara added at the last minute. Zucchini, leek, onion, mushrooms and maybe shrimp or sausage for variety, whatever wasn’t eaten earlier, and then a thin layer of marinara with the usual acid aftertaste of these sauces covered over with some ripe cheese. I don’t like most of the sauces, which generally contain too much tomato paste made from unripe tomatoes, and then a clumsy balance of the acid with sugar, but I wouldn’t be able to do it without them. The Barilla brand comes closest, if you can’t afford the more expensive (and refrigerated) Contadina, but there are a variety of other brands. I look for the ones with recognizable pieces of vegetable floating in a fairly liquid base, and avoid the pureed ones.

 

In my recent comments on prepared organic convenience food, I came across a pasta sauce organic brand called Muir Glen (www.muirglen.com) distributed by Small Planet Foods in Washington.

Believing, as does Foodmuse, that organic tomatoes have the most obvious superiority over their grocery store rivals for taste and texture, this seemed like a good place to see if the superiority would carry over into an organic convenience product. First let me say I was happily surprised to see the organic sauce was the same price as the other recognized brands, like Newman. Next, I discovered from the label that this stuff, with 60 calories per half cup, including only 5 calories from fat overmatched my usual brand, which was 90 calories per half cup, with 25 from fat. The ingredients were almost identical, except for herbs, and the main difference was the amount of sugar and olive oil added. That, and the use of ripe tomatoes in the organic product. This really came through very clearly, that there was less acidic aftertaste from the organic brand.

 

So you’re right, Foodmuse, in that tomatoes are the best place to look to see the superiority of organic farming. I think this shows up, even in a bottled tomato sauce.

Warped Speed

Convenience – I’m all for it. It is not inherently evil. It is not “ a bad thing.” It’s a part of the sustainable toolkit since characteristics of convenience support an efficient use of energy and time. For example, having farmer’s markets in the parking lots of supermarkets has proven to be a boon for everyone. Shoppers can do all their shopping at once – convenience reigns. Merchants have not experienced an erosion of their bottom line, customers get the quality produce they prefer, and the farmers win as well.

HOWEVER – no doubt, no argument, convenience has led us down some lunatic and wrong-minded paths. When seduced by convenience we can too easily become lazy and loose all sense of sensibility.

Convenience is one of society’s hottest battlegrounds with consumers on one side and advertisers and merchandisers on the other.

Here’s a new product sold as “quick, easy and fun.”
Someone on a design team is feeling very proud.
What do you think?

The Devil Cooks McCormick

My favorite scene in the film The Devil Wears Prada is when the character played by Meryl Streep does her first “dressing down” of her newly hired assistant. I don’t recall the words verbatim, though I wish I did, but in short she demonstrates to the young woman that her disinterest in fashion is both ignorant and arrogant. Honing in on the girl’s turquoise sweater, Streep unravels how the chain of opinion, money, advertising (and more money) – attitude, angst, industry forces and the GNP are all apart of what this young woman chooses to exchange her well-earned hard currency for to clothe herself. The fashion industry is predator, we are its prey, our tastes are manipulated so we dance to the Industry’s whimsical, finely orchestrated tunes.

Sound familiar?

That old “manipulation of taste”- thing.

One of the largest spice purveyors is on the move, cooking up new spice pairings. Some of the pairings seem to resonate with an authentic sense of culture and gastronomic history, and some don’t.  The fashion of foods makes me nervous. Not sure why. But, I recall a few years ago when suddenly everything seemed to have lavender; cheese and chocolate and somewhere crackers and cakes. To me it was creepy, but, then again, I’ve got a real stubborn streak.

Jeez Whiz

In earlier eras, serving exotic and foreign foods granted one status and distinction. To serve foods, fruits and flavors that traveled great distances to one’s table demonstrated that you had money and/or connection to provide courses of pride and unusual pleasure.

Today, new fashions are afoot. Serving foods with proven “patrimony” representing a deep, authentic experience of place, preferably local, grants the host crunchy hugs, cerebral salutes and soulful gratitude.

Battles are being waged to ensure the integrity of authentic foods especially when the food at issue carries the name of the place from whence it comes. To name it is to claim it, and cheesemakers are at the forefront of protecting their techniques and ingredients to ensure that what you buy IS, in fact, what it has long been.

Recently the cheese producers of traditional Camembert in Normandy France have formed the Committee for the Defense of Authentic Camembert to “preserve the mandatory use of raw milk in the production of AOC (Appellation d’Origiine Controllee) Camembert.”

