Tag Archives: food and ag

Like Meat and Beer? Hate Cancer?

by silvermega-1959 Posted on March 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Spring is coming. Before long, beer-drinking men and women will be coaxing fiery embers to life and tossing dead animals onto charred metal grates above them. Ahh, the sizzle and snap of fat as it hits red hot coals. Oh no! What’s that you say? Carcinogens are caused by the “contact of dripping fat with hot embers“?

Fear not, eager human. And keep a couple of your dark winter beers handy, because researchers from Portugal and Spain have found that marinating your pork chops in dark beer dramatically reduces carcinogenic contamination. Rejoice!

Smoke, pyrolysis (organic matter decomposing in intense heat), and dripping fat can all cause the accumulation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) on charcoal-grilled meats. According to the EPA, PAHs have caused tumors, birth defects, and “reproductive problems” in lab animals—though the Agency clarifies that these effects have not yet been observed in humans. You can also find PAHs in cigarette smoke and car exhaust.

The researchers tested the effect of marinating meat with Pilsner, nonalcohol Pilsner, and Black beer, against a control sampling of raw meat. Black beer show the strongest “inhibitory effect,” reducing the formation of carcinogenic PAHs by 53 percent. Pilsner beer and nonalcholic Pilsner, showed less significant results: 13 percent and 25 percent respectively. The scientists aren’t entirely sure why a beer marinade has this effect; they speculate that it might be the antioxidant compounds in beer, especially darker varieties, which inhibit the movement of free radicals necessary for the formation of PAHs.

The study, which will be published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, and sponsored by the University of Porto and the American Chemical Society, confirms what we always knew in our hearts: Guinness is good for you.

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Like Meat and Beer? Hate Cancer?

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Are We Becoming China’s Factory Farm?

by WinnieBachman Posted on March 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Illustration: Michael Klein

China is in the midst of a love affair with pork. Its consumption of the stuff has nearly doubled since 1993 and just keeps rising. The Chinese currently eat 88 pounds per capita each year—far more than Americans’ relatively measly 60 pounds. To meet the growing demand, China’s hog farms have grown and multiplied, and more than half of the globe’s pigs are now raised there. But even so, its production can’t keep up with the pork craze.

So where is China looking to supply its demand for chops, ribs, loins, butts, and bellies? Not Southeast Asia or Africa—more like Iowa and North Carolina. US pork exports to China surged from about 57,000 metric tons in 2003 to more than 430,000 metric tons in 2012, about a fifth of all such exports. And that was before a Chinese company announced its intention to buy US pork giant Smithfield Foods in 2013. The way things are going, the United States is poised to become China’s very own factory hog farm. Here are a few reasons why:

It’s now cheaper to produce pork in the US than in China. You read that right: Our meat industry churns out hogs for about $0.57 per pound, according to the US Department of Agriculture, versus $0.68 per pound in China’s new, factory-scale hog farms. The main difference is feed costs. US pig producers spend about 25 percent less on feed than their Chinese counterparts, the USDA found, because the “United States has more abundant land, water, and grain resources.”

Americans are not as fond of “the other white meat” as we once were. You wouldn’t know it from the menus in trendy restaurants, but US consumers’ appetite for pork hit a peak in 1999 and has declined ever since. Yet industry, beholden to shareholders demanding growth, keeps churning out more. According to its latest projections, the USDA expects US pork exports to rise by another 0.9 metric tons by 2022—a 33 percent jump from 2012 levels.

Much of China’s arable land is polluted. Fully 40 percent has been degraded by erosion, salinization, or acidification—and nearly 20 percent is tainted by industrial effluent, sewage, excessive farm chemicals, or mining runoff. The pollution makes soil less productive, and dangerous elements like cadmium have turned up in rice crops.

Chinese rivers have been vanishing since the 1990s as demand from farms and factories has helped suck them dry. Of the ones that remain, 75 percent are severely polluted, and more than a third of those are so toxic they can’t be used to irrigate farms, according to a 2008 report by the Chinese government. According to the World Bank, China’s average annual water resources are less than 2,200 cubic meters per capita. The United States, by contrast, boasts almost 9,400 cubic meters of water per person.

