Living the American Green

Fresh from the Huffington Post oven…

Top 10 Recent Developments on Factory Farming and Vegetarianism

Very briefly up for air, we are at LtAG. Three bits of ominous news for you today from the (slightly unintentional) food front.

1. Winning the Why Am I Not Surprised Award, undercover animal rights activists landed jobs at an Iowa chicken factory and released footage of male chicks being dumped, alive, into an industrial grinder. After all, who needs 200 million roosters running around? Look, if we could breed only female birds we would, but we can’t, so we’ll just keep grinding up these male birds. Crystalline logic. P.S. our eggs are 100% local!

2. A Florida man was horrified when he took a big gulp from a can of Pepsi and discovered that all kinds of foul-tasting gunk was inside. He tried to empty the can and shook it until something that looked like “pink linguini” came out, then called the FDA. The FDA’s analysis? Somehow there had been a disemboweled frog inside the closed can of Pepsi. Mmmmmm. The Choice of a New Generation.

3. And far and away my favorite story, likewise not that surprising – just when we thought health care protests couldn’t get uglier, a rally supporting Obama’s healthcare reform turned into a rumble when it encountered our dear friends on the deather fringe, some words were exchanged, some fisticuffs were exchanged, and a dude’s finger got bitten off by what we can only assume was someone who took the notion of “rabid extremism” a little literally. Yeah, uh, I hear that under Obamacare the government is going to make decisions on what fingers you get to keep. No to Body Part Rationing! Free Grandma! On the plus side, he certainly showed the government that no east-coast liberal is going to tell him to stop eating meat! We The People will eat whatever and whoever we damn well please because this is America, not the Third Reich!

First of all, full disclaimer that “locowashing” is an awful portmanteau – almost (but not quite) as bad as “he-cession.”

This cracks me up though, it really does. Thanks to the apparent trendiness of bioregional eating, the ad wizards hailing from the four corners of corporate fantasyland have decided that it would be a tremendous idea to “go local” themselves. Unfortunately – there doesn’t appear to be a crystal-clear understanding of what exactly “local” entails…

A few examples, ranging from the mildly bile-inducing to the full-on, gut-bustingly, milk-snortingly hilarious:

The one that started the attention was most likely the Frito-Lay corporation, whose marketing campaign in early 2009 gently nudged attention from the quality of the product itself to the “local people and communities” who grow their potatoes. The logic is sound, I guess, in an infuriating know-it-all 6th-grader kind of way: “Potatoes have to be grown by somebody, don’t they? And those people are growing them somewhere, aren’t they? So the potatoes are local to the place where they’re grown. Right?” My favorite feature of this ad campaign? It would have to be the “Chip Tracker” gadget that let’s you pop in a zip code and learn exactly which ”local community” has painstakingly and lovingly grown your potato chips, hopefully taking long, picturesque siestas and relaxing with big pitchers of iced tea and 2.5 children per farmhouse.  (For the record: mass produced chips are not small-batch delicacies. It’s a neat gimmick to give you the location of where potatoes are sourced, but dollars to donuts the Chip Tracker kicks out the closest farm to your zip code without telling you anything about how millions of bags of chips are actually shipped and stored around the country.)

But it’s not just Frito-Lay. Far from it. 

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Oh children. We’ve been flying by the seat of our pants around here with business, campaigning, and general tomfoolery, which I hope explains why we haven’t posted anything in a week and probably will be a bit thin on the ground for a while longer. But in a spirit of reconciling our sorry selves with you, dear reader, here are a couple news articles that one could read in any variety of ways – anything from elation to jelly-booted terror.

Fast-Food School Vicinity Ban: Prudent or Tantalizing?

So New York City councilmember Eric Gioia is trying to get a bill passed in the city that would prohibit the opening of new fast food establishments within 0.1 miles of a school. Now, granted that’s only two blocks in New York speak, which is no great preventative measure if you ask me, but there’s a bigger question at hand. I support in theory any acknowledgment by the city that fast food is a factor of childhood unhealthiness and unknown chemical imbalances later in life, and I respect the effort. But kids that want something are remarkably committed to getting it. Cigarettes, booze, energy drinks, you name it – prohibiting it may have the reverse effect of making it even more desirable than it already is. I used to babysit a kid who was incredibly lazy EXCEPT when going dramatically out of his way to acquire something his parents wouldn’t let him have. If enough noise is made out of this bill if it gets passed (and rest assured, the non-issue-obsessed e-media being what it is, noise will be made), expect to see a sharp increase in the amount of fast food consumed by rebellious high-schoolers at lunch.

