Scrapin' Up the Bits... Antibiotic style

A few interesting things happening out there. To begin with...

CBS News actually does a good job reporting on the extreme overuse of antibiotics on factory farm animals. It was a two-part series, part 1, on the situation in the U.S., here and part 2, which covers the situation in Denmark, where this practice is now banned, here.

Although, it's hard not to gag a little when, Katie Couric, back in the U.S. with an American turkey farmer who doesn' t use antibiotics, is walking through a huge barn packed with turkeys and is asking about why it's so important to also give the birds "more space."

Jamie Oliver continues in his efforts to get Americans (and his mates in the U.K.) to eat better. He even won a $100,000 award to help further his efforts from this organization called TED that, I have to admit, I really don't understand.

UPDATE: Jamie Oliver's talk at TED. Great quote right off the bat.

"I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best things in life."

My take on genetically modified food is pretty simple: I know that for a mighty long time farmers have been cross-breeding different varieties of the same crops to produce more prolific or more tasty or more pest- or drought-resistant crops. But that's different than inserting foreign, non-plant genes into crops, planting them all over the place, and selling them for consumption, without a ton of research to show that these products are safe for human consumption, among other things. I am all for the appropriate use of biotechnology. It's produced some very good (and expensive) drugs in the past decade or so. But that doesn't mean it's necessarily appropriate to use in our food supply -- again, at least without much, much more research.

I say all this because the USDA wants to know what you think about the subject. You can do so easily via SlowFood USA. For some very detailed background, there are also some work published last year that called into serious question the underlying science and value of GMOs.

Some experience-based cooking advice: If you want to jazz up a roasted cauliflower soup with some dried porcinis you find in your cupboard, you don't need very much of the porcini (reconstituted in water, that is). Otherwise your cauliflower soup might become a mighty potent porcini soup. In theory, that sounds good. In practice, it was a bit overwhelming.

In other local food news, Michael Pollan will be speaking at Allegheny College on February 25. Details here (scroll down).

Finally, the South Side Soup Contest is on the horizon, February 20. I've never been to this, but have purchased tickets. Looking forward to some delicious soups from places like Cafe Du Jour, Yo Rita, Big Dog Coffee, and others.

Pollan Talks Shop w/ Farmers, Jamie O. in the NYT

This is from NPR's "Talk of the Nation."

I'll have to listen to the entire thing soon. Got about halfway through. Really good stuff.

Also, Jamie Oliver's been doing a series of shows about food in America, for the BBC I believe. This lengthy feature about it will also have to be weekend reading.

Scrapin' Up the Bits... Welcome Back Neko Style

So much news, so little brain power to process it all...

I don't know if this will have the legs to get through the sausage-making process, pun intended, but Rep. Louise Slaughter has introduced a bill that would put tough limits on the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics on farms raising pigs and such for consumption by, well, consumers. This is aimed directly at factory farms, you know, those kind that don't smell too good.

Who knew you could learn so much in an actual piece of legislation...

(5)(A) an estimated 70 percent of the antibiotics and other antimicrobial drugs used in the United States are fed to farm animals for nontherapeutic purposes, including--

(i) growth promotion; and

(ii) compensation for crowded, unsanitary, and stressful farming and transportation conditions; and

(B) unlike human use of antibiotics, these nontherapeutic uses in animals typically do not require a prescription;

(6)(A) large-scale, voluntary surveys by the Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in 1999, 2001, and 2006 revealed that 84 percent of grower-finisher swine farms, 83 percent of cattle feedlots, and 84 percent of sheep farms administer antimicrobials in the feed or water for health or growth promotion reasons, and many of the antimicrobials identified are identical or closely related to drugs used in human medicine, including tetracyclines, macrolides, Bacitracin, penicillins, and sulfonamides;
...

(9) the United States Geological Survey reported in March 2002 that--
(A) antibiotics were present in 48 percent of the streams tested nationwide; and (B) almost half of the tested streams were downstream from agricultural operations;

On the local tip, Pines Tavern in the northern 'burbs, not too far from Casa de Fillippelli, is having these monthly beer dinners. They are, on the whole, affordable. This month's dinner, which began tonight and runs through Friday, features beers from Peak Organic Brewing and some local pork. Unfortunately we had things going on all three nights. Next month, though, as long as the beer offering is decent, I'm there, kids in tow.

Speaking of local, CSA season is not too far away. If you haven't signed up for one, better do it soon.

The Times weighs in on food politics with a semi-strange article, "Is a Food Revolution Now in Season." I didn't find it as off-putting as some. It provides some good general background on the growth of the sustainability movement in the U.S., and it also highlights one of the biggest problems with ag policy in the U.S.: the obstinance and, in my view, corruption of the legislators from the farm states that have been doing big ag's bidding for far too long.

Of course, [Agriculture Secretary] Vilsack will need the approval of Congress for any major changes in farm policy, and therein lies his greatest challenge. Congress passed a farm bill last year that details farm policy for the next five years, and farm-state legislators say they are not interested in starting over.

When the Obama administration recently proposed a budget that would cut subsidies to the nation’s largest farmers and bolster child nutrition payments, it was greeted with hostility in Congress, even by some Democrats.

And, finally, as for the title of this post, Neko Case, she of the glorious pipes, is back with a new album, complete with first single. And, yeah, it's live. No production. Enjoy.

Scrapin' Up the Bits... Spooktacular Style

A little bit 'o everything here. No need to mince words. I'll just get to it.

First, and this is not the first study to reach this conclusion, but a new study from the United Nations concludes that, in Africa at least, yields on farms that are organic or "near-organic" have superior yields compared to large industrial farms.

