Eating Liberally Blog

Eating Liberally Blog

Farmers + Fashionistas = Sex and the Country?










Muller adds:









The Politician Who's Ready to Reclaim Our Food Chain NOW














Stringer echoed this sentiment on Saturday:


...We've got to bring food closer to home...we must establish a state of the art is time to tag enterprise zones to guarantee that the healthy food supply will come to all neighborhoods, not just the wealthy ones.










Weekend Upbraid

I've never been a connoisseur of cannibis--or any other drug, for that matter--but, seriously, Kellogg's decision to drop Michael Phelps on the grounds that his pot smoking sets a bad example is just pathetic. As role models go, Tony The Tiger may well be a far more insidious influence than Michael Phelps. After all, he's peddling a sugary breakfast cereal made from genetically modified corn and high fructose corn syrup--exactly the kind of junky processed convenience food that's helping to erode the life expectancy of our kids.

So three cheers to Seth Meyers for skewering Kellogg's on SNL's Weekend Update on Saturday. Watch the video and have a laugh. And then stop to ask yourself why Phelp's sponsors didn't get similarly worked up over his arrest for drunk driving back in 2004. As Bruce Mirkin noted over on Alternet, "if Phelps had been photographed hoisting a Budweiser, no one would have said a word." Isn't it high time we put an end to this double standard? And let's stop sugar-coating the toll that frosted flakes is taking on our youth, while we're at it.

The Bitter Taste of "Lemon Socialism": Let Them Eat Crap

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The "Chewable Pampers" commercial on Saturday Night Live last weekend was pretty hilarious, turning brown to green with an eco-friendly edible diaper that comes in three different flavors: "tangy cheddar, spicy lentil, and corn chowder." Gag me with a biodegradable bamboo spoon.

OK, so it was funny--but how farfetched, really? Thanks to our tanking economy, folks are eating crap en masse. Who knew that a pyramid scheme would generate its own food pyramid? Frank Rich took a peek at the ponzi'd-out pantry in his Sunday op-ed in the New York Times:


So, we're responding to a bankrupt economy by turning to nutritionally bankrupt foods. George Will cited this phenomenon as an example of capitalism at its finest when he was on ABC's This Week last week. As Jed L noted over on Daily Kos:

George Will argues that the rising consumption of cheap fast food during the Bush Recession shows the market works, saying the boost in quarterly profits at McDonald’s is a perfect example of "the market sorting this out."

Oh, really? Given that Agribiz is a major corporate welfare queen, the resurgence of cheap convenience foods hardly constitutes a victory for free market principles. Our schizoid USDA perpetually lectures us to eat more fruits and vegetables even as its agricultural policies ensure that fresh, wholesome, unprocessed produce will continue to be a luxury item for affluent urbanites with the means to shop at farmers markets and Whole Foods. The rest of us can eat shit, to put it bluntly.

This warped Western diet is killing us on a scale that our enemies in the Middle East can only dream of. You hear a lot about diabetes and obesity these days, but a diet deficient in nutritious foods is also a major factor in nearly half of all cancers. Our fondness for salty convenience foods also leads to high blood pressure and heart attacks, which is why New York City recently launched a campaign to persuade the food industry to lower sodium levels by 50 percent over the next decade. Such a measure could save 150,000 American lives a year, according to NYC health commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden.

In the meantime, we, the people, will continue to foot the bill for this food system that's poisoning us, just as we are paying for the bungled bailout and an unjust, unnecessary war. Did I say war? Make that wars, plural. Because, in addition to the War on Terror, we're waging the catastrophically wrongheaded War on Drugs.

Our celebrity-besotted media's too busy tarnishing Olympic swim star Michael Phelps over his golden boy-with-bong photo-op to focus on the faceless fatcats who are doing infinitely more to undermine our way of life than an athlete blowing off steam--or sucking up smoke. Does it really make fiscal--or moral--sense to persecute pot smokers and squander billions to incarcerate marijuana merchants while the robber barons of Wall Street remain free to fleece us all?

What would founding father (and hemp grower) Thomas Jefferson make of the fact that we now have more prisoners than farmers? The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the western world. What a collosal waste of human capital, as well as tax payer dollars. Why not fund a program to convert all those renegade hydroponics experts to "aquaponics," the brilliant marriage of fish farming and greens growing perfected by MacArthur genius Will Allen at Milwaukee's Growing Power?