So what can be done? Either try to keep kids indoors for lunch (which, I know from experience, will produce an epic shit-monsoon that no school wants to deal with), or go ahead and pass the ban and make fast food less convenient and hope to Moses, Mary, and Mohammed that they just don’t find out about it. So, I guess: shhhhhhhhh. Wait. I screwed it up already. Sigh.

This is why you're fat (double cheeseburgers with chicken nuggets for buns).

Monsanto and Your Future, or, “Really, FDA?”

Sing, Muse, of Michael Taylor! Of the Monsanto exec who at any given moment is either employed by the US government in a capacity of regulating the dangerous practices of the agribusiness industry, or (if it’s tuesday, thursday, or sunday), is in the agribusiness industry writing deregulatory proposals to be approved by the FDA. One of the architects of Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (the same one that some studies and European governments have suggested contribute to health irregularities and weirdly early puberty in milk-guzzling kids), he was also one of the FDA authorities who approved that very wonder cocktail under Clinton. 

And now! After another corporate foray, Taylor is back in the FD, back in the FD, back in the FDA. Appointed by Obama’s administration. Cool.

Now, all the environmentalist listserves that grace my email have gone into varying shades of apoplexy over this, demanding immediate censure of anything with two thumbs and a government paycheck. IF there is a silver lining or an alternative spin to this, it is that despite the long history of cronyism and impending mollycoddling of Monsanto and the other three Horseman of the Apocalypse, Taylor has in fact been pretty tough on food sanitation issues and will probably do more to crack down on such dangerous embarrassments as the peanut-contamination fracas earlier this year. I guess he’s of the “tough love” school of regulating his buddies, like the coach that wants you to succeed but isn’t afraid to make you run a few extra laps (for the record, that may be the first sports analogy I’ve ever successfully used). But if regulation of dirty agrifactories is achieved mainly by redirecting funds and manpower from the watchdogging of the special-interests science that leads to things like rBGH, as is, well, likely – then we’re no less screwed than we already were.  And I’d really like to be less screwed than we already are.

Michael Taylor. With a mustache.

Cats and kittens, we’ve got a real treat tonight. I sat down yesterday with Jared Koch, nutritionist and author of a dense gem of a book, Clean Plates NYC.

“Jared’s nutritional advice in Clean Plates has the power to transform your individual health and our collective well-being." --Deepak Chopra, M.D.

I first met Jared at New York’s monthly schmooze-fest for all breeds of vocational environmentalists, “Green Drinks,” where he was giving a brief presentation on his project. And quite a project it is: teaming up with a professional food-critic, Alex van Buren, Jared conducted a phenomenal amount of research deep into the food sourcing, cooking methods, and final products of over 300 restaurants in Manhattan – eating at over 125 of them. All with the objective of compiling a list of New York restaurants, accommodating omnivores and vegans alike, that stand out at the helm of a subcultural shift towards food that is as healthy as it is delicious, as ethically sound as it is aesthetically rich. 

After a brief rundown of the criteria by which foods and restaurants were evaluated, the meat and potatoes (so to speak) of Clean Plates NYC begins with ethos, laying out Jared’s five precepts for finding a unique manner of eating that is suited to the individual rather than to the hippest new diet.

He parses the complex relationship between genetic history, cultural background, day-to-day lifestyle, sex, and age in determining what diet may suit us best as “bio-individuals” – and it turns out that the “ideal diet” is just as in flux as we are. Nonetheless, the other precepts make it clear that the nutritional situation of virtually all of us suffers from excessive processing of foods away from their state as they come from the earth, from a gross imbalance of the plant-animal ratio in our diet, from the presence of hormones, antibiotics, and heavy metallic sterilizers in our food, and from addictions to mood-and-energy-altering substances like sugar, caffeine, and alcohol. 