Chinese consumers are losing trust in the nation’s food supply—and will pay for alternatives. A spate of food-related scandals over the past half decade has made food safety the Chinese public’s No. 1 concern, a 2013 study from Shanghai Jiao Tong University found. Judith Shapiro, author of the 2012 book China’s Environmental Challenges and director of the Natural Resources and Sustainable Development program at American University, says she expects Smithfield pork to command “quite a premium” in China, because it’s perceived as safer and better than the domestic stuff. Already, “US pork is particularly popular and commands premium prices, as it is viewed as higher quality due to our strict food safety laws,” a Bloomberg Businessweek columnist reported last July.

But what’s good for pork exporters may not be good for the United States: More mass-produced pork also means more pollution to air and water from toxic manure, more dangerous and low-wage work, and more antibiotic-resistant pathogens. And that’s just the beginning. In addition to ramping up foreign meat purchases, China is also rapidly transforming its domestic meat industry along the US industrial model—and importing enormous amounts of feed to do so. The Chinese and their hogs, chickens, and cows gobble up a jaw-dropping 60 percent of the global trade in soybeans, and the government may soon also ramp up corn imports—because while Beijing currently limits foreign corn purchases, meat producers are clamoring for more. And where does a third of the globe’s corn come from? You guessed it: The good old USA.

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Are We Becoming China’s Factory Farm?

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McDonald’s Accused of Stealing Wages From Already Underpaid Workers

by AnnetteLorenzo Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Fast food workers make very little money. How little money? Very little money! So little in fact that a single parent of one living in New York City would have to work 144 hours a week “to make a secure yet modest living.” But apparently, those wages are not low enough, a group of McDonald’s workers allege, to stop the company from also stealing from them.

Wage-theft suits brought against McDonald’s this week in Michigan, California, and New York accuse the chain of refusing to pay overtime, ordering people to work off the clock, and straight up erasing hours from timecards. If these allegations are true, and maybe they’re not, but maybe they are, then the company has been illegally screwing people who are already being legally screwed.

This is the most recent development in a months-long campaign by fast-food workers pushing for a $15/hour starting wage.

You shouldn’t eat fast food because fast food is bad for you but if you do eat fast food (and you will eat fast food at least once in a while because nobody can be perfect all the time), be nice to the people who serve you. They have to fight tooth and nail to make ends meet.

Could you make it on fast food wages? Here’s a depressing calculator. (Spoiler: Probably not!)

How many people are in your household? One Adult No Children
One Adult One Child
One Adult Two Children
One Adult Three Children
Two Adults No Children
Two Adults One Child
Two Adults Two Children
Two Adults Three ChildrenWhich state do you live in? Which area do you live in? (Area data not available for households without children.)How much do you make in a year? $

In order to make $___ a year, the typical fast-food worker has to work __ hours a week.

A household like yours in ___, ___ needs to earn $__ annually to make a secure yet modest living. A fast-food worker working full time would have to earn $__ an hour to make that much.

The average fast-food employee works less than 25 hours a week. To make a living wage in ___, ___ at current median wages, s/he would have to work __ hours a week.

In __ hours, McDonald’s serves __ customers and makes $__. That’s about __ Big Macs.

var median_fast_food_worker_wage = 8.94; // Source: National Employment Law Project, July 2013; http://nelp.3cdn.net/84a67b124db45841d4_o0m6bq42h.pdf
var work_weeks_per_year = 52;
var months_per_year = 12;
var average_fast_food_worker_hours_per_week = 24.4;
var average_weeks_in_a_month = 4.348;
var hours_worked_at_full_time = 40;

var days_in_2012 = 366; //leap year
var McDonalds_customers_per_day_in_2012 = 69000000; // Source: McDonalds 2012 Annual Report
var hours_in_day = 24;
var mcD_systemwide_restaurants = 34480;
var mcD_served_per_hour = McDonalds_customers_per_day_in_2012 / hours_in_day;

var mcD_earnings_in_2012 = 27567000000; // Source: McDonalds 2012 Annual Report http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/content/dam/AboutMcDonalds/Investors/Investor%202013/2012%20Annual%20Report%20Final.pdf
var mcD_earned_per_hour = Math.round(mcD_earnings_in_2012 / days_in_2012 / hours_in_day);

