California Propositon NO 2 - PASSED

Thank you CALIFORNIA!!!! Now it is time for other states to follow their lead

read the story at www.farmsanctuary.org

Picture of a battery crate that chickens are stuffed into. This is no secret. I have known about such cages for the past 50 years so why are they still here and why do most people pretend they don't know. This is just plain ignorance.

Proposition 2, the proposed Standards for Confining Farm Animals initiative statute[1], is a California ballot proposition in that state's general election on November 4, 2008. The proposition would prohibit the confinement of certain farm animals in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs. The measure would deal with three types of confinement: veal crates, battery cages, and sow gestation crates. If approved by the voters, the statute would become operative on January 1, 2015. Farming operations would have until that date to implement the new space requirements for their animals, and the measure would prevent animals in California from being confined in these ways in the future.

Picture of pig gestation creates

What a shame! Pigs are the most intelligent of our farm animals. They are as intelligent as our dogs that we lavish all sorts of love and care on. What did they ever do to deserve this kind of treatment. Next time you bite in your pork chop think about where your pig came from and what sort of life it had. You need to be buying your meat from local farms. If this is not possible purchase a CSA (community supported agriculature) share which includes meat. Lastly, if none of this is possible look for a local butcher. Always ask where your meat comes from and how it was treated. It is your moral obligation. This is that a well looked after pig looks like. Vote YES on Proposition No 2 for the East Coast usually follows suit shortly thereafter.

Urban Farmer Wins $500k "Genius" Award

Now this is what I like to hear.

Many of the awards fell into the science or arts category but a couple did't fit into either. One of these was the non-profit Growing Power, Inc. http://www.growingpower.org/
It was started 15 years go by Will Allen a farmer in Millwarke who saw teens without work and a farm that needed help. What I think was creative is how he fashioned this partnership. Some would have just used the kids as cheap labor but not Will. He had vision.

Will's offer to Growing Power was that the teens would work at his store and renovate the greenhouses to grow food for their community. This simple idea has 15 years later, blossomed into a national and global commitment to sustainable food systems.

Since its inception, Growing Power has served as a ”living museum” or “idea factory” for the young, the elderly, farmers, producers, and other professionals ranging from USDA personnel to urban planners. Training areas include the following: acid-digestion, anaerobic digestion for food waste, bio-phyto remediation and soil health, aquaculture closed-loop systems, vermiculture, small and large scale composting, urban agriculture, perma-culture, food distribution, marketing, value-added product development, youth development, community engagement, participatory leadership development, and project planning. Here is picture of their headquarters


In 2005 Will Allen won a Leadership For A Changing World award from the Ford Foundation see what they had to say about his efforts at the website http://www.leadershipforchange.org/awardees/awardee.php3?ID=303
Their farms in urban Chicago

Congratulations to Will and all the folks at Growing Power, this is what it is all about.




Visit the MacArthur Foundaton http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.855229/k.CC2B/Home.htm

Cows Grazing in the Rumpus Room - NYT Blog

Grazing in the Rumpus Room - Allison Arieff - By Design - Opinion - New York Times Blog

I know why the caged hen squawks

Many people think that buying "organic" is the be all and end of all of all they need to know about purchasing their food. This is not true. It says nothing about how the animals are kept or treated. It is just common sense that if you stuff thousands of hens together you will get disease. Perhaps it is the hens revenge on us for treating them so badly. We should pay attention. It doesn't have to be this way.

Reprinted from the Grist website
www.gristmill.grist.org
The case for sustainable grown food as a healthier and safer alternative to industrial dreck is gaining force. Here's the latest, from Natural Choices UK:
www.naturalchoices.co.uk/

A recent U.K.government survey shows that organic laying hen farms have a significantly lower level of Salmonella. Salmonella is a bacterium that causes one of the commonest forms of food poisoning worldwide. The study showed that 23.4 per cent of farms with caged hens tested positive for salmonella compared to 4.4 per cent in organic flocks and 6.5 per cent in free-range flocks.

