Almost everyone that's not selling meat agrees that it would be a good thing for Americans to eat less meat. Nutritionists tell us it would be good for our health. Environmentalists tell us it would be good for the environment and one of the most helpful ways to combat global warming. Animal welfare advocates tell us that reducing meat consumption is one of the most helpful ways we can address the horrors of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). As we're learning in our Tables of Plenty journey, most religious traditions teach that constraining the consumption of meat through fasting is helpful on the journey of spiritual formation.
Apparently the message is starting to sink in because, as Mark Bittman reported earlier in the week, American consumers are putting less meat in their shopping carts and that trend is likely to continue into the future. (See chart taken from this Daily Livestock Report)
The rising price of meat is probably the single biggest contributor to these trends but Bittman attributes part of the decline to a shift in consumer conscience:
Some are choosing to eat less meat for all the right reasons. The Values Institute at DGWB Advertising and Communications just named the rise of “flexitarianism” — an eating style that reduces the amount of meat without “going vegetarian” — as one of its top five consumer health trends for 2012. In an Allrecipes.com survey of 1,400 members, more than one-third of home cooks said they ate less meat in 2011 than in 2010. Back in June, a survey found that 50 percent of American adults said they were aware of the Meatless Monday campaign, with 27 percent of those aware reporting that they were actively reducing their meat consumption.
The livestock industry in their report on the trend attributes the change to growing exports which reduced the amount of available meat in the market, higher costs due to the growth of the ethanol industry that diverts corn to the production of fuel and increases the costs of those inputs for animal feed, and finally they attribute the decline to "the fruition of 30-40 years of government policy."
Bittman, along with many others, have expressed shock at the dubious nature of this last statement. One feature of the American food scene over the last 40 years are the generous farm subisidies that have fueled the industrialization of meat production. Instead of dealing with the reality that consumers are choosing to eat less meat, they are stuck on the idea of a government conspiracy against them.
I guess I'm not surprised that the livestock industry doesn't mention changing consumer values but, as I've written in the past, the industry ignores this reality at their peril.
A recent ruling from the World Trade Organization has got me feeling like I need to initiate an "Occupy Your Grocery Store" movement. The WTO has declared that current U.S. food country-of-origin labeling laws for meat and produce are "illegal." Bloomberg News reports:
Canada and Mexico said the provisions impose unfair costs on their exports, reducing their competitiveness. Judges agreed that the policies meant beef and pork from Canada and Mexico were treated less favorably than the same U.S. products.
The article goes on the share the perspectives of farmers and industry insiders who lament that the program is "costly and cumbersome," and that the costs "far outweigh any benefits."
This may seem like an obscure, niche debate but I think it goes to the heart of the current crisis in food systems around the world. Industrialists insist that food is nothing more than a commodity that can be reduced to a product with nutritional content, a hunk of chemicals and proteins with a profit margin. In their ideal world a food item is not connected to anything--no farmer, no land, no community, no country, no watershed, no carbon footprint, no pesticide, no herbicide, no low-wage farm worker, nothing. The industrial food system is most efficient when the journey from farm to table is an undiscernable mystery, and the champions of this industry will keep pushing for more efficiency, as if it hasn't already been pushed too far.
I'm reminded of the John Muir quote from My First Summer in the Sierra where he observes: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
...the first thought may be a recognition of one’s ignorance and vulnerability as a consumer in the total economy. As such a consumer, one does not know the history of the products that one uses. Where, exactly, did they come from? Who produced them? What toxins were used in their production? What were the human and ecological costs of producing them and then of disposing of them? One sees that such questions cannot be answered easily, and perhaps not at all. Though one is shopping amid an astonishing variety of products, one is denied certain significant choices. In such a state of economic ignorance it is not possible to choose products that were produced locally or with reasonable kindness toward people and toward nature. Nor is it possible for such consumers to influence production for the better. Consumers who feel a prompting toward land stewardship find that in this economy they can have no stewardly practice. To be a consumer in the total economy, one must agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.