var cost_of_big_mac = 4;

var first_state = ‘AK’;
var first_locale = ‘Anchorage, AK HUD Metro FMR Area’;
var state_abbr =
‘AL’ : ‘Alabama’,
‘AK’ : ‘Alaska’,
‘AS’ : ‘America Samoa’,
‘AZ’ : ‘Arizona’,
‘AR’ : ‘Arkansas’,
‘CA’ : ‘California’,
‘CO’ : ‘Colorado’,
‘CT’ : ‘Connecticut’,
‘DE’ : ‘Delaware’,
‘DC’ : ‘District of Columbia’,
‘FM’ : ‘Micronesia1’,
‘FL’ : ‘Florida’,
‘GA’ : ‘Georgia’,
‘GU’ : ‘Guam’,
‘HI’ : ‘Hawaii’,
‘ID’ : ‘Idaho’,
‘IL’ : ‘Illinois’,
‘IN’ : ‘Indiana’,
‘IA’ : ‘Iowa’,
‘KS’ : ‘Kansas’,
‘KY’ : ‘Kentucky’,
‘LA’ : ‘Louisiana’,
‘ME’ : ‘Maine’,
‘MH’ : ‘Islands1’,
‘MD’ : ‘Maryland’,
‘MA’ : ‘Massachusetts’,
‘MI’ : ‘Michigan’,
‘MN’ : ‘Minnesota’,
‘MS’ : ‘Mississippi’,
‘MO’ : ‘Missouri’,
‘MT’ : ‘Montana’,
‘NE’ : ‘Nebraska’,
‘NV’ : ‘Nevada’,
‘NH’ : ‘New Hampshire’,
‘NJ’ : ‘New Jersey’,
‘NM’ : ‘New Mexico’,
‘NY’ : ‘New York’,
‘NC’ : ‘North Carolina’,
‘ND’ : ‘North Dakota’,
‘OH’ : ‘Ohio’,
‘OK’ : ‘Oklahoma’,
‘OR’ : ‘Oregon’,
‘PW’ : ‘Palau’,
‘PA’ : ‘Pennsylvania’,
‘PR’ : ‘Puerto Rico’,
‘RI’ : ‘Rhode Island’,
‘SC’ : ‘South Carolina’,
‘SD’ : ‘South Dakota’,
‘TN’ : ‘Tennessee’,
‘TX’ : ‘Texas’,
‘UT’ : ‘Utah’,
‘VT’ : ‘Vermont’,
‘VI’ : ‘Virgin Island’,
‘VA’ : ‘Virginia’,
‘WA’ : ‘Washington’,
‘WV’ : ‘West Virginia’,
‘WI’ : ‘Wisconsin’,
‘WY’ : ‘Wyoming’

var selected_state = jQuery(“#selected_state”);
var selected_locale = jQuery(“#selected_locale”);
var selected_household = jQuery(“#selected_household”);

for (var state in bfjo)
var option = jQuery(” + state_abbrstate + ”);
selected_state.append(option);

var fill_locale_selector = function(state_object)

selected_locale.html(“”);

for (var locale in state_object)
var option = jQuery(” + locale.replace(/,.*$/, ”) + ”);
selected_locale.append(option);

}

fill_locale_selector(bfjofirst_state)

selected_state.bind(“change”,
function()
var state = $(“#selected_state option:selected”).val();
var state_object = bfjostate;

fill_locale_selector(state_object);

)

/*
var fill_household_selector = function(locale_object)
var selected_household = jQuery(“#selected_household”);

selected_household.html(“”);

for (var household in locale_object)
var option = jQuery(” + household + ”);
selected_household.append(option);

}

fill_household_selector(bfjofirst_statefirst_locale)
*/

selected_locale.bind(“change”,
function()
var state = $(“#selected_state option:selected”).val();
var locale = $(“#selected_locale option:selected”).val();
var locale_object = bfjostatelocale;

//fill_household_selector(locale_object);

