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  • Is “Organic” any better?

    As I continue through The Omnivore’s Dilemma, there is just so much that I want to write about! I am working through the chapter on “Big Organic” right now, and I quickly realized that I’d have to break this into several blog entries. There’s just too much to say.

    So, let me start with the first half of the chapter. It has given me a LOT of new books to add to my TBR list 😉

    The last chapter, which I didn’t write about, covers a really interesting farm philosophy where the grass is nourished since it is what feeds all of the rest of the crops. It is really good stuff. The farmer that he follows, Joel Salatin has a “revolutionary” farm that is actually sustainable. The crops feed the animals, the animals feed the crops with their waste, and it works as a system, not just in parts.

    Pollan starts chapter nine with a visit to Whole Foods, where he browses the aisles and imagines life on an organic farm: roaming cows, family farms, simpler times…. Not really. He explains how they fared against journalistic scrutiny

    I learned, for example, that some (certainly not all) organic milk comes from factory farms, where thousands of Holsteins that never encounter a blade of grass spend their days confined to a fenced “dry lot,” eating (certified organic) grain and tethered to milking machines three times a day. The reason much of this milk is ultrapasteurized (a high-heat process that damages its nutritional quality) is so that big companies like Horizon and Aurora can sell it over long distances. I discovered organic beef being raised in “organic feedlots” and organic high-fructose corn syrup–more words I never expected to see combined…

    I visited Rosie the organic chicken at her farm in Petaluma, which turns out to be more animal factory than farm. She lives in a shed with
    twenty thousand other Rosies, who, aside from their certified organic feed, live lives little different from that of any other industrial chicken. Ah, but what about the “free-range” lifestyle promised on the label? True, there’s a little door in the shed leading out to a narrow grassy yard. But the free-range story seems a bit of a stretch when you discover that the door remains firmly shut until the birds are at least five or six weeks old–for fear they’ll catch something outside–and the chickens are slaughtered only two weeks later.

    And yet people think that just because they are at Whole Foods, they are eating from a beautiful, sustainable farm. That’s just not the case. Whole Foods will try to convince you otherwise.

    Lining the walls above the sumptuously stocked produce section in my Whole Foods are full-color photographs of local organic farmers accompanied by text blocks setting forth their farming philosophies. A handful of these farm–Capay is one example–still sell their produce to Whole Foods, but most are long gone from the produce bins, if not yet the walls. That’s because Whole Foods in recent years has adopted the grocery industry’s standard regional distribution system, which makes supporting small farms impractical. Tremendous warehouses buy produce for dozens of stores at a time, which forces them to deal exclusively with tremendous farms. So while the posters still depict family farmers and their philosophies, the produce on sale below them comes primarily from the two big corporate organic growers in California, Earthbound Farm and Grimmway Farms, which together dominate the market for organic fresh produce in America. (Earthbound alone grows 80 percent of the organic lettuce sold in America.)

    CSAs, people. You need to get your produce from CSAs!

    Pollan then goes on the Cascadian Farms property with its founder, Gene Kahn. Kahn is now a vice-president at General Mills, which owns Cascadian Farms. Kahn pushed for synthetic ingredients and was on the panel that decided what was allowed in organic foods. The standards went the way of “Big Organic”, and factory farms, cows without pastures, and synthetic chemicals were all allowed.

    The same might be said for the biggest organic meat and dairy producers, who fought to make the new standards safe for the organic factory farm. Horizon Organic’s Mark Retzloff labored mightily to preserve the ability of his company–which is the Microsoft of organic milk, controlling more than half of the market–to operate its large-scale industrial dairy in southern Idaho. Here in the western desert, where precious little grass can grow, the company was milking several thousand cows that, rather than graze on pasture (as most consumers presume their organic cows are doing), spend their days milling around a dry lot–a grassless fenced enclosure. It’s doubtful a dairy could pasture that many cows even if it wanted to–you would need at least an acre of grass per animal and more hours than there are in a day to move that many cows all the way out to their distant acre and then back again to the milking parlor every morning and evening. So instead, as in the typical industrial dairy, these organic cows stood around eating grain and silage when they weren’t being milked three times a day. Their organic feed was shipped in from all over the west, and their waste accumulated in manure ponds. Retzloff argued that keeping cows in confinement meant that his farmhands, who all carried stethoscopes, could keep a closer eye on their health. Of course, cows need this sort of surveillance only when they’re living in such close quarters–and can’t be given antibiotics.

    I’m pretty sure we’ve all drank Horizon Organic’s milk, so I find this super fascinating. If you go to a mainstream store and want organic milk, this is probably the only brand you’ll see. It doesn’t sound like its worth the extra 2 bucks, does it?

    So what about farms?

