A couple weeks ago, tomatoes went off the shelves in groceries and off the plates in restaurants after being connected to a salmonella outbreak. It’s not the tomatoes themselves that are infected, it’s the processing plants where they’re packed, or turned into other products that are causing the problems. The outbreak continues, the FDA continues to flounder, and Sarah and I can only wonder: why aren’t more people talking about locally grown and packed produce that not only tastes better, but is more likely safer (and certainly easier to control in the event of a problem like salmonella)? I realize not everywhere in the country is great for tomato growing (we’re spoiled here in Maryland–throw tomato seeds on the ground and wait), but there are plenty of hydroponic and potted plant options if your soil isn’t conducive.
Meg’s short list of solutions to the tomato crisis:
1. Shop farmers markets or locally grown sections in your grocery for regional tomatoes
2. Grow your own
3. Be the person that creates the Tomato of the Month club
4. Buy lesser processed tomatoes (like those still on the vine)
5. Write the FDA and encourage more regionalized produce inspection processes, like the ones the USDA has for meat processing plants
6. Vive la difference: take this moment of doubt as an opportunity to try other veg. I’m a fan of peaches for similar texture and tart. Try a peach, swiss, turkey burger with lots of pepper, and red onions (if onions are your thing). Fruit is pretty awesome in salads, and makes a wicked salsa when you combine it with the right herbs.
Yesterday I asked of the Post’s Young Lives at Risk series: When did people stop caring about what their food tastes like, and how it makes them feel? They didn’t answer the question in so many words (instead we got a feature on fat camps that kind of appalled me), but I think they’re starting to dance around it.
Somewhat detached from the series, Sally Squire’s regular column, the Lean Plate Club, talks about her trip to Yorktown High’s home ec class. The students are all loving it. The guys are having a great time learning to cook for themselves, and they actually outnumber the girls in the particular class Squires visited.
One student’s mom says, “It’s perfectly fine for him to learn to cook on his own and not make his mom cook all night every night,” said Sukhbaatar Sanjdorj, whose son, Turmunkh, 17, is in one of Molle’s [the teacher] classes. On Mother’s Day, Turmunkh prepared chicken fajitas for his mother. He also regularly makes spanikopita, the Greek spinach pie. “He never ate spinach before,” said Sanjdorj. “Now he even goes out and buys all the different ingredients.”
Buys the ingredients? As in, knows what vegetables actually look like? Understands how things combine to make a finished product? Whoa, revolutionary.
My foodie and I are totally addicted to this BBC America show You Are What You Eat with Gillian McKeith. She’s fabulous. It takes “Britain’s biggest eaters” and cuts them down to size with better nutrition, a little exercise, and dry British sass. Nearly every episode, on the soon-to-be-reformed eater’s first trip to the grocery to buy real food–they have no idea what actual vegetables look like. They have to ask for help to identify anything more exotic than an onion it seems. On another couple episodes, Gillian takes her charges to the farm to see veg growing in the ground. The less detached you are from your food, the more up close and personally you know it, the more likely you are to care about what goes into your body. I won’t even get into her laying out of the weekly eatings in the beginning of the show…
It’s the same with PETA’s Meet Your Meat series: you see what happens to the meat you eat before you eat it, and (they hope) you won’t want to anymore. (It’s almost worked for me–I’m a cage free egg buyer, at the very least).
So then, I posit that if you’re not cooking your food, or at least understanding where it comes from, you’re less likely to care about what you’re eating because you’re too detached from the process. Get intimate with your food, love you food, and in turn, love yourself.
Having tackled the quality of care for illegal aliens in ICE detention centers last week, now the Washington Post is onto Young Lives At Risk: Our Overweight Children*. Gruesome graphics, scary statistics, chats, and stories guaranteed to warrant popular outcry on all sides of the issue will be included. While I’m so far less than impressed with the series, they did include 10 interesting facts on Sunday, including:
–25 percent of all vegetables eaten in the United States are french fries or chips.
–Soft-drink consumption has increased 300 percent in 20 years and is the leading source of added sugars for adolescents.
Ew? I’m not sure I buy the 25% of all vegetables eaten are french fries or chips bit, but I believe the soda part. My question is: why? Cheap and easy, yes. Convenient: no question.
But when did people stop caring about what their food tastes like, and how it makes them feel? That’s the one thing I want to know most, and I suspect it’s the one thing the Post isn’t going to cover.