U.K. organic standards are run by an NGO called the Soil Association, which creates rules with consumers and smallish farmers in mind, not industrial giants. "The Soil Association insists on higher welfare standards for organic poultry than most other organic certifiers," the group declares in its organic-egg standards. The Association insists that hens be "truly free range," "looked after in small flocks," and have ample access to "fresh grass and air."
www.soilassociation.org

Our own USDA organic standards are much more concerned about how giant operations can cash in on the organic craze. So all we get on animal standards is that "All organically raised animals must have access to the outdoors" -- a stipulation that has been subject to much, well, chicanery. Michael Pollan found "organic" hens stuffed into pens for his Omnivore's Dilemma research, their "access to outdoors" amounting to an unutilized concrete patch. www.ams.usda.gov/nop/FactSheets/ProdHandE.html

And the Cornucopia Foundation has documented that large-scale "organic" dairies for years stuffed cows into confinements and feed them (organic) corn. www.commondreams.org/news2007/0607-11.htm/

As for salmonella and eggs, the issue seems to be about whether the hens are wallowing in their own feces. So if a large portion of U.S. organic layers are doing just that, it seems doubtful that our own supermarket organic eggs can offer the same benefit as those in the U.K. The egg study comes on the heels of a peer-reviewed U.K. study showing that organic milk cuts "the incidence of eczema in infants fed on organic dairy products, and whose mothers also consumed organic dairy products," by 36 percent.

Biggest recall of frozen beef in U.S. history

By now most folks have seen the video on UTube that was released by the Humane Society of the U.S. It shows workers at the Hallmark/Westland Meet Packing Co. kicking cows and using electric prods and forklifts to make them move. People who saw the video say it was sickening. I don't need to look, I know, and this is why i don't buy commercial lot meat.

Whle these acts are violations of a 2003 prohibition on downer cattle from entering the food supply as a precaution against mad-cow disease. The real reason for the recall should be INHUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS.

According to public records, the privately held company was founded in 1985 in what is known as the Chino milkshed. The company has 200 employees and sells beef to institutional vendors such as the USDA's school lunch program and fast-food restaurants, including Southern California icons In-N-Out Burger and Jack in the Box.

Last year, the federal government purchased nearly $39 million of ground beef from Westland/Hallmark at an average price of $1.42 a pound. That represented about 40% of the company's roughly $100 million in annual sales, according to industry sources. There are very few inspectors at the USDA to check out plants. By reducing their budget the government is ensuring that this type of behavior continues so that they can buy cheap beef. Don't support it!!!

The heart of the matter is that meat can only be cheap if you fatten up animals quickly, polluate the water and land, speed up the lines to the degree that workers and animals suffer grave injuries and then you can have your cheap meat. But even then, it comes at as price which most folks are unwilling to think about and that is your long term health in eating this kind of meat.

While two staff members have been charged with animal cruelty all the owners of Hallmark need to be tried. Companies follow the lead of the CEO and the Executive Committee. Do NOT SUPPORT THIS COMPANY instead support the efforts of the Humane Society of America.

The list of products to avoid now and in the future is very long. However look at meat packages for the words WESTLAND MEAT CO or PACKED FOR: KING MEAT CO. Alternatively buy your meat from reputable sources...they do exist.

What Have They Done to My Bread?

All you need to make bread is yeast, water, and flour. Therefore, what makes sliced bread so light and fluffy and last so long? Looking at the ingredients on the plastic wrap I found a whole pile of ingredients that I had no clue what they were. My philosophy in buying food is that if you don’t know what the ingredients are you don’t buy it or eat it.

After some investigation, I found that in the late 1950s the U.S. discovered a way to avoid the centuries’ old process of making bread that required 2-3 hours of fermentation. They did this by incorporating air and water into dough and mixing it with intense energy in high speed mechanical mixers. This process however required the quantity of yeast to be doubled to make it rise; chemical oxidants to get the gas in; and hardened fat to provide the structure – without the fat, the bread collapsed in early experiments – but the process removed the intensive labor, reduced costs and provided much higher yields of bread from each sack of flour as the dough absorbed so much more water.

Chemical oxidants were incorporated into a premix of additives with soya flour as the carrier for the chemical ingredients. The improver or ‘flour treatment agent’ was the logical way to add the fats needed into the bread. Hydrogenated fat is used because of its high melting point that gives the bread the structure it needs; Hydrogenated fat contains trans-fat.