But wingnuts would rather invest in misguided, unwinnable wars than fund frivolous things like health care, education and infrastructure. You know, porky kinda stuff like healthy school lunches for our kids, say, or high speed rail, or rebates on renewable energy. Anyone remember Dubya dissing Al Gore's proposed tax credit for solar panels in the 2000 presidential debates? He could barely conceal his disdain, spitting out the word "pho-to-vol-taic" with the same scorn that "real Americans" Sarah Palin and Rudy Guiliani heaped on community organizers in our last election.

Barney Frank called out Senator Jim DeMint and his Republican colleagues on their demented priorities last Sunday on This Week when DeMint started carping about how President Obama's stimulus plan relied too heavily on spending--as opposed to those conservative cure-alls, tax cuts and a blank check for the military-industrial complex:

...And I don’t understand why, from some of my conservative friends, building a road, building a school, helping somebody get health care-- that’s wasteful spending, but that war in Iraq, which is going to cost us over $1 trillion before we’re through -- yes, I wish we hadn’t have done that. We’d have been in a lot better shape fiscally...

...That’s the problem. The problem is that we look at spending and say, “Oh, don’t spend on highways. Don’t spend on health care. But let’s build Cold War weapons to defeat the Soviet Union when we don’t need them. Let’s have hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars going to the military without a check.”

What we have here isn't really capitalism at all; it's what Paul Krugman aptly titles "lemon socialism," a form of government in which corporations and their CEOs make out like bandits on the basis of corrupt business practices while the rest of us pick up the tab for their toxic mortgages and toxic food.

Our bridges and roads are crumbling, our students are stumbling, our Wall Street wizards and the Beltway brigade are fumbling. But it's scary muslims and scummy socialists who purportedly pose the greatest threat to America, according to Rush Limbaugh, that "corpulent oxycontin aficionado" and climate change naysayer who is famously praying for our new president to fail.

In fact, it's our dependence on fast food and fossil fuels--aided and abetted by the idiotic ideology of Limbaugh and his ilk--that truly jeopardizes America's future.

FDA=Failure to Do Anything

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"Food scares have become as common as Midwestern tornadoes," the New York Times notes in yet another article about the salmonella-tainted peanut butter scandal, which has been competing in recent days with the mercury-tainted high fructose corn syrup scandal, which may have distracted you from the bisphenol A-in-our-bodies scandal, which may soon be surpassed by the phthalates-in-our-bodies scandal...oh, nevermind.

Our chronically overworked and underfunded FDA hasn't got the means--or the inclination--to protect consumers from the monstrous machinations of that tri-headed hydra, Big Ag/Big Food/Big Pharma. As the New York Times recently reported, the FDA routinely ignores its own rules regarding the "financial conflicts of doctors who conduct clinical trials of drugs and medical devices in human subjects," because "collecting and checking this information before the trials was not worth the effort for either the companies or the agency."

Not worth the effort. Just as it evidently was not worth the effort to act on the mercury in HFCS, or to follow up after learning all the way back in April that Peanut Corp. of America was attempting to ship contaminated peanuts (hat tip to Bill Marler.) Oh, and what about the even more toxic methylmercury that our coal-fired power plants spew, which also finds its way into our food chain via fish, among other sources? "Clean coal" may or may not be an oxymoron, but in any case, it doesn't exist yet; in the meantime, as Treehugger notes, coal-fired power plants "are the largest industrial source of mercury pollution in the country."

We are being systematically poisoned thanks to a profound apathy--or, more accurately, hostility--towards regulation and oversight that extends well beyond the FDA. Robyn O'Brien, a food activist who will soon be to Monsanto what Erin Brockovich was to PG & E when Random House publishes her book The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making us Sick -- And What We Can Do About It in May, noted the parallels between our current financial meltdown and our endless food safety fiascos in her HuffPo post, Duped: A Nation of Eaters.

But the collusion between Wall Street, K Street and our governmental agencies doesn't end with the FDA or the SEC. Don't forget the EPA, which has repeatedly failed to protect us as well--most recently, and drastically, in the case of the Tennessee coal fly ash catastrophe. The EPA doesn't even bother to regulate coal ash as a hazardous substance, despite plenty of evidence that it contains significant amounts of toxins. In fact, the EPA even allowed fly ash to be used to contour a golf course in Virginia, with predictable results, according to the New York Times:

In Chesapeake, Va., high levels of lead, arsenic and other contaminants were found last year in the groundwater beneath a golf course sculptured with 1.5 million tons of fly ash, the same type of coal ash involved in the Tennessee spill. The golf course opened in 2007.

