Have a Seat

Table.

While much time and attention is being paid to the obesity and diabetes epidemics, the nutritional content or lack thereof of American meals, and our sedentary lifestyles, an important piece of the puzzle remains largely swept under the rug.  As a culture, we are not taking time to share our meals together at an actual table.  According to surveys published by the Journal of American Medicine less than fifty percent of Americans eat a sit down meal at home on a regular basis.  Instead we eat in our cars, standing up, in front of the television, or simply not at all.  When we do sit down to a regular meal it is riddled with interruptions and iPhone. The era of the Donna Reed dinner is entirely over.  Walk into most homes today and find the dining room table either covered under a mountain of papers and laptops or missing entirely.    

The reality is that sitting down to regular meals cooked at home increases the nutritional content of your diet, decreases the cost of food, improves digestion, encourages communication, and provides regular quality time with family.  Meals are where we talk, laugh, plan, and listen to one another.  The importance of sharing a meal is historically ubiquitous and cross cultural, it is how we honor important events and people and the touch point for family life.  Skimp on television, miss out on your twitter feed, forget to update your status, but make room for making meals and eating them as well.  Not all the vestiges of by-gone eras should be cast assunder.  

Photograph Courtesy of:

http://www.merakoh.com/2009/06/23/part-ii-the-kiddush-brunch-viriginia-and-david/

References/Resources:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/02/26/172897660/family-dinner-treasured-tradition-or-bygone-ideal

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500165_162-6086647.html

Food Rules

Eat.

Food activism was alive and well even a century ago, but it was considered common sense, not radical eating.  The most interesting thing about these US Food Administration recommendations from 1917 is the nod to buying locally.  The local food movement is largely touted as a 21st Century phenomenon, but the value of local food sources has long been understood.  Generations that lived through contagion, wars, or the great depression all understand  the value and necessity of having food at hand, and being able to grow more of it yourself.  There are few communities that grow enough food locally to be able to sustain themselves through crises, and crises are becoming more common as food sourcing and distribution is consolidated.  Interruptions in transportation or computing systems, extreme weather events, and economic instability all threaten the current food structure, maybe it's time to start listening.

Stone Soup

Hash.

According to a 2012 report released by the Natural Resource Defense Council 40 percent of the food in the United States goes to waste. Much of this is in the production and marketing of pre-packed and pre-prepared foods, and much of it is due to over-sized restaurant portions. But a lot of it just gets tossed from our refrigerators because we forgot to get around to cooking it.

Food waste argues against itself. There are no good reasons to waste food, only good excuses for why it happens. I believe that one of the primary contributors to American food waste is the loss of home life and the domestic art of cooking. Sure, people still make a couple of things here and there, and we will still make a special trip to the store to try a new recipe from the Times, but the art of daily cooking, and the practice of sitting down to eat has been disappearing from our lives since the 1980's. Cooking has become a form of social action.

That we make too much food and then throw it away or let the leftovers go bad is true, but an overlooked and important contribution to food waste is in our food preparation. More specifically, because we no longer cook from scratch or with regularity, we waste more food. Vegetable ends and peels go into the trash or compost instead of a broth. Past-fresh breads and pastries are thrown out instead of cooked into a bread pudding. Leftovers and need to be eaten now items are tossed over for takeout instead of cooked into a improvised hash. Knowing how to prepare our food, what is edible and is not, how long it can be kept, or how to freeze and preserve leftovers or seasonal batches can prevent food waste as well. Do you use the lemon zest before you slice the lemon? Do you remember to toss the squeezed lemon wedges in with the chicken to season it as it roasts?

While food preparation waste may not be the largest contributor to our overall food waste, the NRDC claims that a decrease in our food waste of even 15 percent could feed 25 million Americans annually. Small changes go a long way.

The best things you could be cooking with things you might otherwise throw away:

1. hash
2. vegetable broth
3. sweet or savory bread pudding
4. veggie and cheese spreads/tapenades
5. smoothies and juices

Recipes:

Hash is an dish with protein, veggies and some kind of starch (potatoes etc.) although you can substitute a grain like rice or quinoa.

The New York Times lists lots of simple and delicious hash recipes:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/vegetable-hash-for-an-easy-dinner/

Vegetable and meat broths can be made easily from scraps and frozen until you need them. An easy starter recipe from Frugal Living:

http://frugalliving.about.com/od/makeyourowningredients/r/Vegetable_Broth.htm

Bread puddings are easy and flexible, substitute any kind of bread and add or subtract sweet and savory ingredients.

Ina Garten's Bread Pudding:

http://www.barefootcontessa.com/recipes.aspx?CookBookID=0&RecipeID=813

Veggie and cheese spreads can be made in minutes with bits and pieces of whatever you have lying around. Alton Brown has a great beginners recipe:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/roasted-vegetable-spread-recipe/index.html

Smoothies are almost infinitely variable. Better Homes and Gardens provides a great selection of recipes:

http://www.bhg.com/recipes/drinks/anytime-drinks/smoothie-recipes/

Resources/References:

NRDC Report of Food Waste:

http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf

A Cloven Hoof

Meat.

In the last few days it has been revealed that large quantities of foodstuffs common in the European markets were labeled clearly as beef when they were, in fact, horse.  Many people have found this upsetting; especially those that have eaten it.