Berry concludes, and I tend to agree, that the best way to respond to this situation is to nurture "prosperous local economies." According to Berry, "Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice." In other words, buying from local farmers and producers is the best way to know the story of the items we buy. Instead of relying on a beauracracy of labeling rules, he says we need to take things into our own hands and develop relationships with people. If enough consumers start moving in this direction, demanding meaningful knowledge about the items we buy, then maybe industry representative will take note and respond.
Supporting local farmers like Rocky Ridge Ranch that was featured in the Spokesman Review this weekend is a great way to take a step in this direction. The Spokane Public Market and the Millwood Winter Farmers' Market, 3-6pm on Wednesdays at the Crossing Youth Center are other options worth considering. Consider making local farmers and producers a part of this year' Christmas shopping plans.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post highlighting the book, Superbug by Maryn Mckenna. The book tracks the emergence of antibiotic-resistant MRSA and claims that the heavy use of antibiotics in industrial animal agriculture has contributed to the rise of these resistant strains of bacteria.
Mckenna has an article at Wired.com today that reports on a new scientific study on the presence of drug-resistant bacteria in meat for sale in stores. She reports:
A team of researchers from Arizona bought meat and poultry in five cities across the United States, tested them for bacteria, and found this: 47 percent of the samples contained the very common pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, and 96 percent of those isolates were resistant to at least one antibiotic. Of more concern: 52 percent of those staph isolates were resistant to at least three antibiotics that are commonly used in both veterinary and human medicine.
That is: Roughly one in four packages of meat and poultry from across the US contained multi-drug resistant staph.
Here's the breakdown of how different types of meat compared:
Among the types of meat tested, turkey carried the most resistance, with 77 percent of the meat samples showing at least some; that was followed by pork (42 percent), chicken (41 percent) and beef (37 percent). Interestingly, it wasn’t all the same staph. Though there was a great diversity of staph types, each animal species seemed to carry mostly one sequence type or strain of staph: ST1 in pigs, ST5 in chickens and ST398 in turkey.
Perhaps the most important finding in the study is that the source of the bacteria was not human contamination, rather the bacteria came from the animals themselves. Mckenna quotes study team member Lance Price:
“There’s an important second point: We found that each of the meat and poultry types had their own distinctive staph on them. That provides strong evidence that food animals were the primary source of the resistant staph. The source wasn’t human contamination of the meat at slaughter, or when it was packaged for retail sale.”
This is an important data point in the debate about the impact of antibiotic use in raising farm animals. The Ag. community has argued for years that no one has been able to prove a link between such use and the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria that is harmful to humans. The evidence is mounting that concentrated animal operations are not only bad for animals, but they are bad for humans as well.
Go here for a previous post on safety issues with America's meat supply.
The geniuses at Google have put together a search tool that allows you to search through a good portion of the books they've scanned into Google Books. Here is how it works:
The service draws on the absolutely massive Google Books corpus. Google estimates they've scanned and OCR'd more than 10 percent of all the books ever published, and they use about a third of the total books in the tool.
Language and book publishing trends are tricky things to nail down. For example, just because a word comes into more frequent use does not necessarily mean that the concrete realities we attach to those words in today's language have become more important or popular. But they do provide fascinating data points to consider when assessing cultural trends.
I did a few searches related to the content of this blog:
Below is the meat index comparing usage of the words chicken, beef, pork, and turkey (1900-2008):
Here's an "industrial agriculture" vs. "organic agriculture" throwdown (1940-2008):
Below is the fast food index showing the rise of pizza, hamburger, and fast food (1940-2008):
Here's what I'll call the foodie index showing community garden, farmers market, and csa (1900-2008):
Below is the vintage food index showing use of victory garden, pickling, and canning (1900-2000):
Finally the ag index showing frequency of farm, farmer, and agriculture (1900-2008):
Sante is the French word for health. Jeremy Hansen, owner and chef of Sante Restaurant and Charcuterie exemplifies a holistic health in the way he runs his pioneering establishment next to Auntie's Bookstore in Downtown Spokane.
Jeremy grew up in Spokane and has been in the restaurant business since he was a young teenager, cutting his teeth at the Mustard Seed and other area kitchens. He eventually attended Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Portland where he not only honed his skills as a chef, but formed a philosophy of food and community that eventually gave birth to Sante.