As the “process” involved it was found that emulsifiers provided a similar function to the fat. They plug the gaps, enabling the dough to retain more air while also slowing down the staling of the bread. The most commonly used group of emulsifiers in bread is the data esters, relatively novel and complex compounds, made from petrochemicals. Salt goes into the bread to add flavor, up to 0.5g per 100g for white sliced, making it a high-salt food.

In the late 1990s, many western governments banned the use of chlorine to bleach white bread which led manufacturers to find alternatives such as enzymes and other novel ingredients. Enzymes have been used for centuries in food preparation but today many of them used in baking today are produced by genetically modified organisms. It is the microorganisms that produce the enzymes however, rather than the enzymes themselves, that have been modified. As enzymes are destroyed in the baking process it does not needed to be listed on the label, because they are not there!. The bread is then finished off by spraying it with either potassium sorbate or calcium propionate – both antifungal agents which inhabit the growth of moulds. Potassium sorbate is a poly unsaturated fatty acid salt. Do you really want to eat this kind of bread?

So this is what goes into the packaged, sliced white loaf of bread but what’s taken out?

The whole grain consists of an outer fibrous layer of bran; the germ and the inner white endosperm. The bran contains the fibre, some protein, fats and minerals. The germ contains most of the oils, some protein and the highest concentration of vitamins and minerals. The endosperm is mostly carbohydrate and some protein. The oil of the whole grain has traditionally been one of the most important sources in the diet of essential fats, which are vital for a healthy brain and nervous tissue function, but when whole wheat is milled to white flour, the most nutritious part of the grain is taken away. During the milling of white flour, over twenty vitamins and minerals present in the original wheat grain are reduced by half or more.

When you stone-grind flour the grain goes in at the top and comes out the side twenty seconds later. You know you have the whole lot. Also white flour can be matured by careful storage and does not need additives and enzymes. For thousands of years grain was milled this way. It’s a relative gentle process that leaves most of the nutrients intact. But a pair of stones can only grind 250 kilos of flour an hour which is why commercial bakeries have abandoned the process. While you can get excellent bread made from scratch from local independent bakeries, most purchase their flour from the big agribusinesses such as General Mills. Make sure you know what kind of flour was used in your bread.

Don’t forget too that there is extensive use of Pesticides and Fertilizers on wheat. Some of the main chemicals (insecticides, herbicides and fungicides) used on commercial wheat crops are disulfoton (Di-syston), methyl parathion, chlorpyrifos, dimethoate, diamba and glyphosate. Although all these chemicals are approved for use and considered safe, consumers are wise to reduce their exposure as much as possible. Besides contributing to the overall toxic load in our bodies, these chemicals increase our susceptibility to neuro toxic diseases as well as to conditions like cancer. Many of these pesticides function as xenoestrogens, foreign estrogen that can reap havoc with our hormone balance and may be a contributing factor to a number of health conditions. For example, researchers speculate these estrogen-mimicking chemicals are one of the contributing factors to boys and girls entering puberty at earlier and earlier ages. They have also been linked to abnormalities and hormone-related cancers including fibrocystic breast disease, breast cancer and endometriosis.

Much of this article was rewritten or excepted from Not On The Label by Felicity Lawrence; chapter four

Sources

http://www.mercola.com/2003/jul/26/avoid_wheat.htmf
http://www.weightlossresources.co.uk/food/labelling/not_on_the_label.htm
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11712
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3675/is_199606/ai_n8747244#continue
http://www.arrowheadmills.com/products/category.php?cat_id=63
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/felicity_lawrence/profile.html

Local New England Purveyors of Food

This is a personal list of places that I have shopped at or do shop at. There are many more N.E. purveyors of food not listed that can be found either on the Internet or in the edibleBoston magazine. This will be updated time to time as I found new purveyors or new items to add

Apple Cider
Carlson Farms, Harvard; I didn’t understand the love of New Englanders for apple cider until I drank their cider at their farm. It can be bought also at Whole Foods.

