You Can Have Your Sustainable Turkey and Eat It Too

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When people think about Thanksgiving, the first thing that should pop into mind is gratitude for all of the blessings received throughout the year. The real first thought, however, may be food. Thanksgiving, the most delicious of holidays, is a great time to experiment with sustainable and heritage foods. Sustainably-raised heritage turkeys are slightly more expensive, but you can be confident that the bird was raised humanely and will taste all the better for it. Most Thanksgiving staples are seasonal, so most of what you need for mashed potatoes, stuffing and pies should be readily available at the farmers market. And while you might be thinking foooood, buying sustainable and local is about celebrating food the way it should be.

If you haven’t ordered your turkey yet, check out Heritage Foods USA, but do it soon because the birds are about to fly the coop! If you don’t have the urge to cook a gigantic Thanksgiving dinner but still have the desire to eat one, search the Eat Well Guide for sustainable restaurants that will serving one instead.

Read on to find out what we’ve been up to at Sustainable Table and The Meatrix and learn what our friends are doing too! Have a very joyful Thanksgiving!

Meatless Monday

Our sister organization, Meatless Monday, has found themselves in the middle of a very hot topic! As industrial agriculture’s part in climate change has become clear and the health benefits of eating less meat are more apparent every day, Meatless Monday is the way to go. Check out their website next Monday to read “10 Ways to Cook Up a Meatless Thanksgiving,” written by trained chef and longtime food journalist, Kim O’Donnel. She will also be hosting “Table Talk with Kim O’Donnel” on the Culinate website, Thursday (tomorrow!) at 1pm Eastern time.

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Food Inc. Hosting Online Chat This Thursday

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I just saw Food Inc. for the first time this weekend. It was informative and captivating, I happily stayed awake through the whole movie! And it’s rentable and NetFlixable too – if you haven’t seen it, rent it and share it with friends and family. It’s a wonderful introduction to the issues, but detailed enough for everyone to learn something.

Food Inc. will be hosting an online chat Thursday, Nov 19th with leading food advocacy groups Food and Water Watch and Community Food Security Coalition. The chat is being held in conjunction with the DVD release of Food, Inc. and will touch on topics raised in the film such as sustainable agriculture, small farmers, organics and school milk issues. You will have the opportunity to ask questions and get answers in real time.

Prior to the chat, there is 45 minutes of footage available for viewing on the site. It includes the film trailer, footage, PSAs, interviews with food experts at Slow Food Nation and a previous chat.

The live chat will take place on Thursday, November 19th at 9:00pm EST/ 6:00pm PST at: http://www.livestream.com/foodinc

Since the film’s release last spring, it has changed the way the world eats and shops. More than 40,000 people have signed the Child Nutrition Act Reauthorization and thousands more have started eating local and sustainably-grown food. However, more can be done. Thanksgiving is just weeks away, use this incredible holiday to make a statement to family and friends. Try to get as much of your holiday feast from local and sustainable producers. You can find them on the Eat Well Guide.

Please go to these websites for more information about Food Inc., Food and Water Watch, and Community Food Security Coalition.

Food Inc. on DVD from TakePart on Vimeo.

“Eating Animals” Enlivens Issues

This interview by Kerry Trueman was originally posted by our friends at Meatless Monday!

Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Eating Animals is a thorough look at the ethical and environmental quandaries posed by America’s appetite for meat. His wish is to foster more mindful eating, whether we choose to forego animal-based foods or simply reduce their consumption. Foer graciously ruminated on my meat-y questions when I spoke with him by phone last week.

KT: Your book is making quite a splash; it seems like you have this huge potential to influence a lot of people who haven’t previously given this a whole lot of thought.

JSF: I hope so. I know the topic is not easy to approach. But I also know that if the conversation is had correctly, it’s a conversation Americans are not only willing to have, they want to have.

When I did “Ellen,” I looked at her audience – it’s not Berkeley granola-eaters. It’s people on a fixed income, it’s a lot of mothers, a lot of people who come there from the middle of America. And people care.