Sante is remarkable for the way it sources foods locally. Hansen is pictured above processing the half of a steer that was just delivered that morning by Gary Angel of Rocky Ridge Ranch. Most of the beef and other meat at Sante comes from this nearby farm. Jeremy points out that not only is Gary's beef superior in quality because of the feed and care Gary provides, processing beef in this way also makes good business sense. By cutting out the middle-men he makes a good profit, Gary get's a good price and a reliable market for his beef, and the consumer gets a choice meal at a reasonable price. This is a great example of Jeremy's uncompromising pursuit of holistic health. Everyone wins, including his employees who apparently are paid well above average for Spokane area restaurants.
Sante is not only a restaurant, it is a Charcuterie, which is the area of cooking that involves preparing meats like the sausages, bacon, and prosciutto ham pictured to the left in the restaurant's display case. Jeremy was telling me that he really had trouble making good prosciutto with the pork that was available through commercial channels. He said, "When I used Gary's Berkshire pigs it came out comparable to the finest hams available in Europe. The quality really is dependent on what the animals eat. When we eat animals we're really eating what they ate." All of the items in the displays case are not only used in meals for diners, they are available for bulk purchase. They even make their own mustard which I saw being prepared in the kitchen. I imagine the steady stream of income from these items is the envy of every restaurant in Spokane.
There is one other unique aspect to Sante that was a great surprise to me. While it is in many respects a fine-dining establishment, the space they've created is warm and welcoming, even to a guy like me who wants to plug in a computer and do some work while he eats. They have a counter with outlets and stools that connects the restaurant with the book store and free wifi. I had the toasted-cheese sandwhich that included an egg and a couple of slices of their house bacon. It was fantastic and was in the Red Robin range of prices.
Needless to say I'm impressed. While many talk about the virtues of local and sustainable food, Jeremy and his wife took their life savings and are turning those virtues into a sustainable business. Spokane is a healthier city because of their efforts. If you're giving a gift certificate for Christmas this year, Sante should be high on your list of candidates. They are open for breakfast and lunch, 8am to 5pm, 7 days a week. They are open for dinner Wednesday through Saturday till 9pm.
As if we need one more reason to be worried about the supply of beef and milk in the US food chain, this article from BBC News explains that not only are cattle being cloned to maximize production, but some of the cattle are cloned from the cells of dead animals.
The aim of livestock cloning is to clone the best animals to produce the best beef. But some cattle farmers believe it is impossible to pick the best quality animals until their meat has been properly analysed. That is why there are cloned bulls here that have been produced from the cells taken from the carcasses of dead animals.
Brady Hicks of the JR Simplot company in Idaho said his organisation was among many that had tried out the technique successfully. "The animals are hanging on a rail ready to go to the meat counter," he told BBC News. "We identify carcasses that have certain carcass characteristics that we want, but it's too late to reproduce the genetics of the animal. But through cloning we can resurrect that animal."
These "resurrected" animals are then bred with naturally born cows. The next step is to see if their offspring - whose meat can be sold to consumers in the US - have the same qualities as the grandparent from which the cells were originally taken.
As the article goes on to point out, most people in the U.S. are unaware that cloning has been adopted as an acceptable practice in the production of beef and milk cows.This is certainly the first I've heard of it and I'm pretty dialed into issues around beef production.
According to the BBC;
It is early days for cloning in US agriculture. There are only a thousand clones in the one hundred million-strong American cattle herd.
This may be safe. They claim to have done a few studies that show the practice is safe but it is way too early, in my opinion, to be introducing cloned cattle into the supply chain. It just sounds crazy. Are they really unable to determine the best cattle for breeding without cloning them? The beef industry is so hell bent on increasing productivity, but don't they realize that the loss of consumers of beef is an important part of the equation. They lost me a long time ago.
I buy all my beef from the local farmers' market that is grass fed at a small sale nearby farm. Rocky Ridge Ranch and Susie David Beef are good sources in the Spokane area.
I've found that local beef also tastes better. Gary from Rocky Ridge recently gave me some of his top of the line steaks and they were amazing! And the steers that produced the steaks were selected for breeding the way farmers' have done if for thousands of years.