Bread
Hum! Bread seems to be a very personal thing. There are many fine local bakeries but my favorite bread comes from Clear Flour Bread in Brookline available at their store at 178 Thorndike St, Brookline or Whole Foods in Newton and Newtonville. They use unbromated and unbleached flour and specialize in the breads of France and Italy.
www.clearflourbread.com

Cheese
Formaggio Kitchen Cambridge; go there early on a Sunday morning and ask them if you can see their cheese cave for which they are most proud. This is the place that Julia Child always went for her cheeses. They sell Carlisle Farmstead Cheese featured in the first edition of edibleBoston magazine. www.formaggiokitchen.com

Chicken
Not as local as I would like but the best chicken I have eaten is from Bella Farms, Allensville NY and is sold at Lionette’s in the South End. The farm raises their animals at a normal rate instead of how “factory” chickens are raised and they arrive at the store 24 hours after being slaughtered. The flavor is wonderful. They have two types of heirloom chickens: Blanco (ideal for roasting and grilling) and Fedora (or black chicken) – its feathers are black and it’s best for braising. No other chicken from anywhere else will do. I am hooked! Let’s have an “adopt a farmer week” http://www.goeboston.com/index2.html

Chocolate
Taza Chocolate located at 561 Windsor St in Somerville produces chocolate in a very ethical manner. They are respectful to the environment and their workers who harvest and process it. It is fair trade and organic from bean to bar and it is GREAT chocolate. There chocolate can be found at some of favorite places: Berman’s Wine and Spirits, Lexington, Diesel Café, Somerville, Darwin’s, Cambridge and Lionette’s in the South End. http://www.tazachocolate.com/

Coffee
Terroir Coffee (http://www.terroircoffee.com/) located in Acton run and by the best known coffee guy in the U.S. George Howell. You probably all remember the Coffee Connection before it was bought out by Starbucks (this was George’s chain). He deals in single origin coffee and pays a premium price for it.

Beef
Willbrand Farm, Brandon, VT and North Hollow Farm – all grass fed and distributed by Hardwick Beef , Vermont.

Eggs
Very problematic if you care about the well being of chickens; after much searching my two favorites for taste are Maple Meadow in VT and Butterbrook Farm. However Maple Meadow’s idea of “cage free” is not the image the average consumer would have. 6,000 chickens nest in individual boxes in a huge high tech building. I am very anxious to taste the eggs from Herb FARMacy, Salisbury whose chickens do run around outside.

Fruit Cake
Yes, I know many people have eaten awful fruit cakes in their lives but Emily Dickenson’s brandy cake made in Concord Teacakes own bakery and sold in their store in West Concord is worth the drive. It is a rich and moist fruit cake. Bar making your own it’s the best I have found. They opened in 1984 as a small whole sale operation starting with this fruit cake and their scones and the recipe has remained consistent through all these years.

Herbs
Herb Lyceum at Gilson's, located in a renovated 19th century carriage house in Groton on the grounds of the Gilson Family Homestead. You can walk around the grounds or take a self-guided tour of the fragrant gardens and greenhouses. All the herb plants and culinary herbal products are available for purchase and they are produced from the herbs that they grow. They are open Wednesday through Sunday from 9:00 - 4:00 p.m. www.gilsonslyceum.com

Lamb
Not Your Ordinary Farm, Guilford, Vermont

Milk
Crescent Ridge Dairy, Sharon MA
I had literally stopped drinking milk until I discovered this milk sold in bottles at Whole Foods supermarket. Their milk comes from the 500 head of Holstein cows at the 5th generation Howrigan Family Farm in Fairfield VT. The milk is tasted at St. Albans Cooperative a milk processing plant in VT and then shipped directly to Crescent Ridge.
It is not ultra pasteurized hence its flavor.

Pastries and Cakes
Vicki Lee’s Belmont; the best bar none! http://www.vickilees.com/

Pig
I am very wary about buying pork. They are such intelligent animals that for me it is critical that they are slaughtered and humanely and with great care. This takes me to Bob Clark in Ferrisburg, VT. A typical Vermont farmer who has never left Vermont and never will! He primarily raises Yorkshire pigs along with a few Berkshire pigs. Again this meat can be found at Lionette’s. Do call ahead to order a particular cut as they are a very small operation.

Scones
These are plain scones with currents and are made in the baker of Concord Teacakes in West Concord. They melt in your mouth; no doubt from all the butter they use. Not for the faint hearted!