And then come the reviews. And O, the reviews. The rest of the book is composed of nuanced, in-depth, high-quality reviews of the 75 top choices from Jared’s and Alex’s research. Now, I visited two of these places prior to interviewing Jared, and already I’ve had the most interesting tea I’ve ever tasted, one of the best salads I’ve ever had, the third most delicious sandwich I’ve ever had (1st place goes to the Italian ex-pats at Panino Sportivo Roma on 121st and Amsterdam, and 2nd to the sandwich ninjas at our dear City Sub on Bergen near 5th Ave in Brooklyn), and one of the best (organic!) cocktails I’ve ever had (called, no less, the “Slap & Tickle”). These restaurants are the real deal: hedonistic, atmospheric, and power-packed with nutrition. And because the book is pocket-sized, you can stick it in your pants and go on the healthiest damn glutton-crawl this side of the Sardinian countryside. Clearly, the authors are onto something here – something way, way overdue…

So I knew straight away I needed to talk to this guy. Get him to weigh in on all these tricky issues we keep carouselling around at LtAG – local vs. organic? just how much difference can we actually make on the environment with our food consumption choices? how do we get schools involved in re-rooting our agricultural system in real foods that don’t need to be shipped halfway around the world? on a scale of 1 to 100, just how elitist is arugula (okay, I didn’t ask that one)? But the rest – and much more – are answered below the fold.

So here are the steps to take. 1) Click “More” to read this exclusive interview with Mr. Jared Koch; 2) Reflect. Salivate; 3) Buy the book – you won’t regret it if you’re ever planning on being in this beautiful, busy, and surprisingly healthful city of mine.

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An Ethanol Molecule. You know... Science Stuff!

The other week, I posted a few things about Ethanol: how the lobby was holding up the Waxman Bill, etc.  As per my usual, it was one part educated conjecture, one part politics, one part research a six parts B.S. (essentially, the patented  LtAG 9 part system!)

After Mark made the fair point that numbers might be a good thing, I tried… but lets be honest — I don’t know much about “science”.  On the other hand, I know people who know things.  Some of them even know a lot of things.

One of those people, a Mr. James C, was kind enough to tell me a little ’bout Ethanol, and about why we shouldn’t let that ship sail off to the proverbial land of the elves just yet.  (Yeah, that was a LoTR reference.  So what?)

James works for a company makes enzymes for the corn ethanol industry, so he has a dog in this fight.  However, he also has “knowledge” of “science” stuff, so we have to suspect that he knows what he be talking bout.  The following is all his words, and let me tell you: they make sense.

“I have come to believe that while corn is not the ideal crop, it is the currently the only means to reduce emissions in cars on the road today. Even when we look slightly into the future, technology is still lacking. While electric cars will become more of a reality in the future, the battery technology is not here yet and they will likely be expensive when it is. Also, we have to think about where the electricity is coming from (ie, coal is worse that solar but solar costs a lot).  Funding into fuel cells has been cut by the DOE as it’s not really a feasible technology.  Algal biodiesel likely will never happen (it’d be great if it does but there are too many hurdles such as how to collect it). (Editors Note: Crap!  We were really jazzed about that!)   Finally, we can make more efficient cars, but they will still need liquid fuel likely in conjunction with electricity (hybrid electric).   (more…)

Another tidbit for today, culled from the extensive and scientifically-rigorous trolling we do of the internet for relevant news items: this highly-dugg humor article by cracked.com on 5 Ways People are Trying to Save the World (That Don’t Work). Most of the points made are pretty good, and in true cracked.com fashion, are successfully humorous because they let the air out of the tires of things we all love and take for granted. Kind of like a hip version of mythbusters that doesn’t involve a dude who looks like a persian cat. Here are the five green-crazed things that, according to Cracked, don’t work:

1) Buying carbon offsets (they compare it to buying your girlfriend a bracelet after a night in the Champagne Room)

2) Using antibacterial soap (Darwin sez…weeding out the weak bacteria and allowing the strong to flourish and pass on their resistances = major pwnage)