Like I said, cloning may be safe. I don't know otherwise. But consumer beware - cloned cattle are in the US beef supply.
Mint.com has an interesting infographic about the likely sources of food at our 4th of July cookouts. Click on the picture to enlarge it and read the stats - odd are hamburgers from Texas, hot dogs from Iowa, baked beans from North Dakota, lettuce from California, tomatoes from Florida or California.
I was chatting with Gary Angel from Rocky Ridge Ranch last night and he explained that his meat sales have skyrocketed this year. What took him 3 months to sell last year is being snatched up in 2 weeks - whole chickens, steaks, hamburger, bacon, pork, you name it it's selling.
Reflecting on possible causes for the uptick in sales he speculated that the movie "Food Inc." has something to do with it. He's heard a lot of people mention that seeing the movie has led them to seek out alternative sources of meat. I hadn't given it much thought, but I also have heard a chorus of people saying they saw the movie and it has sufficiently freaked them out to seek out non-industrial chicken and beef alternatives.
These are just anecdotal observations, but I do think that Food Inc. may be a game changer in popularizing local small scale beef and chicken, and that along with that we may be on the cusp of seeing ordinary grocery stores get on the band wagon.
The mainstreaming of organic produce is a good example of how this works. Along with mentioning that meat sales are way up, Gary said that their organic produce offerings don't sell like they did five years ago. Another farmer chimed in that organic produce is now available everywhere, "even Walmart has organic produce," he lamented. Organic produce was seen, until very recently, as a fringe food movement, but in the last five to ten years it has moved into the mainstream. You can argue about the effectiveness of organic standards that many say are not strict enough, but there is no doubt that organic produce has arrived.
I'm wondering if we might be on the cusp of a similar transition in what is available at local grocery stores in the meat department. There are currently some half-hearted efforts to provide locally raised beef in grocery stores, but as this recent KREM story highlights, the industry hasn't really made offering meat alternatives a priority because they haven't had to. But Food Inc. may be a game changer. Seeing graphic images of "beef product" soaking in ammonia tends to mess with your head in a way that makes it difficult to turn a blind eye to the source of your meat.
This Diffusion of Innovation chart shows the process of how change is innovated and adopted, with the blue line indicating when various percentages of the population adopt an innovation and the brown line indicating the market share of a product. The blue line is helpful in understanding the various food movements. For my purposes I'll ignore the brown line.
I would put organic produce in the early majority stage of development, with organic produce available everywhere and a growing percentage of people making choices to buy organic. I think the movie Food Inc. signals the transition of local, naturally raised meat from the innovators stage to the early adopters and as the market responds to rising interest I think within the next couple of years smaller scale grass fed beef and more naturally raised chicken will find its way into grocery stores. I think the chorus for change in the meat industry may be reaching a critical mass that shifts markets and moves things like grass-fed beef into the mainstream.
Another way to look at the chart above is that industrial beef and chicken have ridden the wave of innovation over the last 60 years and now take up 100% of the market. What used to be a radical innovation is now the only way we do it. If I had a couple million dollars I sure wouldn't be investing it in a traditional CAFO. I'd be thinking about how to innovate a series of smaller scale, more local, more natural feed lots that have enough capacity to supply Costco. New innovations will rise up in response to the market and I'd want to be on the front end, not the back end of the innovation cycle.
These are just my anecdotal observations so take them for what they're worth.
A recent report on efforts to control harmful "residues" in the US Beef supply has got me even more freaked out about eating a hamburger than I already was. Go here for one of my previous posts on problems with beef.
The audit report assesses the effectiveness of current monitoring for veterinary drugs, pesticides and heavy metals in beef and concludes that our current system is not doing the job.
Here are some choice quotes;
We found, however, that tolerances have not been set for many potentially harmful substances, which can impair FSIS’ enforcement activities. For example, in 2008, when Mexican authorities rejected a shipment of U.S. beef because it contained copper in excess of Mexico’s tolerances, FSIS had no basis to stop distribution of this meat in the United States since FDA has set no tolerance for copper.