KT: The industrial meat industry is attempting to dismiss your critique of their operating methods in the same way they’ve attacked Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser and all the others who’ve written exposes of factory farming. You presumably expected some backlash; has it been better or worse than you anticipated?

JSF: Infinitely better. The book’s now been reviewed, I don’t know, a hundred times or whatever it is, and there are enough people who think I’m an jerk, there are enough people who think the style is annoying. But there has not been a single argument in defense of factory farming, or against the premise of the book. Not even a whiff of it.

KT: Let me ask you, is the term “conscientious carnivore” an oxymoron?

JSF: No, and I think that points to something important, which is that these words “carnivore” and “vegetarian” do a real disservice to the conversation. They imply an on/off switch rather than a spectrum. When it’s framed as an all-or-nothing, people who don’t feel like they can do everything sometimes think they should do nothing.
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Antibiotics: If This Doesn’t Convince You, Nothing Will

As a child I had strep throat on a regular basis. The doctor would diagnose me by putting a giant Q-tip into the back of my throat to check for bacteria. I was given penicillin, amoxicillin, and tetracycline – at least those are the names of the antibiotics that I remember. I have always had an aversion to taking pills. I hated taking vitamins and even refused pain killers after surgery on my knee when I was 10. I stopped taking antibiotics when I felt “adult” enough to question whether or not I really needed them. The last time I took antibiotics I had been sick for many weeks and the doctor looked at me like I was crazy when I asked what would happen if I didn’t take the dose she recommended, “You are healthy enough that you won’t die from this, but do you really want to stay sick for at least another month?” I didn’t want to be sick anymore, so I took them and I got better right away.

Those antibiotics worked quickly and I was happy to be healthy again, but imagine if you were given medicine, specifically antibiotics, and they didn’t work. What if the doctor had to try multiple doses of different and increasingly potent drugs before they could get your infection under control? What if they couldn’t get it under control at all?  I swear my mother’s doctor will give her antibiotics “just in case” even if she only has a cold, or maybe she asks for them? Medical overuse is the main reason for antibiotic resistance in humans, but the other major reason is agriculture.

Antibiotics and agriculture? A strange combination, right? The use of antibiotics to treat illness in humans seems totally unrelated to agriculture – until you realize that about 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States is routinely fed to farm animals – and not animals that are sick either.

What are antibiotics and antibiotic resistance?

Antibiotics are natural, semi-synthetic or synthetic agents that are classified by whether they kill bacteria or inhibit its growth. One critical point is that antibiotics only attack bacteria, such as those that cause strep; they don’t work on viruses, such as those that cause a cold or flu.  While antibiotics are attacking bacteria that make you ill they also harm bacteria in your digestive tract that is necessary to keep you healthy, potentially causing other health problems. Penicillin was the first antibiotic to effectively treat previously deadly diseases such as syphilis, but many people are allergic to penicillin. There are now as many as 150 different types of antibiotics, which can attack bacteria that cause everything from earaches to life threatening cardiac infections.

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Sustainable Dish

Another win for Big Ag and CAFO lovers alike. Ohio passed a constitutional amendment creating a “Livestock Care Standards Board”. While this may sound promising, it thwarts organizations such as the Humane Society from trying to improve the standards of animal care and prevents new laws from being passed such as the one in California banning battery cages. The Cattle Network kind of “reports”.

Frequent questions asked of vegetarians: “But don’t you need meat to live?” “How do you get your protein?” “Are you sickly and anemic if you don’t eat beef?” Marion Nestle comes to the rescue with a blog post on why it’s just fine not to eat animals.

Bisphenol A – the little plastic that causes big problems. Looks like it’s finally getting the attention it desperately deserves. Nicholas Kristof reports in the New York Times.

“H1N1” or “Swine Flu”, which do you prefer? The name that reveals the link to factory farming, or the sanitized white house version? Tom Philpott suggests the media get more comfortable with “swine flu” on Grist.

Factory farmed products may be in the overwhelming majority of the food we eat, but it can be avoided with a bit of gumption. Nicolette Hahn Niman gives a detailed roundup of the steps to eating food you can be comfortable with on the Huffington Post.

