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The least patriotic food in America?
That’s the headline in the Washington Post and their answer is, yes, the hamburger. The article is in four parts: the burger itself, the bun, the fixings and equality. The bottom line is that fresh, nutritious, real food has increasingly been reserved for the more affluent. The poor are left with the artificial, cheaper, processed food…dressed up with salt and flavorings, packaging, and advertising. It was a problem Thomas Jefferson worried about 200 years ago, noting that the wealthy ate vegetables and the poor did not. The major points in the article: The burger. 85% of all the burger Americans eat come from just four giant food processors. They control…
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Et tu, NIH?
One of the rewards of what we do is talking to our friends and neighbors as they get their latest grass fed beef and pork fix. There were a couple of those conversations yesterday. One about the federal study that says the low carb diet is best for losing weight after all….and another with a woman who says she depends on the perfect fats in grass fed beef to supply just the right amount of fat she needs. We’ve ranted here before about the nonsense masquerading as science that comes out of not only the government but the medical industry. Anyone for the food pyramid? Now, though, this latest study…
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Just by coincidence…
I had barely finished writing my post below warning that grass fed farmers needed to carefully consider before shipping their animals into the commercial marketplace. My point was that designing your animals for “The Box” is what got the meat industry into trouble in the first place. It’s an easy way to sell your steers, assuming you produce them to the required size, but I wanted to point out it was possibly the proverbial “bargain with the Devil”. (Why didn’t I think of that phrase sooner?) The big food processors have been buying up the smaller organic and natural labels and inevitably, I argued, that will lead to the corruption…
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The developing grass fed beef market (Part 2)….
Bill Roberts’ dissent from the old bromide perception is reality reminded me of another: “Each man is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts”. It’s generally attributed to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan but goes back a lot farther than that. And while we have some serious concerns over Bill’s article (see Part1 just below), we accept his basic fact: to meet the requirements of the commercial meat trade a steer must have a hanging weight of at least 600 pounds and that requires a live weight of more than 1,000 pounds. That’s Bill’s major concentration right now….putting together trailer-loads of grass steers…to be sent to processors. To…
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If you can’t beat them, buy them….
We’ve made the point before that the organic label has been seriously corrupted. Big agriculture industry giants (Big Ag) have infiltrated the organic field and, with their accomplices in government, are doing all they can to blur the differences between our contaminated supermarket food supply and safe food. Again, Democrats and Republicans alike in Washington are the culprits in this story. You would think, of course, that “organic” means entirely natural; it grows and we eat it unadulterated except for what we may add as we prepare it. Well, that’s not true. Something like 300 additives, some carcinogenic, have already been cleared by the “watchdog” government agency for use in organic food…
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Better living through chemistry (cont’d)….
It’s a problem that apparently is growing: the wholesale use of antibiotics is causing drug resistant immunities to build-up in humans as well as animals. We just can’t depend on drugs to battle disease as we once did. E.coli is one of them. Industrial agriculture is based on antibiotics. All commercial animals…cattle, chicken and pigs…are fed them routinely as a preventative. They have to, because in the way they are raised, they’d die otherwise. So you get them too, whether you’re buying meat at the supermarket, a restaurant or McDonald’s. More than that, those cows you see gracing lovely landscapes (unless you’re looking at Thistle Hill and similar farms), are…
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The sign in the window….
…announces that the Merry Moo in Flint Hill, Virginia now carries Thistle Hill beef and pork. Well, only hamburger right now, but we think it’s worth driving to Flint Hill for and a more complete line of products will be there soon. We’re proud to be affiliated with Gail Reardon and her quality store. She not only carries local meat and poultry from a number of sources, but she also has wonderful fresh fish twice a week and a terrific inventory of gourmet food items. And there’s also an gallery in back displaying the works of local artists. Another reason to visit: continuous wine tastings. Of course, we’ll continue with our…
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The father of the “real food” movement….
Wendell Berry truly is a legend in his own time. This Kentucky farmer, writer and philospher has been thinking and writing about our land…and our food…longer than anyone I know. It’s easy to be misled by his gentle nature, as this New York Times writer was, but Berry is a fighter who pulls no punches when the occasion demands. But first, the introductory article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/25-1 Before you leave the article, click on the “good reads” link for a compendium of Berry’s writing. Or just click here: http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/8567.Wendell_Berry Here’s a quote to give you the flavor. Again, I recommend you read the several pages of excerpts from his writing. “Whether we and our…
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On this, I’m not so sure…
At first glance, it’s another case of Pointy-Head Over-reach. Bureaucrats cracking down on a blogger when he has the temerity to recommend the Paleo (Cave Man) diet even though he’s not a professional nutritionist. What he seemed to be doing was recommending the diet to his readers based on his happy experience with what it had done to cure him of diabetes. We recommend the diet, too. But to others, we’re too weak and addicted to coffee, sugar and wine. (Not a complete list) But a careful reading of the story from North Carolina indicates the authorities are making a good point. That you can go too far in passing…
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Grandpa knows best….
It’s interesting to watch our old friend Kit Pharo move in the direction of becoming a “healthy eating” advocate. For those of you who don’t know him, Kit is a very successful Colorado rancher who raised himself from rodeo vagabond to head what may be the largest bull stud operation in the country. We’re not sure whether it’s becoming a grandfather, or just age, but Kit now regularly writes about eating right. Until recently, he’s been far more into raising cattle at the lowest cost than he was about the quality of the meat they produced. Here’s the latest from his on-line blog: Carbage – Several people said our pre-sale…