The study found that organic practices outperformed traditional methods and chemical-intensive conventional farming. It also found strong environmental benefits such as improved soil fertility, better retention of water and resistance to drought.

Next, and this is very late in coming, but if you didn't read Michael Pollan's latest in the New York Times -- a letter to the next president -- please do so now. It's quite long, but well worth the read. At the heart of this letter is a central proposal, to return to a food system based on the power of sunshine.

Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.

More locally, Cafe Allegro, a Pittsburgh dining standard bearer for the better part of the last two decades, is closing. I never ate there, and had heard its better days were behind it. Nevertheless, it's sad to see.

Meanwhile, the Passport Cafe, a restaurant where I have only eaten lunch, gets raves from the City Paper.

The subtitle of Passport Café, a year-old restaurant in an upscale strip mall on Perrysville Highway, is "Global cuisine, local harvest." Worthy, to be sure, but ... not to put too fine a point on it, but lately every other restaurant we visit seems to tout a variation on this theme. What then, we wondered, would distinguish Passport Café? Let us count the ways.

That's a long way from this Post-Gazette review from nearly a year ago, not long after the restaurant opened.

With all this effort, I expected to be impressed. Instead, I found myself perplexed and disappointed.

When we eat steaks anymore, I've given up on the grill. Instead, I opt for the cast-iron, seared first on the stove top, and finished in the oven. While I enjoy a burger, the ones I make at home are just never that great. I place part of that blame on the grill and its lack of temperature control. I know it sounds like heresy, but I've been thinking if, for burgers, we should likewise abandon the grill altogether.

This, however, convinces me that a combination approach, may be worth at least one try. Now if I could only find those brioche buns!

The Food Crisis: Coming to a City Near You?

Well, a new meme burning through the popular news media at a rabid pace is the international food crisis that might, just might, be starting to nudge its way into the land of large waistlines and large TVs, the good old US of A.

First, the global perspective:

Increased food demand from rapidly developing nations such as China, the use of crops for biofuels, global stocks at 25-year lows and market speculation are all blamed for pushing prices of staples like wheat, maize and rice to record highs.

That in turn has sparked food riots in several African countries, Indonesia and Haiti, and the FAO has warned that 37 countries face food crises.

This is not something that came from no where, however:

"The situation we are in is the result of inappropriate policies over the past 20 years. Between 1990 and 2000 we lowered food aid for agriculture by half," U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Director General Jacques Diouf] said.

Generous farm subsidies in wealthy countries had also discouraged agriculture in the developing world, further aggravating the situation, he said.

"Above all we have not invested in water management in different countries of the third world... In Africa only 7 percent of land is arable," he added.

If you didn’t catch that, the “Generous farm subsidies in wealthy countries” is shorthand for the United States.

Which brings us back to the situation domestically, where food prices are rising dramatically. And it appears that it’s having some perhaps surprising effects. The big box stores, for example, are seeing indications of strange purchasing behavior:

The regulatory clash came amid evidence that a rash of headlines in recent weeks about food riots around the world has prompted some in the United States to stock up on staples.

Costco and other grocery stores in California reported a run on rice, which has forced them to set limits on how many sacks of rice each customer can buy. Filipinos in Canada are scooping up all the rice they can find and shipping it to relatives in the Philippines, which is suffering a severe shortage that is leaving many people hungry.

More about those moves by Costco and Sam’s Club:

The two biggest U.S. warehouse retail chains are limiting how much rice customers can buy because of what Sam's Club, a division of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., called on Wednesday "recent supply and demand trends."

[snip]

The limits affect 20-lb bags, not retail-sized portions. Costco could not immediately be reached for comment on its limits or whether they are the first ever.

Sam's Club said it will limit customers to four bags at a time of imported jasmine, basmati and long grain white rice.

In the United States, at least, whether this is an indication of any sort of actual crisis, or something altogether different, is unclear:

The move comes as U.S. rice futures hit a record high amid global food inflation, although one rice expert said the warehouse chains may be reacting less to any shortages than to stockpiling by restaurants and small stores.

In a related story, there is a growing backlash against the boom in corn-based ethanol production as a way to alleviate the dependence on oil. In an Earth Day column in the Washington Post, Lester Brown and Jonathan Lewis, of the Earth Policy Institute and Clean Air Task Force, respectively, say it’s time to end the experiment:

…we call upon Congress to revisit recently enacted federal mandates requiring the diversion of foodstuffs for production of biofuels. These "food-to-fuel" mandates were meant to move America toward energy independence and mitigate global climate change. But the evidence irrefutably demonstrates that this policy is not delivering on either goal. In fact, it is causing environmental harm and contributing to a growing global food crisis.

Their charges consist of:

• It requires tons of energy, mostly coal-based, to produce ethanol
• Ethanol production produces beau coup pollution
• It’s driving up the cost of other food staples – that is, exacerbating the international food crisis.

More than a year ago, some researchers from the University of Minnesota, also in the pages of the Post, predicted some of these problems.

Some biofuels, if properly produced, do have the potential to provide climate-friendly energy, but where and how can we grow them? Our most fertile lands are already dedicated to food production. As demand for both food and energy increases, competition for fertile lands could raise food prices enough to drive the poorer third of the globe into malnourishment. The destruction of rainforests and other ecosystems to make new farmland would threaten the continued existence of countless animal and plant species and would increase the amount of climate-changing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

It’s funny, in a sad sort of way. So many of these things are discussed directly or alluded to in Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. I have yet to read his latest, In Defense of Food – I’m desperately trying to actually finish a fiction book – but I did read Pollan’s most recent essay in the New York Times Magazine. It, too, touches on the environment and food prices.

It’s one of those must reads. Exhibit 1:

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing [about global warming], but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?

I do.

Seriously. Read the whole thing.