    When I think about organic farming, I think family farm, I think small scale, I think hedgerows and compost piles and battered pickups–the old agrarian idea (which in fact has never had much purchase in California).  I don’t think migrant labor crews, combines the sizes of houses, mobile lettuce-packing factories marching across fields of romain, twenty-thousand-broiler-chicken houses, or hundreds of acres of corn or broccoli or lettuce reaching clear to the horizon.

    So is there anything wrong with that?  Kahn (the founder of Cascadian Farms) says absolutely not.  He says it is the only way for organic to survive.  But is organic really different?

    In many respects the same factory model is at work in both fields, but for every chemical input used in the farm’s conventional fields, a more benign organic input has been substituted in the organic ones.  So in place of petrochemical fertilizers, Greenway’s organic acres are nourished by compost made by the ton at a horse farm nearby, and by poultry manure.  Instead of toxic pesticides, inspects are controlled by spraying-approved organic agents (most of them derived from plants)… and by introducing beneficial insects like lacewings.  Inputs and outputs: a much greener machine, but a machine nevertheless.

    Hey, its better…

    Perhaps the greatest challenge to farming organically on an industrial scale is controlling weeds without the use of chemical herbicides.  Greenway tackles its weeds with frequent and carefully timed tilling.  Even before the crops are planted, the fields are irrigated to germinate the weed seeds present in the soil; a tractor then tills the field to kill them, the first of several passes it will make over the course of the growing season.  When the crops stand too high to drive a tractor over, farm workers wielding propane torches will spot kill the biggest weeds by hand…  But this approach, which I discovered is typical of large-scale organic operations, represents a compromise at best.  The heavy tillage–heavier than in a conventional field–destroys the tilth of the soil and reduces its biological activity as surely as chemicals would; frequent tilling also releases so much nitrogen into the air that these weed-free organic fields require a lot more nitrogen fertilizer than they otherwise might.  In a less disturbed, healthier soil, nitrogen-fixing bacteria would create much of the fertility that industrial organic growers must add in the form of compost, manures, fish emulsion, or Chilean nitrate–all inputs permitted under federal rules…  Not surprisingly the manufacturers of these inputs lobbied hard to shape the federal organic rules; in the end it proved easier to agree on a simple list of approved and prohibited materials rather than to try to legislate a genuinely more ecological model of farming.

    So again we are messing with the system in order to get quantity over quality.  The same problem keeps resurfacing.  Pollan talks about how smaller-scale farms are able to farm in a sustainable say, but the WalMarts of the world don’t want to buy from them, because they can’t offer a one-stop-shop for all of the WalMarts in the world.  Instead, they could only supply a small amount of many different kinds of crops, and the big names don’t want that.

    So now he moves on to one of the farms owned by Earthbound Farm.  I have seen their story on TV before.  They started out as twenty-somethings who rented some land and made their own lettuce and raspberries.  Local chefs bought their baby greens.  They figured out a way to keep them fresher longer, and soon they were selling to huge stores, like Costco.   Costco didn’t want the “organic” label because people associated organic with being high-cost and low-quality, so they dropped the name organic, even though they still used the standards.  Today, Earthbound still plants trees to offset their fossil fuel consumption, and they use biodiesel on the farm.  They are at least better than Cascadian…
    Pollan goes on to describe what the new, much larger, Earthbound Farm looks like as it operates.

    Earthbound’s own employees (who receive generous benefits by Valley standards, including health insurance and retirement) operate the baby greens harvester, but on the far side of the field I saw a contract crew of Mexicans, mostly women, slowly moving through the rows pulling weeds.  I noticed some of the workers had blue Band-Aids on their fingers.  The Band-Aids are colored so inspectors at the plant can easily pick them out of the greens; each Band-Aid also contains a metal filament so that the metal detector through which every Earthbound leaf passes will pick it up before it wind’s up in the customer’s salad.

    For anyone who isn’t on GCM or didn’t read it, this reminded me of the story of the bullet in the Earthbound salad.  Man, that was nasty.  Read it for laughs and quivers.  OK, moving on…

    He then talks about the machines, washers, and processing (chlorine wash, anyone?) that the lettuce has to endure.  You get the idea  ;)  Read the book for the details.  The point is that it is trucked and processed so much, that the energy used is still hardly better than conventionally grown foods.  Its not so natural.  On to talk about the chicken.  We now try to find “Rosie”, the chicken at Petaluma Poultry that he bought at Whole Foods.  Petaluma is hardly an enviro-friendly company though.

