Sean's Mental Walkabout

I just finished listening to the audio book of the Omnivore’s Dilemma, which was great, but I’ll get to that after a brief digression. 

I’ve been listening to a decent number of audio books over the past few years, but until now I’d never heard the same reader in 2 books of different genres.  In addition to being an excellent reader for this book, Scott Brick also read the most recent Dune books.  So I was mildly distracted through the first couple of discs waiting for the words “kwisatch haderack” to come out of his mouth.  I guess given the epic nature of this book, it was appropriate, but a little jarring at first.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is Michael Pollan’s big food treatise, which starts with a simple premise: trace the path of 4 meals produced in different ways from grown raw ingredients to the final meal to be eaten.  As he states in the intro, it was originally going to be 3 meals: industrial, organic, and self supplied (for lack of a better term), but as he started investigating the organic industry, he realized there were really 2 camps there, the industrial organic and local organic.  While the local food movement was still young in 2002, it was there, and presumably his book helped further it dramatically over the years.

There is so much in this book that is fascinating.  The entire first section of the book, the industrial meal, dives into the absolute reliance of our modern food supply on cheap corn.    How we got to having all this cheap corn, and the effect it has on the rest of the food chain is pretty amazing.  The average american gets > 50% of his/her callories from corn.  Either directly processed, or through meet that was fed cheap corn.  Because industrial grown corn requires artificial fertilizer (which is petroleum based) you can calculate the gallons of oil required for a pound of corn, and even a pound of beef.

The industrial organic and local organic sections show a rich history of where the organic movement started, and where it’s ended up after scaling up to global levels.  The juxtiposition of the two is amazing, and the exploration of ways to produce meat outside of the industrial system is quite compelling.  You’ll learn more about the biology of many farm animals and grasses than you ever thought you would, and will be better for it.

Lastly Pollan addresses his final meal, where he is determined to grow, hunt, or gather every element of it.  He makes an incredibly elaborate meal, including bread with air captured yeast, so he’s really pushing the limits as to what you can do in full hunter gatherer mode, and the results are impressive.

I would highly recommend this book to everyone.  The writing style is great, and what you’ll learn along the way is invaluable to understanding many things.  Why high fructose corn syrup is in everything?  Why America is continuously going through food fads while the rest of the world is not?  And why we spend so much of our energy on figuring out what to eat?  Which is, of course, the Omnivore’s Dilemma.

The NY Times has a pretty incredible article on why E-Coli keeps showing up in ground beef.  The whole article is worth reading, but this bit gives you the flavor of it.

The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

Using a combination of sources — a practice followed by most large producers of fresh and packaged hamburger — allowed Cargill to spend about 25 percent less than it would have for cuts of whole meat.

Those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli, industry research shows. Yet Cargill, like most meat companies, relies on it suppliers to check for the bacteria and does its own testing only after the ingredients are ground together. The United States department of Agriculture, which allows grinders to devise their own safety plans, has encouraged them to test ingredients first as a way of increasing the chance of finding contamination.

Unwritten agreements between some companies appear to stand in the way of ingredient testing. Many big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli, according to officials at two large grinding companies. Slaughterhouses fear that one grinder’s discovery of E. coli will set off a recall of ingredients they sold to others.

While none of this surprises me, since I’ve been listening to the Omnivore’s Dilemma recent, it definitely adds weight to getting your meat local, fed by what the animal evolved to eat, from farmers you trust.  It costs a bit more, but then again I tend to like my meat as free of feces as possible.

The last bit of media that was playing as we came in for approach to JFK from Berlin was an episode of Mad Men.  This was an original configuration 767, so there was just the big central screens in coach, and everyone was watching the same thing.  Neither Susan nor I we watching with head phones, but from time to time we’d see the pictures going by.  At some point the family was out for a picnic, and they “cleaned up” by throwing their beer can into the woods, and just flipping everything off their blanket and onto the ground.

I turned to Susan and said “ah, the 50s, how amusing you were”.  Her response was “…or horrifying”.  50 years ago communing with nature meant throwing you trash on the ground.  It took a generation to realize that trash isn’t taken away by magical fairies.  It just remains, and leaches into the ground water, and causes all manner of problems for generations down the road.  It makes for a good TV moment because the entire audience understands how egregious the act was.  2 generations will do that.  When you are in the middle of a change, it’s a lot harder to see that perspective.