A few observations:

Most religions of the world place dietary restrictions on their practitioners.  Buddhism and other religions object not to the eating of meat per se, but to the needless and dis-compassionate taking of life.  Judaism and Christianity have dietary laws clearly intended as practical guides to food safety, avoiding the ingestion of blood or decomposed meats; the animal must have a cloven hoof.  The Hindus hold the cow in sacred reverence.

We form intimate working and recreational relationships with horses, not with cows.  Horses are easier to ride.  Some cows have horns.  Neither species speaks English.

It takes far more resources to fatten a cow for slaughter than it does to fatten a horse, though neither is especially more or less nutritious.  There are lots of countries, due to climate and resources, that historically have and continue to raise horses for meat.  Many of these countries are modern, and European.  Americans typically pretend they do not know this.

So.

There is neither a better reason to not eat a horse than a cow nor a better reason to eat a cow rather than a horse.  Eating animals is eating animals, at least to some extent.  Cows and horses bear a good resemblance to one another, certainly more so than a fish and a horse.  If you can eat one, you can probably eat the other.

The controversy that is unfolding this week is not about whether or not it is gross or morally and ethically reprehensible to eat horses or even horses versus cows.  This is the illumination of the modern food system.  What should really be making us feel uncomfortable about about this is how difficult it is to determine the original source of the meat.  That the food industry even in such a small geographic region as continental Europe can be so convolute so as to have obscured both the source and the end product.  The real argument no longer lies in how we eat, vegetarian versus carnivore, but in the industry that has come to feed us.

This is what we eat.  This is not happening across the world right now, its happening right here.  We just haven't shined the light.  Be impeccable with your food.  Understand where it comes from and vote with your dollar.  Buy locally, and trust small food handlers.  

To watch video of the wild horses of Oregon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30QgYVaHqQQ

To watch a truly distressing portrait of the American cattle industry:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhlhSQ5z4V4

A Walk In The Woods

saunterer.

A long weekend and the beginning of summer do a lot to remind us to go outside, breath the fresh air, listen to the birds, stretch our legs, and experience wildness. I think it’s important, amid the beer, fireworks, weenie roasts, and recreational vehicles that mark the American camping experience, to make sure that we do just that, stretch our legs and experience wildness. It’s not often anymore that the majority of us find ourselves away from the crush of noise, information, and development that comes with “civilized society”, and I think our distance from the wild plays a key role in our health and well-being, and our decision making as a people. Distancing ourselves from the wild is part of why we are able to devalue the environment, and that devaluation reveals itself in our politics, policies, and way of life. It allows us to waste resources, diminish habitat, allow entire species to go extinct, and engineer our bodies and our food.

I feel at my most engaged in the environment when walking through it. A walk in the wilderness does more to ease my mind, body, and soul than almost anything else. And it reminds me, in a tangible and profound way, that I am connected to this place, this world, this land, that it sustains me. Thoreau, in his 1862 essay, Walking, had this to say about the value of a walk in the woods, “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre" — to the holy land… They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.”

We can make no progress in the improvement of our daily lives, in the fostering of health, community, sustainability, or peace, until we acknowledge and embrace our connection to the wilderness. Take a first step, take a walk.

To read the full text of Thoreau’s Walking:
http://thoreau.eserver.org/walking.html

To Read Emerson’s Nature:
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/emerson/nature-emerson-a.html#Chapter%20I

Photo courtesy of:
http://dinabloomphoto.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/edith.jpg

Let Them Eat Cake

agroterrorism.

There are a lot of great, albeit traditionally left-winged reasons to eat locally. Eating locally supports small family owned farms and food producers, decreases the carbon footprint of your meals, discourages industrialization of farming practices and therefore the prevalence of pesticides and herbicides, supports your local economy, increases community sustainability, decreases dependence on the migrant workforce and foreign energy sources, and generally results in healthier meals and fresher/tastier food on your table. And we wonder why more conservatives haven’t hopped onto this bandwagon.

But there are a couple of reasons for eating locally that the conservative right can get behind. Eating locally is the best protection against food-related outbreaks of illness and diesease and eating locally is the best way to combat agroterrorism. That’s right, agroterrorism, the malicious use of plant or animal pathogens to cause devastating disease in the food supply.

In 2006 Michael Pollan wrote an article for the New York Times discussing the role of industrialization in the prevalence of food-related outbreaks. While his article was written in the context of a spinach-related E coli outbreak, the recent problems with the peanut industry and the worldwide outbreak of swine flu have brought the issue back into focus. In his article, Pollan argues that the centralization of food processing and distribution centers leads to more frequent and widespread issues of infection and contamination, whereas food grown, processed, and distributed locally decreases the reach of food-related outbreaks and allows for faster and more efficient identification of sources and solutions to food-based illnesses. Pollan further goes on to note that when Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.” This sentiment was reiterated by the G.AO. in its 2003 Bioterrorism report to Congress, “The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry make them vulnerable to attack.” And they’re right, in 2006 eighty percent of beef in the United States was slaughtered by four companies and seventy-five percent of all precut salads were processed by only two companies. The implications of these numbers when viewed in the context of the spread of disease and our current healthcare crisis is terrifying. And the proof, at least lately, is in the peanut butter.

What this means is that food consciousness is no longer the proprietary holding of the liberal left, but a necessary and immediate change that must be made in the daily lives of ordinary citizens for the protection of public health and safety. Take back your health from the hands of industry, eat locally, and with compassion.


To read Michael Pollans article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/magazine/15wwln_lede.html

For more information on farmers markets, eating locally, and CSA food shares:
http://www.localharvest.org/
http://100milediet.org/
http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/