    When its founder, Allen Shainsky, recognized the threat from integrated national chicken processors like Tyson and Purdue, he decided that the only way to stay in business was through niche marketing.  So he started processing, on different days of the week, chickens for the kosher, Asian, natural, and organic markets.  Each required a slightly different protocol: to process a kosher bird you needed a rabbi on hand, foe example; for an Asian bird you left the head and feet on; for the natural market you sold the same bird minus head and feet, but played up the fact that Rocky, as this product was called, received no antibiotics or animal by-products in its feed, and you provide a little exercise yard outside the shed so Rocky could, at his option, range free.  And to call a bird organic, you followed the natural protocol except that you also fed it certified organic feed (corn and soy grown without pesticides and chemical fertilizer) and you processed the bird slightly younger and smaller, so it wouldn’t seem quite so expensive.  Philosophy didn’t really enter into it.

    Crap!  I’ve bought Rocky and Rosie!  I’m such a schmuck.

    Rosie the organic chicken’s life is little different from that of her kosher and Asian cousins, all of whom are conventional Cornish Corss broilers processed according to state-of-the-art practice.  The Cornish Cross represents the pinnacle of industrial chicken breeding.  It is the most efficient converter of corn into breast meat ever designed, though this efficiency comes at a high physiological price: The birds grow so rapidly (reaching oven-roaster proportions in seven weeks) that their poor legs cannot keep pace, and frequently fail.

    That’s just lovely.  I’m feeding my kids a seven week old who can’t even stand on her own weight.  Maybe we should all be vegetarian.  Even if I don’t eat it, I’m putting money in Petaluma’s pocket.

    After a tour of the fully automated processing facility, which can translate a chicken from a clucking, feathered bird to a shrink-wrapped pack of parts inside of ten minutes, the head of marketing drove me out to meet Rosie–preprocessing.  The chicken houses don’t resemble a farm so much as a military barracks: a dozen long, low-slung sheds with giant fans at either end.  I donned what looked like a hooded white hazmat suit–since the birds receive no antibiotics yet live in close confinement, the company is ever worried about infection, which could doom a whole house overnight–and stepped inside.  Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one…  Twenty thousand is a lot of chickens, and they formed a gently undulating white carpet that stretched nearly the length of a football field.  After they adjusted to our presence, the birds resumed sipping from waterers suspended from the ceiling, nibbled organic food from elevated trays connect by tubes to a silo outside, and did pretty much everything chickens do except step outside the little doors located at either end of the shed.

    Ah, “free range”.  I’m feeling great for supporting this industry.

    Compared to conventional chickens, I was told, these organic birds have it pretty good: They get a few more square inches of living space per bird (though it was hard to see how they could be packed together much more tightly), and because there were no hormones or antibiotics in their feed to accelerate growth, they get to live a few days longer.  Though under the circumstances it’s not clear that a longer life is necessarily a boon.

    Running along the entire length of the shed was a grassy yard maybe fifteen feet wide, not nearly big enough to accommodate all twenty thousand birds inside should the group ever decide to take the air en masse.  Which, truth be told, is the last thing the farmers want to see happen, since the defenseless, crowded, and genetically identical birds are exquisitely vulnerable to infection….  But the federal rules say an organic chicken should have “access to the outdoors” and Supermarket Pastoral imagines it, so Petalum Poultry provides the doors and the yard and everyone keeps their fingers crossed.

    It would appear Petaluma’s farm managers have nothing to worry about.  Since the food and water and flock remain inside the shed, and since the little doors remain shut until the birds are at least five weeks old and well settled in their habits, the chickens apparently see no reason to venture out into what must seem to them an unfamiliar and terrifying world.  Since the birds are slaughtered at seven weeks, free range turns out to be not so much a lifestyle for these chickens as a two-week vacation option.

    Remind me again why it would be worth it to pay $8/lb for organic free-range chicken breasts when they never leave their coop?  That clicking sound is the sound of my brain re-figuring why I feed my kids chickens that aren’t local.

    The chapter wraps up with a discussion of the fact that two companies pretty much control all of the organic produce available.  Its not all negative though.  The fact is that if you are buying organic, you are generally getting a healthier product.  He goes on to state all of the studies that have proven that they really are better

    What I could prove, with the help of a mass spectrometer, is that it contained little or no pesticide residue–the traces of the carcinogens, neurotoxins, and endocrine disruptors now routinely found in conventional produce and meet… I very much like the fact that the milk in the ice cream I served came from cows that did not receive injections of growth hormone to boost their productivity, or that the corn those cows are fed, like the corn that feeds Rosie, contains no residues of atrazine, the herbicide commonly sprayed on American cornfields.  Exposure to vanishingly small amounts (0.1 part per billion) of this herbicide has been shows to turn normal male frogs into hermaphrodites.  Frogs are not boys, of course.  So I can wait for that science to be done, or for our government to ban atrazine (as European governments have done), or I can act now on the presumption that food from which this chemical is absent is better for my son’s health than food that contains it.