Tortillas
Maria and Ricardo's Tortilla Factory/Harbar Corp., Quincy, http://www.harbar.com/, all-natural, kosher corn and flour tortillas. These are the best. They can be bought directly from the factory in bulk (100 per bag) or they can be bought from Whole Foods. Until you have used really good tortilla’s you cannot appreciate the difference they will make in your dish.

Raspberries Saved Their Land

Silferleaf Farm

In Concord, Massachusetts, Svea Johnson and her son Tom have been growing organic raspberries on their farm for over 20 years. Silferleaf farm came into being in 1978 when Svea decided that she needed a way to get the land to pay for itself. Svea was recently divorced, raising two small children, and working as a nurse and so things were not easy for the family. One day she sat down and wondered how she could use the open fields to get the land pay towards its upkeep. What would give her a decent return for her efforts while not taking a lot of time? Both raspberries and blue berries were considered. She checked around to see if there were any other local growers of these fruits and finding there was not, decided on raspberries as they would produce berries the following year. She made the decision to plant an everbearing variety, so she would only have one crop in the fall, and thus avoid the summer heat. Svea and her son Tom cleared the first field of brush and several cedar trees and in1978 plowed the field. In spring the entire extended family was involved in the process of planting the little sticks and roots. So began the job of hard work, lots of learning about life and running a business.

Silferleaf Farm occupies eleven acres and is a natural work of beauty with ponds, woods, and fields.. Back in the 1800s there was a dairy farm on this land along with a guesthouse for vacationing city people who arrived by train from Boston. In WWII it was a chicken farm and now it is a raspberry farm and so the farming tradition continues!

On average, the land yields 2000 lbs of raspberries per acre during the 6-8 weeks growing season. The Johnson’s raise the fruit on two acres of land of which a portion is always fallow. They rotate the crop every 12 years allowing for a 3-year rest before replanting. On another small piece of land the family grows their own vegetables and has planted a few apple and peach trees.

From the beginning the decision was made that it would be a “Pick Your Own” farm which means they essentially have no labor costs. If they had to pay local labor costs they feel that they would not have a viable operation because they would be competing against California berries that are picked under much better conditions and much lower labor costs.

Even though they only have one crop on two acres of land they are constantly rotating, fertilizing, weeding (we go across the fields 3 times a year) along with hand weeding, trellising, and monitoring the drip irrigation system. Long durations of rain will destroy the crop so this is always a worry and one that is out of their hands. High humidity is another problem as it will cause molding on the bush. They decided to grow a heritage long time standard of fall bearing variety raspberry so that the bushes could be pruned mechanically and cut down at the end of the year. The summer bearing variety, produces several crops but has to be hand pruned which is why they didn’t choose it. Raspberries are one fruit where the flavor is locked in the moment you pick it, they do not continue to ripen once you pick them. The more ripe the raspberry the more flavor they have.

As is natural when you have an abundance of raspberries on your doorstop, Svea started looking for something to do with them. In Sweden, where Svea’s parents were from, they take any fruit and thicken it with potato flour to make a pudding and that was the first thing she made with the raspberries. The following year they had an excess of berries and Svea made some raspberry fusion and sold a few bottles at the farm stand Two yeas ago they decided to go ahead and get the kitchen certified by the town and the state so they could expand the sales of the Raspberry Infusion. The infusion is a brilliant idea, because when it rains people don’t come out to pick and wet raspberries do not have a shelf life.

When they began production, the majority of their customers were people who came to pick their berries. They have now expanded the distribution to include some local shops in their town and two branches of Whole Foods Markets. Word has since been spreading on the product and they are now receiving calls regularly from people looking for it. Bottles will be available again in September 2007.

The raspberry infusion is great on ice cream, salads, spritzers, as a vegetable glaze or a meat marinade. It can be purchased directly from Silverleaf Farmm 460 Strawberry Hill Road, Concord. You Pike starts in September, call for more information at 978-369-3624 or email Silferleaf@cs.com.

Published in edibleBoston Summer 2007 and Farmers Markets Today Dec/Jan 2008

My writing can be found at http://www.edibleboston.net/index.htm and www.belmontfarmersmarket.org/newsletters/2007

What is That Chicken I'm Eating Anyway?

With recent food scares, many consumers are starting to question where their food comes from. I am one of those people. I call farms and ask questions about how the animals are raised, and I have even been known to call the slaughterhouse to try and gauge whether the animal was treated humanely or not.