Cheeses produced with pasteurized milk will not be able to sport the coveted AOC label.   Here’s the story: 

Of course, you’ll get kudos if you serve the AOC Camembert, but the hug you’ll get won’t be as crunchy as the ones you’ll receive if you were to serve a  farmstead chevre from within your area code.

Soylent Green

Here’s some food for thought contributed by Jon Markman, a stock market analyst writing for MSN.money. In an article entitled ”Could we really run out of food?” he reports that grain surpluses in storage are at an all time low, while new acreage planted is also at an all time low (despite recent efforts in the rain forests), and that the combination has put grain commodity prices at an all time high. Several factors have combined to cause this phenomenon, including not only farmland lost to urban sprawl and the manufacture of biofuels by both the US (using corn) and the Euros (using soybeans), but also pressure from developing countries like China and Indonesia, where animal protein (from grain fed stock) is breaking into the diet in record amounts, and always the relentless population growth with famine ubiquitous in the third world.

 

The numbers are chilling.  Prices on basic grains have tripled in the last three to five years, with the poorer exporting countries like Russia and the Ukraine (wheat) and Vietnam and India
(rice) now holding back exports to encourage lower prices at home.  Hardest hit are the Philippines
and Indonesia, which warn of impending famine and civil unrest unless grain imports resume. And Mr. Markman didn’t point out, but I will, that some of the countries at risk have nuclear weapons. This should be kept in the back of mind forever, when any idea of trade embargos and protectionism arise. The global economy is here to stay.

 

While this hasn’t had much effect on US food prices yet, presumably because of our far larger storage capacity and good weather in the Midwest for the last two decades, signs are near. Markman suggests following pizza prices as the best indicator. Hmm. He also suggests investing in agro-biz stocks, such as Monsanto, as a protection against the downward market. His advice is to invest in seed companies, especially the ones involved in genetic research, fertilizer and pesticide producers, and companies that make big farm machines. I doubt if this advice will be welcome news to our readers.

My advice would be my version of Michael Pollan's now familiar phrases: eat less, mostly vegetables, not so much meat, which always applies. Vote against biofuel, though right now both parties support it, so good luck. And finally, if you feel forced to invest in food technology stocks, avoid the one that produces Soylent Green.  You won’t like how they make it.

 

 

Does Only the Nose Know?

Aside from the inevitability of death and taxes, there is much to speculate about our fate, both individual and collective. Over the past few decades to satisfy that speculation, funds have been devoted to brain science to see how we are “hardwired,” and for what purposes. Books have been written to answer if we are hardwired for success or failure; for compassion or hate; for war or peace or belief in God; – and one of my favorites - Are we hardwired for geometry?!

Our “wired-ness” regarding taste has long been speculated, and studied. Many findings, including the blending of our primitive lobes for smell with the mysterious power of memory have been applied to industries to create some of our most dear, and dreaded, habits, trends and fashions.

But all of that may be on the verge of becoming simplified, and objectified. See today’s article in the Washington Post.

And None of This for Organic Farmers!

An editorial in the Washington Post tells it like it is on the farm bill dickering and what it actually means for the consumer.  It does NOT, however, mention the small farmer at all - pity!  The local sustainable farmers are the unsung heroes of this mess - neglected by corporate interests and lobbyists, ignored by the farm bill, and yet working endlessly to supply as many people and possible with the healthiest food possible.  I don't think they count themselves as members of this category:

"The tentative $280 billion-plus price tag includes needed spending on nutrition and soil conservation programs -- but also about $5 billion a year in cash transfers to corn, soybean, wheat, cotton and rice farmers over the next five years. So far, there are no meaningful limits on the amount each farm enterprise can receive. Thus, plenty of this federal largess will be showered on people much richer than the average American, who is struggling with higher food costs."

How long is it going to take. . .

An Uneven Treatment of an Ancient Practice

There is a renewed interest in kosher and hallal slaughter of animals in the United States. It's assumed that the slaughter practices are humane, taking into consideration the transmigration of the animal's soul. In conversations with a number of non-religous observers who purchase kosher and hallal meats, I've learned it is also assumed that the religiously slaughtered meat must be "cleaner" (though I never got a fully satisfying response as to what that actually means).

So, for a confluence of reasons, the demand for kosher and hallal cuts is on the rise in the USA.

But it appears that kosher slaughter is not done in a consistent manner, worldwide. A recent article in the Jerusalem Post calls to question how kosher slaughter is practiced in South America, which provides most of the beef consumed in Israel, both kosher and non-kosher.