* I’d like to note that it certainly hasn’t been a slow news year: why all the feature series above the fold at the Post? Real life is still happening, right? Just checking…
2007 has been a less than stellar year as far as food safety is concerned. Seemingly every week we’ve faced yet another recall: beef, chicken, pork. An article in the New York Times this morning talks about what Tyson is doing to change their beef processing. They’re changing the way they steam, vacuum, and treat a carcass. But Dean Danilson, the man in charge of food safety at Tyson, hits on something interesting in one line of the article. He says, “Keeping the dust down [at cattle ranches], knocking some of the caked-on mud and things off, any little bit helps.”
The way I see it, there are two distinct parts to the meat process: the part where the animal is alive, and the part where the animal is dead. Why put all the burden on the meat processors? Why not share the burden of food safety with ranchers? Mass ranching is a brutal and disgusting process. If we make it a little cleaner, a little more humane, a little less crowded, maybe we’ll have fewer problems with extremely dirty, damaged carcasses coming to the meat processors. Same goes for chickens and pork.
Maybe I’m beating the PETA drum a little too hard, but I think it could make a difference. Many consumers are responding well to cage free eggs, and the commercials about “happy cows” for California cheese were somewhat successful. Why not expand into meat production? Furthermore, a less crowded method of farming will leave a smaller ecological footprint. Green is in, and hey, not getting food poisoning is always a winner. Let’s go with it.
I may be a city gal born and bred but I’ve spent my fair share of time in the country and along the way I developed a bit of a fondness for animals of the livestock variety. At times it has bordered on obsessive and at various stages of my childhood I begged for a cow, a pig, goats, sheep, a llama and a number of other creatures. I think the only farm animal I didn’t want was a chicken- a hatred resulting from a traumatic encounter with a bird named Betsy- which is fine since they’re not technically considered livestock. Completely unrelated to my agricultural dreams, I happened to fall in love with everyone’s favorite ginormous land mammal: the American Bison, also known as buffalo. I’m not quite sure where this love comes from but while other little girls decorated their trapper keepers with dolphin stickers I perused the library for bison facts. At an embarrassing late date I realized that bison are in fact considered livestock, a discovery that lead to the most unreasonable request I have made of my family to date: I wanted my very own buffalo. As one might expect my family refused to fulfill this request. And then they laughed at me. Read the rest of this entry »
For me, both issues boil to down to choice and personal responsibility. In the case of the vegan parents, and any parents really, it was their responsibility to make sure that their baby nutritionally under cover. It’s no mystery that vegan and vegetarian practitioners have to pay close attention to what they’re eating in order to get all the right vitamins and minerals needed to stay healthy, and responsible vegans understand this about their choice of diet. It follows that responsible vegan parents would understand that they need to make extra sure that all the good stuff’s there in their childrens’ diets as well. Unlike Nina Planck, I do not think that a vegan diet is inherantly cruel for children. I just think that you’ve got to back up your choice responsibly. Plenty of happy, healthy, well adjusted vegan kids in the world. Besides, food and parenting takes a lot of faces in the news. Remember Connor McCreaddie in the UK? He was just about carted off to social services because he was obese, and his mother was accused for his condition. Unlike a baby, however, Connor was 14, and arguably needed to take some responsibility of his own… but that’s a point aside. End of story: people make their own choices, and have the responsibility to back them up, vegan parents or otherwise.
However, I find this tainted Chinese stuff coming ashore to be a much greater problem because often (like in the case of pet food, toothpaste) we’re not even made aware of where products are coming from in order to make informed choices, hold up our end of the choice/responsibility thing. That strikes me as something that should be more closely monitored. The Post article up there talked about a ton of stuff that’s been rejected from China this year. That’s worth a public outcry.
A couple weeks ago, tomatoes went off the shelves in groceries and off the plates in restaurants after being connected to a salmonella outbreak. It’s not the tomatoes themselves that are infected, it’s the processing plants where they’re packed, or turned into other products that are causing the problems. The outbreak continues, the FDA continues to flounder, and Sarah and I can only wonder: why aren’t more people talking about locally grown and packed produce that not only tastes better, but is more likely safer (and certainly easier to control in the event of a problem like salmonella)? I realize not everywhere in the country is great for tomato growing (we’re spoiled here in Maryland–throw tomato seeds on the ground and wait), but there are plenty of hydroponic and potted plant options if your soil isn’t conducive. 