    Uh, yeah.  I’ll pass on the stuff that turns boys into hermaphrodites.  I’m not really up for dealing with that right now.

    Organic food also contains more polyphenols and vitamins than conventionally grown foods, even if they are grown right next to each other.  This goes a long way towards explaining why highly processed conventional foods still don’t make you feel as good as organic whole foods can.  It seems that the reason they are healthier and tastier is because they have to grow stronger cells since they don’t have fertilizers and pesticides doing the work for them, so they grow better.  This cell strength translates to better taste and nutrients.

    The earth is better off without the chemicals as well.  Of course, that can easily be negated if we are buying food that comes from a far-off land so that we can enjoy it off-season.  By the time it is flown, trucked, and packed at Whole Foods, it is no better for the environment, and it generally tastes pretty crappy too.  There’s a reason why certain foods grow in certain seasons.

    Again, I am feeling very pleased with my decision to use local farms.  The more I think about it, the more that I am seeing benefits beyond supporting your community.  You are also doing more for your health and the land.  Its good stuff.

    There was a whole ‘nother section about fertilizers that I’d LOVE to write about, but for now we’ll call it quits.

  • The corn-fed American steer

    Wow, I am 5 chapters into The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and it is a great read. I would like to point out that this author is NOT a vegetarian, and even admits that he will probably go back to eating feedlot meat once the memories start to fade. I think that makes this book even more interesting. I did not write this entry to try to convince everyone to become vegetarian, but just to do your part when it comes to supporting grass-fed cattle ranches as opposed to the large factory farms.

    After Mr. Pollan addresses some seriously fascinating stories about corn (who knew?!), he goes on to the next part of the food chain: the feedlot cattle. About 60% of the corn produced in this country goes to feedlots, so this is the next logical step. Although cows are not naturally corn-eaters, feedlot cattle have been forced into this way of life.

    Economically, it is nearly impossible for a family farm to compete with feedlots. A big part of the reason is because feedlots (and everyone, thanks to government subsidies) get corn for less than it costs the farmers to produce. Even if farmers wanted to feed cattle corn, it would cost them more to feed their own corn to cattle than it would to buy corn for them.

    Pollan decides to buy a steer and follow its life through the cycle. He gives its history. Steer 534 (the one he bought) was the product of a $15 mail-order straw of semen and a mother cow named “9534” since she was the 34th cow born in 1995 at her ranch. None of her male offspring are around long enough to be named individually, so they are all called 534.

    Born on March 13, 2001, in the birthing shed across the road, 534 and his mother were turned out on pasture just as soon as the eighty-pound calf stood up and began nursing. Within a few weeks the calf began supplementing his mother’s milk by nibbling on a salad bar of mostly native grasses…

    It sounds pretty good. I’d say that’s a pretty good mental picture.

    Pollan then goes on to discuss the way that cows and pastures have a perfect relationship. The cows eat the grass, but also keep trees and bushes from growing and crowding out the grass. The manure fertilizes it, and as long as there is a proper amount of pasture rotation, life is good. Cows are made just for grass

    …cows …have evolved the special ability to convert grass-which single-stomached creatures like us can’t digest– into high-quality protein. They can do this because they possess what is surely the most highly evolved digestive organ in nature: the rumen. About the size of a medicine ball, the organ is essentially a forty-five gallon fermentation tank in which a resident population of bacteria dines on grass.

    Its perfect and it works for the cow, the grass, and even the bacteria 🙂 The whole chain is solar-powered and transforms sunlight into protein. You really can’t beat that.

    So then why is it that steer number 534 hasn’t tasted a blade of prairie grass since last October? Speed, in a word, or, in the industry’s preferred term, “efficiency.” Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and for half a century now the industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef animal’s allotted span on earth. “In my grandfather’s time, cows were four or five years old at slaughter,” Rich explained. “In the fifties, when my father was ranching, it was two or three years old. Now we get there at fourteen to sixteen months.” Fast food, indeed. What gets a steer from 80 to 1,100 pounds in fourteen months are tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs.

    Fourteen months. That is crazy. That is so young. It is this age difference that has enabled Americans to go from eating beef as a luxury item to eating it as everyday fare.

    In October, two weeks before I made his acquaintance, steer number 534 was weaned from his mother. Weaning is perhaps the most traumatic time on a ranch for animals and ranchers alike; cows separated from their calves will mope and bellow for days, and the calves, stressed by the changes in circumstance and diet, are prone to getting sick.

    I think every nursing mother can cringe at this. Yes, they are “only” animals, but obviously they aren’t bellowing and moaning just out of instinct. They are truly upset. Even their immune systems respond to this stress.

    So next the calves go into a “backgrounding” pen, where they are, for the first time in their lives, confined to a pen, “bunk broken”–taught to eat from a trough–and where they learn to eat a new and unnatural diet: corn.