Just to be clear, Mexico has a more thorough monitoring system for beef when it comes to heavy metals than we do in the US. The beef that had high levels of copper was rejected by Mexico and then, without a hitch, was slipped into the US food supply, probably ending up in school lunches or fast food hamburgers.
We also found that FSIS does not recall meat adulterated with harmful residue, even when it is aware that the meat has failed its laboratory tests. Between July 12, 2007, and March 11, 2008, FSIS found that four carcasses were adulterated with violative levels of veterinary drugs and that the plants involved had released the meat into the food supply. Although the drugs involved could result in stomach, nerve, or skin problems for consumers, FSIS requested no recall.
Heavy metal, drugs - this is starting to sound like a Metallica concert.
The report explains how some of these residues make their way into the food supply;
Residues are introduced into meat intended for human consumption for a variety of reasons. Some producers provide antibiotics to dairy cows in order to eliminate an infection after a calf is born. If the producer perceives that the cow is not improving, he may sell the animal to a slaughter facility so that he can recoup some of his investment in the animal before it dies. If the producer does not wait long enough for the antibiotic to clear the animal’s system, some of this residue will be retained in the meat that is sold to consumers.
The low grade meat from these death bed dairy cows is usually turned into cheap hamburger.
Meat from bob veal calves also frequently contains residue which may enter their system through medicated feed or from waste milk from cows that are going through a drug withdrawal period. Farmers are prohibited from selling milk for human consumption from cows that have been medicated with antibiotics (as well as other drugs) until the withdrawal period is over; so instead of just disposing of this tainted milk, producers feed it to their calves. When the calves are slaughtered, the drug residue from the feed or milk remains in their meat, which is then sold to consumers.
This is getting too gross for me so I'm going to have to stop here. Go to the link above and read the whole report if you like. Alternet has a nice summary of the report findings here. I'll just say what I've said before; I will gladly pay twice as much for grass fed beef at the farmers' market that is produced by farmers that I know and trust. This also means that I eat less beef, which is probably a good thing.
There is a water battle brewing in Eastern Washington north of Pasco and it looks like the feedlots are winning. As E&E publishing reports it;
At issue is a proposal by Easterday Ranches Inc. to build a feedlot for
30,000 head of cattle that would withdraw a shade under 1 million
gallons a day from the ancient Grande Ronde Aquifer during the driest
months of the year. The proposal has touched off a wave of concern
among local farmers, prompting Collins and about 20 of his neighbors to
form the nonprofit Five Corners Family Farmers to fight the feedlot
project and others that might come along behind it.
The new feedlot is taking advantage of an outdated state statute that allows ranchers and feedlots to draw an unlimited amount of water for livestock. The owner, Cody Easterday, has estimated that the ranch will draw 300,000 gallons of water a day. I called Cody Easterday this morning to clarify if indeed during the hot summer months they will draw close to a million gallons of water per day, but he had not comment.
The lawsuit brought by other farmers in the area was thrown out by a Franklin county judge last week based on the "clear and unambigous" nature of the statute. It was originally written to accomodate the water needs of small family farms, not big feedlot operations.
The groundwater problems in eastern Washington are among the most
serious in the country, in part because the region is among the driest
in the country, averaging about 7 inches of rainfall a year.
In
Franklin County, the aquifer is receding about a foot a year, while
groundwater levels in neighboring Whitman County groundwater are
declining at an even faster rate of 1.5 feet per year.
A
state-funded study released in January found that the deep aquifer in
eastern Washington -- especially Franklin, Adams, Grant and Lincoln
counties -- are in serious trouble because "a significant percentage"
of the area's wells are tapping into the deepest part of the aquifer,
where the water is 10,000 years old and is not recharged by surface
water, said Paul Stoker, executive director of the four-county Columbia
Basin Groundwater Management Area, which conducted the study...
The
Easterday Ranch's feedlot is proposed near the southern boundary of the
Odessa Aquifer, which Slattery described in his November letter as
perhaps "the most critical water supply shortage in the state."
It's because of issues like this that I eat a lot less beef than I used to, and when I do it's from small, grass fed farms.
Cody Easterday was also recently involved in a lawsuit challenging the 2008 Farm Bill requirement to provide country of origin information on beef in the grocery story.
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