The Bush administration presided over--and fostered--the wholesale abdication on the part of these agencies of their duty to protect us. President Obama is promising to "re-regulate" Wall Street, and, as the New York Times reports, vowed that "when I am president, it will not be business as usual when it comes to food safety. I will provide additional resources to hire more federal food inspectors.” He's also restoring science to its rightful place at the EPA after 8 years of the agency's being hijacked by climate change deniers and creationists.

Here's hoping that under Obama, the FDA will stand for Finally Daring to Act. Because I'm sick of writing about all these food scares, just as you all are sick of reading about them.

How Obama Cheats on Eats at Meet 'n' Greets

Given that a politician's life is an endless series of food-filled photo-ops and dinners with dignitaries, how on earth does our newly minted president stay so slender? The Washington Post's Kim O'Donnel discussed this phenomenon the other day in a terrific interview with Eddie Gehman Kohan, founder of the superb Obama Foodorama. As Kohan observed:

...the fact that he's a slim fellow who is perpetually photographed eating, and that he holds many meetings over meals, speaks to the secret fantasy that's promoted by the billion-dollar US diet industry: You *can* eat a lot, and still stay slender. That's a false assumption, but very compelling.

Well, thanks to a report on last Friday's ABC World News, we now know that Obama's secret weapon in the war on love handles is Reggie Love, an aide who follows Obama everywhere and shields him from incoming pastries and other snack attacks:

Love watches Obama's back -- and his waistline. He frequently intercepted brownies from the president while on the campaign trail.

Watch the video above to see Obama surreptitiously pass a fat bomb off to Love when no one's looking. Here's to having a president who won't pack on the pounds--or his cabinet--with Brownies, be they home-baked, or half-baked.

Let's Ask Marion: What's Your Take On The Salmonella Outbreak?


Kat: It's like deja "ew" all over again. As the salmonella-tainted peanut butter outbreak continues to spread (no pun intended), more than 125 products have been recalled, and the list grows longer everyday, including everything from dog biscuits to ice cream to energy bars. Hundreds of people have been sickened and at least six people are suspected to have died from this latest lapse in our fractured food chain.

We now know that the source of the salmonella is peanut paste from a processing plant in Georgia, owned by Peanut Corp. of America. You linked to a helpful Scientific American article the other day which explains that the contamination most likely occurred after the peanuts were roasted, since salmonella can't survive high temperatures. This would seem to implicate the factory. But the company, which sources its peanuts from both domestic and foreign farmers, buys some that are already roasted, according to the LA Times.

As the Scientific American article notes, the most likely source of salmonella is animal feces. Inspectors investigating the outbreak at the Georgia plant found a second strain of salmonella on the premises in addition to the one implicated in the illnesses. This is not reassuring. Scientific American reports that "there are some 40,000 cases of salmonella infection each year; about 600 of them are fatal." Is it too much to ask that our foods not come in to contact with bird droppings or rodent excrement or whatever other forms of fecal matter seem to be floating around in our food processing factories?

Dr. Nestle: No, it is not too much to ask. It’s not rocket science to produce safe food. All it takes is a food safety plan, one that is planned intelligently, followed diligently, and monitored carefully. Pillsbury designed a prototype for NASA to make sure that astronauts did not get food poisoning in outer space (upset stomachs and diarrhea under conditions of zero gravity? I don’t think so). They called the prototype HACCP, standing for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point with Pathogen Reduction, a mouthful.

It’s too bad that the name is so off-putting. All it means is that you look for places where contamination can occur in the production process, take steps to prevent that from happening, check to make sure the steps were followed, and test to make sure they system is working the way it is supposed to. If it works in outer space, which it definitely does, it ought to work on earth, no?

So my first take on the peanut butter situation is that the company either wasn’t following a HACCP plan, or its plan was deeply flawed, or nobody was checking. Any of these is inexcusable. What is so distressing about this situation is that it is a dead-on repeat of the pet foods recalls of 2007. I thought they were such a warning of what would happen if we didn’t fix our food safety system, that I wrote Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine to make that point.

The same thing happened with peanut butter: one company makes a generic product (or uses generic ingredients) that get shipped out and sold under dozens of brand names. The company is vague about where its ingredients come from and doesn’t always know where they go. The result is sick cats, dogs, or people in practically every state with maybe a few other countries tossed in.

And then melamine, the toxin in pet food, turned up in Chinese infant formula and made nearly 300,000 Chinese babies sick. This week, the Chinese courts dealt with two of the managers of the company that produced the melamine-tainted infant formula. It sentenced them to death. The Chinese government is taking food safety seriously.

We tend to be more casual about food safety problems, which is why we do not have a food safety system that covers all foods from farm to table. We have had plenty of warning that we need a more comprehensive system: spinach in 2006, pet food in 2007, tomatoes or peppers in 2008, and now peanut butter. How many people will it take to get sick or die before Congress requires HACCP for all foods? I just want Congress to do something about this before even more harm is done.