    Pollan goes on to describe the sight and smell of a feedlot. Let’s just say it smells like poop and operates much like a big city in the dark ages. You can always read the book for more details 😉 I don’t want to give away all of the good stuff, haha. Anyways, so back to the corn…

    We’ve come to think of “corn-fed” as some kind of old-fashioned virtue, which it may well be when you’re referring to Midwestern children, but feeding large quantities of corn to cows for the greater part of their lives is a practice neither particularly old nor virtuous. Its chief advantage is that cows fed corn… get fat quickly; their flesh also marbles well, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have come to like. Yet this corn-fed meat is demonstrably less healthy for us, since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed grass. A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef. (Modern-day hunter-gatherers who subsist on wild meat don’t have our rates of heart disease.) In the same way ruminants are ill adapted to eating corn, humans in turn may be poorly adapted to eating ruminants that eat corn.

    Seriously, if you eat meat, then that should be enough to convince you to buy grass-fed cattle, even if you don’t care about their living conditions or quality of life.

    The economic logic behind corn is unassailable, and on a factory farm there is no other kind. Calories are calories, and corn is the cheapest, most convenient source of calories on the market. Of course, it was the same industrial logic–protein is protein–that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as mad cow disease. Rendered bovine meat and bonemeal represented the cheapest, most convenient way of satisfying a cow’s protein requirement (never mind these animals were herbivores by evolution) and so appeared on the daily menus… until the FDA banned the practice in 1997.

    So you might think that now cows aren’t fed cows, but you’d be wrong.

    The FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat; my steer will probably dine on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he’s heading to in June. (“Fat is fat,” the feedlot manager shrugged, when I raised an eyebrow.) …The rules still permit feedlots to feed nonruminant animal protein to ruminants. Feather meal and chicken litter (that is, bedding, feces, and discarded bits of feed) are accepted cattle feeds, as are chicken, fish, and pig meal. Some public health experts worry that since the bovine meat and bonemeal that cows used to eat is now being feed to chickens, pigs, and fish, infetious prions could fine their way back into cattle when they’re fed the protein of animals that have been eating them.

    Seriously yucky.

    Compared to all the other things we feed cattle these days, corn seems positively wholesome. And yet it too violates the biological …logic of bovine digestion. …Bloat is perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn. The fermentation in the rumen produces copious amounts of gas, which is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime forms in the rumen that can trap the gas. The rumen inflates like a balloon until it presses against the animal’s lungs. Unless action is taken promptly to relieve the pressure (usually by forcing a hose down the animal’s esophagus), the animal suffocates.

    A concentrated diet of corn can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike our own highly acid stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen cow is neutral. Corn renders it acidic, causing a kind of bovine heartburn that in some cases can kill the animal, but usually just makes him sick. Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant, and salivate excessively, paw and scratch their bellies, and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, rumenitis, liver disease, and a general weakening of the immune system that leaves the animal vulnerable to the full panoply of feedlot diseases— pneumonia, coccidiosis, enterotoxemia, feedlot polio.

    Mmm, makes me hungry 😛

    Cattle rarely live on feedlot diets for more than 150 days, which might be about as much as their systems can tolerate. “I don’t know how long you could feed them this ration before you’d see problems,” Dr. Metzin said; another vet told me the diet would eventually “blow out their livers” and kill them. Over time the acids eat away at the rumen wall, allowing bacteria to enter the animal’s bloodstream. These microbes wind up in the liver, where they form abscesses and impair the liver’s function. Between 15 percent and 30 percent of feedlot cows are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers; Dr. Mel told me that in some pens the figure runs as high as 70 percent.

    And yet since corn is so cheap, it is used. We demand cheap meat, and by buying cheap meat, we encourage this treatment of animals.

    In order to keep the animals alive, they are given antibiotics, and a lot of them. These antibiotics are now becoming ineffective in humans and animals as the bacteria become more resistant to them. That means we have to take more powerful antibiotics, all because animals must be given them in order to boost their immune systems which are only weakened because we insist on feeding them corn.

    So 534 was not at the feedlot and not looking his best. His eyes were bloodshot from the dust of the feces that lines the pens. 534 slept on manure that is full of bacteria.

    The bacteria… can find their way from the manure on the ground into his hide and from their into our hamburgers… The speed at which these animals will be slaughtered and processed–four hundred an hour at the plant where 534 will go–means that sooner or later some of the manure caked on these hides gets into the meat we eat. One of the bacteria that almost certainly resides in the manure I’m standing in is particularly lethal to humans. E. Coli 0157:H7 is a relatively new strain of the common intestinal bacteria (no one had seen it before 1980) that thrives in feedlot cattle, 40% of which carry it in their gut. Ingesting as few as ten of these microbes can cause a fatal infection; they produce a toxin that destroys human kidneys.

    Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the strong acids in our stomachs, since they evolved to live in the neutral pH, environment of the rumen. But the rumen of corn-fed feedlot steer is nearly as acidic as our own, and in this new, man-made environment new acid-resistant strains of E. Coli, of which 0157:H7 is one, have evolved… The problem with these bugs is that they can shake off the acid bath in our stomachs–and then go on to kill us. By acidifying the rumen with corn we’ve broken down one of our food chain’s most important barriers to infection. Yet another solution turned into a problem.

    This is so scary. This is why man should not be interfering with God-made systems. We are not here to recreate systems, we are here to take care of the earth. I know I sound like a total hippie, but c’mon, look at the name of my domain.

    …Petroleum is one of the most important ingredients in the production of modern meat, and the Persion Gulf is surely a link in the food chain that passes through this (or any) feedlot. Steer 534 started his life part of a food chain that derived all of its energy from the sun, which nourished the grasses that nourished him and his mother. When 534 moved from ranch to feedlot, from grass to corn, he joined an industrial food chain powered by fossil fuel–and therefore defended by the US military, another never-counted cost of cheap food. (One fifth of America’s petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food.)

    So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.

    It is estimated that EACH COW uses 1 barrel of oil to be sent to market as beef. This oil is in the form of petroleum to fertilize the corn as well as the oil to transport and convert his food from corn into the flakes that they eat, along with the other manufactured products put in his food. That is scary.

    I know this is a looooooooong post, and I should probably split it up, but there was just SO much to talk about in this chapter. I hope it makes you think twice, I know I am.

  • Corn, corn everywhere

    On the suggestion of a few women at GCM, I decided to pick up a copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma – A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. It is really good. Who knew that a book about crops and factory farming could be such a page turner?

    The first chapter discusses corn and the fact that it is present in the majority of our foods. We eat a ridiculous amount of corn.

    Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

    Head over to the processed foods and you find even more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of the nugget’s other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, even the citric acid that keeps the nugget “fresh” can all be derived from corn.

    To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)–after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you’ll be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltrose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins… This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn.

    As a matter of fact, he even goes into the science of how, through DNA testing, Americans have a ridiculous amount of corn in them. We even have more corn in us than the Mexicans, who generally eat 40% of their diet from corn.

    Now that corn has taken over most other crops, the earth gets depleted so nitrogen-replacing fertilizers must be used. The nitrogen from those fertilizers not only ends up in our bodies, but contributes to global warming, the killing of many other species of fish and animals, and a huge loss of variety in our diets. Then again, experts estimate that 2 out of 5 of us would be dead if it weren’t for those fertilizers. That’s not so hot either.
    He goes into great detail about the genetic modifications of corn and what that means for the land, for us, and for our future. Its really good stuff.

    I know I’ve read about this before, but I found this to be a really fascinating first chapter. I’m sure I’ll keep posting about this book as I go.

    Oh, and as an interesting side note, “modifying” the salmon to eat corn is something that my brother has been working on as a genetic engineer. Good stuff, huh? Can you believe we came from the same genetic pool? LOL. He’s great at what he does though!

  • The Proverbs 31 Woman – A real “helpmeet”

    I would love to blog about this book a million times! It is great! Unfortunately my time is limited with it (it is a library book), so I guess I’ll just have to hit the main points that I enjoyed and that I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere.

    Patricia Gundry writes this book so well, and does an amazing job at balancing femininity with strength. She provides a wonderful example for how this can be done, despite what many other books on this passage try to say. She tackles important issues for all women, including being a hard worker, trustworthy, strong, beautiful, not manipulative, a bargain hunter, a planner, an investor, a provider, and praiseworthy. I have read many other books on Proverbs 31, and none of them capture the context and the relevance of what is being said to King Lemuel the way that Gundry does in this book.
    Here are some of my highlights from a few chapters.

    On women who manipulate (re: Proverbs 31:12 “She does him good and not harm all the days of her life”)

    Women manipulate men… I always wondered why women are so tempted to do it… Why would women like Marabel Morgan or Helen Andelin justify it with Bible verses, case histories, and personal examples of their own approach to pragmatism in marriage?

    I think they do it because they live in a double bind. Women are the underdogs in the family and society. So they gravitate toward survival methods common to underdogs, methods that are as old as the Fall.

    Here’s how it works: the underdog is afraid to approach her superior directly. Though direct approach is effective some of the time, too often it is not. When dealing with a superior power that is also unscrupulous and unfair, being direct is often dangerous. Underdogs learn to manipulate in order to get along–or survive.