They didn’t even have cucumbers

Our trip to Europe was primarily for Clemens wedding, in Berlin.  (We got there via Switzerland, but that’s a different story).  The wedding was small (by US standards), with about 50-60 people there, but the mix was amazing.  Americans, Germans, and Turks, all with quite interesting backgrounds, and all great people.  It was my first time to Berlin, and I realized how lacking my history was, so crammed a bit out of the guide book and asked some questions of the folks there.  For Clemens, who grew up in the city, I got some great responses at times that showed how matter of fact the second big moment in history for me was (the first being the challenger explosion).  “What’s up with that tower.”  “So there was this wall around the city…”

On the last night of the trip we went out to dinner with a student from Susan’s MFA program who is a German native, and living in Berlin now.  At some point the whole unification question came up and she started retelling her remembrances from childhood.  The one thing she remembered most was how the news kept saying “They didn’t even have cucumbers” of the East Germans, when trying to show how bad off they were.  This wasn’t actually true, in East Germany they had food when it was in season.  So no tomatoes or cucumbers in January, when they are shipped in from Argentina, picked green, and taste like styrofoam.  But this was the height of the 80s.  Western civilization’s peak got symbolized with any thing, any time you want it.  Much like the beer can in the woods, it doesn’t matter the impact, or the quality.  So when unification happened, one of the much lauded benefits was this any time culture.

We’re hopefully starting to leave that wastefulness behind.  In another generation I think we’ll see tomatoes in January no less quaint than throwing our garbage out the car window.  Food miles do matter, both for flavor and for impact to the world around us.  Once we got home we had friends over and had some fresh farm tomatoes with mozzarella, basil, and balsamic vinegar.  Amazing flavor.  Yes, we don’t do this in January, but once you’ve tasted what a tomato is actually supposed to taste like, you wouldn’t want to either.

Foul Plea: one chicken’s appeal for a smarter food system

This was made by IBM.  Things like this are part of what keeps me proud to be at IBM.

Susan is off at the farm right now picking our strawberry allocation for the week. The amounts get set daily, but it looks like due to the heat and fast rate of ripening, she’ll probably come back with a quart of the best tasting strawberries I’ve ever had.

Secor’s also just opened for early picking yesterday. We didn’t pick strawberries there last year, though we did pick 15 lbs of blueberries, which managed to last us the whole winter (we’ve still got a bunch we need to use up now). Susan’s pretty excited on hitting them up this weekend to get enough to jam and freeze.

And if that wasn’t enough, the Beacon Sloop Club does their Strawberry festival this Sunday. Hippies, strawberry short cake, chocolate covered strawberries, and strawberry shakes, always a good time. Susan and I ended up at the strawberry festival on our 2nd weekend of dating (6 years ago), so it has a special place in our hearts. Or maybe it’s just that Susan likes chocolate dipped strawberries so much.

And, the piece de resistance, is that we just got both an ice cream maker, and the ben & jerry’s ice cream book. There is nothing I love more than freshly made strawberry icecream with freshly picked strawberries. Our french vanilla experiment of last weekend went ok, but now that I’ve got my B&J book again (I had one in college when we made liquid nitrogen icecream), I’m much more excited for the output.

Update: Susan returned, the successful strawberry hunter, with 3 QUARTS, as the farm now has a policy where you can pay to pick extra quarts. Soooooooooo good on my cereal right now!

I really enjoyed Freakonomics, as it provided a much more interesting look at the world. But I’m quite sad that Dubner posted this Chewbacca argument on local foods. Some how, the fact that he can’t make sherbert effectively, means that local foods don’t make sense.

The logic is flawed all over the place. From the fact that “my sherbert sucked, so locally grown food definitely isn’t tasty”, to the complete gloss over on nutrition (which has a USDA study behind it), to using meat production cost vs. transportation to say that producing anything locally has the same balance (think for a second that most apples sold in NY state come from China, when one of NY’s big crop exports is apples). It’s really a hack all around. It’s pretty much the classic “I’m sounding really smart, so don’t actually try to follow my logic” kind of post.

While there are some good arguments against localization of food production, Dubner doesn’t actually state any of them. There is also an assumption that behavioral patterns don’t change when you start localizing your food, and that you are still buying tomatoes in the winter. That really isn’t true. Even going back to store bought lettuce in November was depressing, as it’s really that much worse. Nothing that’s supposed to have as much flavor as a tomato is even bearable off season.

I do realize he’s not actually the economist part of the team, he’s just the writer. But it would be nice if he did some actual research before posting stuff like this. It’s just embarrassing.