In this process I have learned a lot. Some farmers will talk at length and tell you what their animals are partial to eating, how they live, and how they care for them. Others will not discuss anything and when you ask the breed of animal, they will say “you wouldn’t recognize it.” I wonder if farmers realize that this kind of answer throws up a red flag to the consumer.
The best chickens that I have ever eaten come from a farm in Allensville, N.Y. The chickens are so good that until recently I wanted to adopt the farmer who raised them. This is a story of what changed in the relationship!

I had always been told that the chicken I was buying was an heirloom Kosher King and it was priced accordingly. Then one day a friend who raises chickens told me it didn’t look like an heirloom chicken; for one thing, its legs should have been longer. While heirloom and heritage are often used interchangeably, three components are involved in the use of these two words: unique genetic breed traits, grown or raised many years ago, and typically produced in a sustainable manner.

I called the store where I bought the chicken and asked them to look into the matter which they did. They called the farm and were told it was a Kosher Cobb. This name was unfamiliar to me, and a Goggle search produced nothing. I looked up Cornish Cobb and discovered that a Cobb is a Cornish X Rock cross – not a heritage bird but a modern hybrid bred specifically for meat production.

Then I went to the farm’s own website, which said they had Fedora, Ross, Silver Cross, and Kosher King chickens and that their chickens were allowed to take their normal time to fatten up. Was it their special diet of corn, canola seeds, and soybeans that made them taste so good? Or was it other reasons, such as whether they were pastured in movable hen houses or the age they were killed?

As I pondered these questions, I decided to go to the end of the process and check the slaughterhouse one more time. Yiks! I discovered the “Buddhist style chicken” label clipped on the chicken looked the same as the chicken I had been eating, except, in tiny letters, the name of the slaughterhouse had changed.

It turned out that this slaughterhouse was cited in November 2005 by the USDA for sanitation violations and assault of the inspectors. I had always assumed that “Buddhist style poultry” meant that the chicken was treated with great respect, as Buddhists don’t believe in injuring or killing a live, breathing animal or person. However, I found out that “Buddhist style poultry” merely refers to a chicken that has its head and feet left on and the intestines taken out – not the humane treatment of animals.

Now I felt it was time to speak to someone at the farm, which I did. I was told that since their slaughter facility burned down 2-1/2 years ago, they were using two outside slaughter houses. They didn’t seem too concerned when I mentioned the violations of the slaughterhouse.
Here’s what they told me: They deliver Fedora, Ross and Kosher King varieties to the store where I buy my chicken, but most likely I was eating a Ross, a white featured bird – hence the name Blanco. Their two heirloom birds were the Silver cross and the Kosher King.
The farm gets birds from eight other farms and keeps them in coops with a 25-foot-high roof, double the space that commercial chickens get. Because of the quantity of birds they have and with the danger of predators and bird flu, the chickens are not allowed outside. They are raised by age rather than weight –to-feed ratio.

The farm never advertises that its birds are free roaming because of the connotations the term would have with customers. The chickens are not fed organic grain and they are killed between six and 10 weeks old. About 2,000 birds are shipped out a day, six days a week.
So what was bothering me?

Several things: The Silver Cross and the Kosher King are hybrids, not heirloom birds. The farm doesn’t need to be concerned with weight-to-feed ratio because this was taken care of in the breeding. Chickens don’t fly upward 10 feet – never mind 25 feet – and the reason the chickens are not outside is that they probably have upward of 50,000 birds in one place at any one time, and the care or lack of care that goes into slaughtering a chicken is indicative of its life here on earth. Those were the things wrong with our conversation.

Now don’t misunderstand me. The chicken I had eaten was excellent. My point is this: There should be truth and transparency from the producer to the consumer and there is a cost factor to consider.

The most common breeds of chicken consumed in the U.S, are Cornish X Rock crosses that are bred to gain weight quickly and inexpensively. Selling a hybrid chicken as a heirloom that is not even fed organic grain is like ordering a filet mignon in a restaurant and receiving a flank steak.
As a consumer or as a producer, what do you think and what would you do?

Published in Farmers Market Today October 2007

My writings can be found at http://www.edibleboston.net/index.htm and www.belmontfarmersmarket.org/newsletters/2007