    Manipulation is demeaning both to the one doing it and to the unsuspecting victim. If you’re a woman, your actions say to the man you victimize, “You aren’t very bright, or honorable. If you were smart, you would see through my tricks. If you were honorable, they wouldn’t be necessary.”

    This kind of scheming has further disadvantage. It makes close, honest relationships between people impossible.

    Amen. I have read so many books for Christian women that only teach women how to be manipulative. They tell you how to get your way: How to convince your husband to do what you want without him knowing it. Its sick, and it makes me so sad that Christian women stoop to that level.
    On the Proverbs 31 woman and when she opens her mouth compared to other women

    I think inborn nature has nothing to do with the incidence of shrewish or razor-tongued women. It’s as simple as this: those who can’t fight with their fists learn to fight with words. We develop skill with the weapons we have. We also pick up the skill by observing the skilled practicioners who precede us. It is often passed from mother to daughter with success.

    Women tend to practice and gain skill on men who are vulnerable. Sometimes this involves practicing on male children who are extremely defenseless. They grow up to be easy targets for other female verbal assaults.

    I found this section really interesting. I have quite the razor tongue. As a matter of fact, even long after dh and I were married, I had never “lost” a fight. My quick wit and tongue allowed me to be a more skilled arguer than any boyfriends had ever been. I ended up thinking I was always right. It was a humbling blow to find out that not only was I often wrong, but I also manipulated situations because I could argue better.

    She goes on to address an interesting cycle she has noticed. I have seen this for myself, especially in church, which is so sad.

    We women are too easily tempted to vent our anger on male children. I have seen it happen so often. A family who lived near us years ago went through a weekly cycle. Over the weekend the husband harassed his wife. On Monday she terrorized their oldest child, a boy (who looked like his father and had the same name) about a year older than my daughter. On Tuesday the boy was out for blood and my kids got it from him…

    It is the old pecking-order sequence: we can’t hit back at those who are stronger, so we find excuses to take out our anger on those who are weaker. I firmly believe that much male hostility to women is a result of this vicious circle. Women are repressed and put down by men or by a male-dominated system. Mothers sometimes take out their resentment on their young sons; and teachers and others over children, on little boys in their charge. Those little boys grow up with an accumulated load of unconscious resentment toward women that has been years in the making. They then pass it on to the women who become vulnerable to them.

    I’ve never seen this addressed in writing before, but it makes me think of a family whose son was in the Sunday School class that I taught. I would see the end of the cycle, as the mother would take her aggression out on her son as they would walk through the church. He would then come into the class and take his aggression out on the other children. He would often make the other 2 and 3 year olds so upset that they would physically shake. I would have to remove him from the classroom to protect the other children. It was heartbreaking because he was only acting out on what he knew. He was only 3.

    I don’t want to make this too long, so I’ll just give one last quote from the end where she is talking about the translation of “helpmeet.”

    This verse has been traditionally understood to mean that God created woman as a kind of glorified girl Friday for Adam. A nice girl, but slightly substandard and needing a man to supervise her work. The words help and meet have been condensed by common usage into helpmeet. We have been taught that this means woman should be a helper to man, not his equal.

    But in Hebrew, the original language, the words ezer and neged do not have the connotations we have given them. Ezer means “help” all right, but not secondary help or assistant, as in assistant to the president. It means help in the way God helped Israel. The word is used in the Old Testament to refer to help by a superior force, such as help by God, as in Psalm 121:1,2

    I raise my eyes towards the hills.
    Whence shall my help come?
    My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

    The word ezer is never used elsewhere in the Old Testament to refer to subordinate or inferior help.

    Neged (“meet”) is a preposition in Hebrew and cannot be translated as a preposition in English and still retain the sense. It means “corresponding to,” “fit for,” “meet for.” In other words, God created woman as a real help to Adam, someone who was like him, suitable in every way. There is no hint of inferiority for woman in the original account.

    Good stuff.

    This book also has a ton of practical advice. She talks about keeping your home, ways to find your passion for a cottage / work-at-home industry, time management strategies, and ways to enjoy your work and bless your family. I really highly recommend it 🙂

  • Juice box bags

    Seriously, how cool are these bags?

    I have been in the market for some reusable bags to replace the plastic bags that most stores use. I have been trying to knit, scrounge, and find as many bags as I can before I purchase any. I’ve knitted a few of these silk sari hobos. They are gorgeous. I’m tempted to pick up a few ecobags. I love the produce bags. How cool are they? I have just recently become aware of how much plastic I use in the produce section. Ack!