3) Recycling (the numbers show we aren’t actually going to suffocate ourselves in landfills or turn America into a WALL-E landscape as long as we keep making landfills deeper. Questionable, but I see where they’re going with that. A better point – often the energy expenditure and resource use of recycling far outstrips that of producing new materials…)

4) Rejecting vaccinations (seriously, why do people do this? This is kind of a straw man entry, in my opinion – no one seriously considers the conspiracy theories about vaccinations to be a legitimate environmentalist crusade.)

and 5) Buying organically grown food (because organic food isn’t healthier than non-organic food, decreases yield and therefore increases the hunger crisis, and uses more resources like water, fuel, and manure)

Wait, what? What was that last one again? (more…)

Ladies and gentlemen: step right up! Come see this marvel of the modern age! A vegetarian encouraging you – no, pleading with you – to eat venison!

I feel bad for deer. I do. They’ve got the short end of the stick at the moment. By no real fault of their own, they’re suddenly the anti-endangered species that it’s okay, even the cool thing, to want to kill. I know there’s the cute factor, which seems to be the only argument anyone ever tries to make on their behalf, but ask any ecologist and you’ll hear the whole litany of reasons that deer need to be taken down a notch.

this wolf is sad because she's locally extinct

Deer: the adorable forest menace

The backstory: we humans like livestock and pets. We do not like wolves and pumas. We kill wolves and pumas. Deer cease to have natural predators and start eating…well, everything. Deer become overpopulated and start starving to death. They eat the understory and keep entire forests from rejuvenating themselves, they attract ticks and carry lyme disease…yeah: pretty crappy to be a deer these days. 

Anyone who’s followed this blog closely over the last month (anyone? Bueller…? Bueller…?) will know that there is a mild disagreement between my humble self and our illustrious leader, the great and powerful LtAG himself – it’s a difference over the place of meat in the emergence of post-eco-disastrous American society. A difference of degree, really – there can’t be much logical dispute that as a culture we need to consume less meat – and while I personally feel that the costs of producing meat far outweigh the benefits, he’s more of the school that retains meat as the centerpiece (however diminished in scale) of the American diet. No biggie. There are fine arguments to be made either way, and I don’t sweat it too much.

But HERE’S the point, friends and family and awkwardly stalking ex-lovers: many of the most convincing reasons to avoid meat like the plague - immense wastefulness of water, energy, and arable land, unhealthy saturation with chemicals and hormones,  unsafe and polluting production conditions – go out the window when it comes to venison. Read on below…

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-Thammuzzy-

Time for a bit of housekeeping here at LtAG. We recently gained a new member on the team: an upstanding twentysomething with upstanding ecological cred (in a former life he was a tour guide at the American Museum of Natural History and wrote a college thesis on evolutionary theology – don’t ask), who is going to do his darnedest to bring some new perspectives to the table. This is probably going to involve some musing about food (a lot of musing on this topic gets done, believe you me), cooking, farming, fermenting things, the feasibility of locavory, freeganism, occasional apoplexy at the general dipshittiness of Monsanto: things along these lines.

In the interest of full disclosure, however, we have to note that this new writer, who (spoiler alert!) happens to be the writer of this post, is a vegetarian (well, lazy vegan) – thus invalidating the claim in our “About Us” page that we don’t hold truck with tofo and sprouts and other such namby-pamby secretly-socialist born-in-Indonesia freedom-hatin’ side-dishes. Today for lunch I made myself some sautéed brussel sprouts dusted with turmeric and ginger: Q.E.D.

But this raises an important question – why in fact is there such a well-worn association of environmental concern with the renunciation of tasty animals? I’ve heard it said by some of my more hardcore Veg associates that it’s a contradiction in terms to be a meat-eating environmentalist. I certainly see their point. But I would prefer to leave the jury out on that one, and I don’t go in for guilt-tripping as an effective mode of dialogue. I suppose it’s a running question of mine, asked in genuine and unselfish curiosity (as I have no real interest in going back): how can the production and consumption of animal products be made a sustainable practice?

More on this later, we promise. We’ll figure something out for y’all. Be cool, cats and kittens – we got this.