A Farm in Danger: Help Save Bed-Stuy Farm

In one Brooklyn community, neighborhood residents are fighting to keep their farm. Bed-Stuy Farm, once a neighborhood garbage dump, was transformed into an urban oasis that produces over 7,000 lbs of fresh food every year, helping feed more than 4,000 people a month through the Brooklyn Rescue Mission.

The Farm is a source of community pride that has inspired neighborhood greening, backyard food gardening and food pantry agriculture projects.  It is a constant reminder to residents that better nutrition and healthy eating are within our grasp. Now, though, the project is threatened by development.

Check out the post Kerry Trueman wrote about it back in August to learn more and help save the Bed-Stuy Farm by signing this petition.

Daphne Oz’s Dorm Room Diet

From our friends at Healthy Monday…

Daphne Oz is a graduate of Princeton University and author of The Dorm Room Diet, a national bestseller that helps college students create healthy eating habits. Her father Mehmet Oz is a cardiac surgeon, talk show host and acclaimed author. Daphne uses both personal experience and the lessons of her upbringing to answer collegiate questions about diet and nutrition:

The introduction to The Dorm Room Diet welcomes readers of varying nutritional backgrounds. How can young people change their eating habits despite an upbringing that didn’t include healthy dining choices?

The trick to forming healthy dining habits, because or in spite of the habits you were raised with, is to live in the moment. Make every eating decision consciously. When you do splurge, just make sure you’ve actually made a decision to indulge, and are not quickly cramming food into your mouth simply out of habit, boredom – or because you think no one is looking (your waistline will be!).

Proper nutrition during your college years can have benefits beyond your immediate health. How do healthy eating habits impact academic success?

The blood sugar spike that occurs when you ingest a ton of simple carbohydrates gives a huge jolt of jittery energy, followed almost immediately by a blood sugar crash that can leave you exhausted and craving another sugar fix. Obviously, this makes focusing on classwork incredibly difficult. Making sure you are getting plenty of fruits and veggies, complex carbohydrates, proteins, and good fats can aid in mental acuity, information retention, and concentration.

In your book, you write that students should consume three small servings of protein a day, but you also state that only one serving should come from meat. What other foods offer protein and what benefits do they hold over meat products?

The next time you’re weighing whether you “need” to eat meat for your third meal of the day, keep in mind that Americans, on the whole, get up to 5 times more protein than they need. Also, meat isn’t the only source of protein, and you do NOT need it in your diet (certainly not on an every day basis). Consider this: A 6-ounce broiled porterhouse steak has 38 grams of protein, but it also has 44 grams of fat!

Some of my favorite meatless protein sources from my college days are kidney beans, garbanzo beans (chickpeas), lowfat cheese, cottage cheese, yogurt, peanut butter, protein bars, tofu/seitan jerky, cooked lentils, spinach and soy crisps.

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Eat Local (and sustainable!)

One of the most popular food trends in the past year or two has been local food. So why is eating local all the rage, and what can you do to be part of this growing movement?

What is local?

We need to start by defining the word local. It has different meanings to different people, but I define local as being as close to home as possible. With food, that would mean buying food raised or produced as close to your home as possible.

To purists, or locavores, local means buying food within a set radius, such as 50 or 100 miles. To others, local means as far as a day’s drive from where you live. Because geography and growing is different around the country (and world), I opt for a more flexible definition.

Technically, this means that any food you buy close to your home is local, even conventional or industrially produced food. So inherent within the local label is the concept of sustainable. Try to avoid food from a large industrial operation, no matter how close to your home it is. The best way to tell if a farm is industrial is to find out how big it is and how diverse its products are. A very large farm producing only one crop is most likely industrial – when you plant the same crop on many acres, you attract pests, which means you have to use pesticides. So focus on smaller farms, ones that have different types of crops, and find out what their growing practices are.