    When I was looking for bags, I came across these Basura Bags that are made by women in the Philippines out of foil juice boxes. Each one is unique. I think I might be trading in my Coach bags…

    My husband thinks that I may be going a little off of the deep end, but I’ve told him many times that it is not like he got a bait-and-switch out of this deal. He met a vegetarian who wore Birks. He met a girl who wasn’t in the mainstream. There weren’t any other electric guitar playing, skateboarding, computer and math major, punk girls walking around campus. 😉

    If you use cloth bags at the grocery store, please comment and let me know what has worked for you! I’m really interested to see what most people do and whether or not the stores make an issue of it. I know that Wild Oats gives you a nickel for each cloth bag you use, but I’m guessing that the mainstream stores aren’t like that.

  • Tofu fried rice

    After a visit last week to Pei Wei, I’ve been in search of a recipe similar to their honey-seared tofu and veggies plate.  I’m not saying that I have it figured out yet, but I’m getting closer!

    Tofu Fried Rice

    1 block of Oriental Baked Tofu (or make you’re own if you’re feeling industrious)
    2 eggs (omit if you’re vegan)
    2 T olive oil
    1 package of sprouts (optional)
    2 cups of cooked rice, refrigerated
    shredded carrots or other veggies
    soy sauce to taste (maybe 1/8 cup?)
    honey
    sesame oil
    Get out your wok (or pan) and heat the olive oil.  Add the eggs and scramble them.  Move the eggs over to the side and toss in the veggies.  Stir fry them until they are soft.  Add the rice and soy sauce while continuing to stir fry.  Cut your tofu into cubes and toss them in.  Stir it all until it is evenly heated.  Add sprouts, if desired.

    Once it is all warm, transfer to a bowl and add sesame oil and honey to the top.

    This is so good!

  • Day 1 of half marathon training

    We are finally settled into our new house! Yay! DH is dragging in some new book shelves as we speak. Once my books are in place, I’ll really feel “home” 🙂

    A group of friends and I decided to go ahead and attempt our first half marathon! Its actually a 15-miler, so it is longer than a typical “half”, but I really think we can do it. We talked amongst ourselves and decided to go with Jeff Galloway’s Half Marathon Schedule. I’m super excited, but totally nervous at the same time. I went for my first run at the new elevation (1500ft lower than our old house) and it felt amazing. I felt like I could run forever. I wonder how long that’ll last? Hopefully through May so I can feel that way on race day, hehe.

    In reading news, I have picked up several more books. The librarians here in town already recognize me when I come in the building (probably as “the weird girl with the hoop through her nose and the crazy hair, but hey… whatever). Here are my current reads:

    Patricia Gundry is an author I’ve wanted to check out for a while. This book was written when I was a year old, but it is still so applicable. I love the way that she tackles the lies that so many women believe. I will definitely be blogging about this in the very near future.

    This book was recommended by a friend, so I picked it up when I saw it for a quarter at Goodwill. It is very grace-based and I have been surprised (in a pleasant way) by a lot of things he has said. I’m still not sure if its too focused on works not mattering, but we shall see.

    John Holt is considered a “classic” for homeschooling, and I was quickly able to see why. This book has had me laughing out loud. My mom has been a teacher for the past 20 years, and I could hear her saying everything that he says in this book. I’ll be blogging about this too!

    I wish all of you a happy and blessed new year, and I am excited about what it holds for me and my family. I’m off to look up parks and hiking areas now, because my kids have been scratching at the doors to get out due to all of this snow! Have a great night 🙂

  • America’s Most Literate Cities

    America’s Most Literate Cities

    Way to go, Denver!
    Not only are we one of the healthiest states, but we’re quite literate as well.  I’m telling you… this is my kind of place  🙂

  • Running again!

    After a bit of a break thanks to selling our house, buying a new one (we’re still waiting to close on each), I am back running! I went out yesterday and today and it felt great 🙂 I’ve been doing about 3/4 of my runs with the kids in the stroller and then the other 1/4 I jog around the playground while they play at the park. That way they get to stretch their legs, I’m still near them, and everyone is happy.

    Today’s workout:

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  • Even if we don’t agree, there’s a lot of wisdom in this book

    Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
    by Barbara Brown Taylor


    Although Barbara Brown Taylor is coming from a different place than I am theologically, I am still very glad that I chose to read this book. Her descriptions of life as clergy gave me new respect for the clergy members in my life. It is easy to view clergy as different, even the clergy members that I know, but her descriptions of how she felt when people treated her differently were more than a little thought provoking.

    I think she reminded me that it is OK to go through different seasons in your life with regards to church. She also encouraged me to explore some of the early church writings on finding God in nature, and I have really been enjoying that discovery. Her thoughts on theological and doctrinal debates made me pause and ponder.

    I don’t think many of her ideas are orthodox, at least not for the kinds of churches that I have always attended, but that didn’t bother me. There is still plenty to learn.

    Overall, I really enjoyed this book. 🙂


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