In the meantime, commercial jars of peanut butter are supposed to be OK, but one member of Congress (Rosa deLauro, Dem-CT) is asking the FDA to do a complete recall of all peanut butter until it can be shown to be safe. Oh well, you can always grind your own.

Slow Food For Fast People, An Interview With Amanda West

Guest Blogger Eve Fox of Garden of Eating kindly shared her interview with healthy fast food pioneer Amanda West:

Fast food is the ultimate American invention--quick, cheap meals for people on the go. But we pay a heavy price for our national addiction--an epidemic of obesity, the destruction of our fragile environment, and the loss of community ties that could be maintained by taking the time to prepare and eat food together.

Despite these negatives, the need for quick, affordable food is undeniable in today's world. But why on earth are McDonalds and its competitors our only options? Every single time I get hungry on the road, in an airport, or at a shopping mall I wish that someone would hurry up and open a healthy fast food restaurant!

Turns out the wait is finally over--Amanda's Feel Good Fresh Food restaurant opened its doors for business in Berkeley at the end of July 2008.

Amanda's Sign

The restaurant happens to be located right downstairs from my office so I was among the first to check it out (you may remember seeing my review this summer.) I'm happy to report that Amanda's is pretty much exactly what I'd been wishing for--the food is healthy (they have the nutrition guidelines to prove it, too), tasty, and affordable (a cheeseburger made with naturally raised beef and organic cheese is $4.50, baked sweet potato fries are $1.50, and a freshly made agave-sweetened soda is $1.75.)

Amanda's also goes out of its way to reduce its impact on the environment. For example, they don't sell bottled water since it creates too much landfill waste and takes a lot of petroleum to transport. Everything served in the restaurant is also fully compostable so any "trash" left over at the end of your meal can be deposited in one of the restaurant's green bins that feed directly into Amanda!Berkeley's city composting program where it will become rich soil for local farms and city landscaping projects in a matter of months. The restaurant also tries to foster a sense of community with a series of events in the restaurant and around the neighborhood. The future of fast food has never looked so green, nor so healthy!

Amanda is often behind the counter in the restaurant, filling orders alongside her team (the handwritten "Amanda" on her wooden nametag was the only thing that tipped me off.) I was curious to know more about how she'd gone about making her idea a reality and what her plans were for the future of the restaurant, so I introduced myself. She was kind enough to meet with me and answer my questions late last week.

Can U Dig It?

Finally--a president who dares to demand better of us. From our new president's inaugural speech today:



This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

As the righteous Reverend Billy would say, "Change-a-lujah!"

Blaze A "Sun Food" Trail To The Inauguration

Electric cars and high speed rail top the wish lists of many a progressive, but for now, those lucky few who'll be hitting the road this weekend to head to DC for the inauguration must still rely on our tired old trinity of transit: trains, planes, and automobiles.

Drivers will be making pit stops all along the way to fuel up on petroleum-based products--oh, and also to get some gas. The pit stops I'm talking about are those roadside eateries where plates are piled high with a corn-ucopia of commodity crop-based crap: grain-fed factory farmed flesh deep fried in genetically modified soybean oil, with a side of fries. Top it off with a quart of high fructose corn syrup-sweetened soda and drink a toast to Big Ag!

Sure, gas is the only game in town to keep your engine running, but when it comes to recharging your own batteries, you can switch to solar power right now. How? By getting your calories from local, sustainably produced, predominantly plant-based foods instead of the meat-mad-schlepped-from-god-knows-where-fossil-fueled-fare served up at your standard diner.

Oh, yeah, like finding fresh-from-the-farm food on the road is so easy? Well, actually, it's a whole lot easier than it used to be, thanks to an online resource called the Eat Well Guide. Whether you're heading out from the heartland--or the bi-coastal "arugula belt"--the EWG's interactive mapping tool, Eat Well Everywhere, lets you print out your own ready-to-roll, customized "eat-inerary" with directions to the shops, co-ops, restaurants, farmers markets and even B & B's along your route that feature locally grown fruits, veggies, pastured animal products and all the other good stuff you can't find at conventional roadside restaurants.

The election may be over, but we still get to vote three times a day for a more humane and sustainable food chain. So all you progressive foodies who are flocking to DC to give Obama an earful on Vilsack and victory gardens, put your money where your mouth is-- fuel up on foods brought to you through the miracle of photosynthesis, and save the fossil fuels for your gas tank.