When you’re shopping for local food, look for local sustainable food from a small independent family farm. That means minimal chemical pesticides and fertilizers were used, the land and everything on it was treated with respect, and every effort was made to provide you with the most wholesome, nutritious food. In general, smaller farms are more sustainable because they tend to grow a variety of crops and undertake conservation practices such as crop rotation, so they usually have less problems with pests. But it’s always wise to find out exactly how your food was produced before you make the decision to buy and eat it.

Why buy local?

There are many reasons to buy local, including –

- Taste. Local sustainable food is most often picked when ripe because transport time to market is so small. It is also usually grown with minimal inputs such as chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This provides you with better tasting food.

- Better for you. Food raised close to home will not be shipped long distances so will be harvested when ripe, giving you optimal nutrition. Industrial food shipped long distances is harvested before ripe, shipped, and sometimes sprayed with chemicals to preserve or forcibly ripen it.

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Sustainable Dish

We tax cigarettes, we tax alcohol, we may even tax soda. Now the idea of taxing meat is being bandied about by Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University in The New York Daily News. Is it a classist ploy or the earth’s environmental salvation?

Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, “Eating Animals”, is the latest in a line of books espousing conscientious thought in eating. Elizabeth Colbert published a fantastic review in The New Yorker giving it both praise and due criticism. What I want to know is, does the author have anything new to say, or is it the same information Pollan and so many others have already published?

Nicole Hahn Niman strikes again with an op-ed in the New York Times defending small livestock farmers. In the face of a new report stating that GHG emissions from livestock may be as high as 51%, Hahn Niman states that small family farms aren’t the problem - de-forestation and industrial agriculture are.  I think she and Safron Foer (above) may have some disagreements on this one.

A man by the name of Islam Siddiqui has been nominated for the position of chief agricultural negotiator in the office of the U.S. trade representatives. You may know him from such frightening organizations as “CropLife America”, which openly blasted Michelle Obama’s organic garden.  Seems to be a blatant oxymoron; The New York Times reports.

Cocoa Krispies boosts your immunity! Wait, I take that back, and so does Kellogg. The cereal giant is reneging on its claim that Cocoa Krispies and other cereals boost health with added antioxidants. It’s a tough time out there for fake healthy food. See Advertising Age for the full story.

For the December edition of Consumer Reports, a plethora of cans, bottles and bags were tested for BPA – the results were not good. Fooducate gives a very clear breakdown of the problems associated with BPA (toxicity, brain damage, cancer), and Civil Eats gives some further insight.

All of our food may be produced by major agriculture corporations, but at least our wine’s still safe, right? Unfortunately, the top 30 wines sold in the U.S. all come from major producers who buy “grape juice” in bulk from various locations and slap a label on it. But don’t despair, small wineries still do exist, just look for “produced and bottled by” on the label and you’re in the clear. Read the full story on The Daily Beast.

Thursday Online Chats – Merrigan and Hirshberg

Tomorrow is full of online chats about sustainable agriculture – the first hosted by the USDA at 3pm (Eastern) with Kathleen Merrigan and the second hosted by Take Part featuring Gary Hirshberg at 9pm (Eastern).

Thursday at 3 p.m. – Kathleen Merrigan, “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food”

Agriculture deputy secretary Kathleen Merrigan will host her second Facebook chat. The topic of this chat will be farm to school, which involves getting and using fresh produce and other farm products from local and regional farmers for use in local schools. The effort not only supports increasing economic opportunities for local farmers but also helps school children make healthy food choices.

Details are available at www.usda.gov/live and people can submit a question in advance of the chat or watch the conversation on the USDA website. The website, at www.usda.gov/knowyourfarmer , features social media tools to help focus the public conversation about farming and food, while engaging American agriculture and linking producers to customers.

Thursday at 9p.m. – Gary Hirshberg, co-founder and CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm and Josh Trought, of D Acres Farm

Love Stonyfield yogurt? Have questions about sustainable agriculture and organic farming? Well now is your chance to ask Gary Hirshberg co-founder and CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm as well as Josh Trought of the D Acres farm and supporter of the National Family Farm Coalition about food, food politics and Food, Inc.

Grab your friends and family to watch Food, Inc. on DVD and then join our live discussion -the DVD hit shelves Tuesday, November 3rd!