)

enable_disable_locale = function()
var household = $(“#selected_household option:selected”).val();
if (household === ‘1P0C’ else
selected_locale.attr(‘disabled’, ”);

}
selected_household.bind(“change”,
function()
enable_disable_locale();

);
enable_disable_locale();

jQuery(“#calculate_this”).bind(“submit”,
function()

var state = $(“#selected_state option:selected”).val();
var locale = $(“#selected_locale option:selected”).val();
var household = $(“#selected_household option:selected”).val();
var salary = parseInt($(“#input_salary”).val());

var annual_living_wage = bfjostatelocalehousehold;
console.log(state);
console.log(locale);
console.log(household);
console.log(annual_living_wage);
var hourly_for_living = annual_living_wage / months_per_year
/ average_weeks_in_a_month / hours_worked_at_full_time;

var hours_to_live_per_month = annual_living_wage / months_per_year / median_fast_food_worker_wage;
var weeks_to_live_per_month = hours_to_live_per_month / hours_worked_at_full_time;

var salary_monthly = salary / months_per_year;
var hours_to_salary_monthly = salary_monthly / median_fast_food_worker_wage;
var weeks_to_salary_monthly = hours_to_salary_monthly / hours_worked_at_full_time;

var hours_living_a_week = hours_to_live_per_month / average_weeks_in_a_month;
var hours_salary_a_week = hours_to_salary_monthly / average_weeks_in_a_month;

var commify = function(number)
while (/(d+)(d3)/.test(number.toString()))
number = number.toString().replace(/(d+)(d3)/, ‘$1’+’,’+’$2′);
}
return number;
}

var salary_string = commify(salary);
var yearly_living_wage_string = commify(annual_living_wage);
/*
while (/(d+)(d3)/.test(salary_string.toString()))
salary_string = salary_string.toString().replace(/(d+)(d3)/, ‘$1’+’,’+’$2′);

while (/(d+)(d3)/.test(yearly_living_wage_string.toString()))
yearly_living_wage_string = yearly_living_wage_string.toString().replace(/(d+)(d3)/, ‘$1’+’,’+’$2′);

*/

jQuery(“#calculated”).show();
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_hours”).text(Math.round(hours_to_live_per_month));
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_state”).text(state_abbrstate);
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_state2”).text(state_abbrstate);
if (household === “1P0C” || household === “2P0C”)
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_locale”).text(”);
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_locale2″).text(”);
else
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_locale”).text(locale.replace(/,.*$/, ”) + ‘,’);
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_locale2″).text(locale.replace(/,.*$/, ”) + ‘,’);

jQuery(“#salary”).text(salary_string);
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_time”).text(Math.round(hours_to_salary_monthly));

jQuery(“#living_hours_per_week”).text(Math.round(hours_living_a_week));
jQuery(“#living_hours_per_week2”).text(Math.round(hours_living_a_week));

jQuery(“#salary_hours_per_week”).text(Math.round(hours_salary_a_week));
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_living_wage_annual”).text(yearly_living_wage_string);

jQuery(“#mc_d_customers_served”).text(
commify(
Math.round(
Math.round(hours_living_a_week) * mcD_served_per_hour
)
)
);
jQuery(“#mc_d_money_earned”).text(
commify(Math.round(Math.round(hours_living_a_week) * mcD_earned_per_hour))
);

jQuery(“#big_mac_count”).text(
commify(
Math.round(
Math.round(hours_living_a_week)
* mcD_earned_per_hour
/ cost_of_big_mac
)
)
);

console.log(hourly_for_living);
var hourly_for_living_clean = Math.round(hourly_for_living * 100)
.toString().replace(/(d+)(d2)/, ‘$1’+’.’+’$2′);
jQuery(“#living_wage_hourly”).text(hourly_for_living_clean);

return false;

}

)

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McDonald’s Accused of Stealing Wages From Already Underpaid Workers

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You’re Drinking the Wrong Kind of Milk

by JeroldNRPB Posted on March 12, 2014

Mother Jones

When my in-laws moved from India to the United States some 35 years ago, they couldn’t believe the low cost and abundance of our milk—until they developed digestive problems. They’ll now tell you the same thing I’ve heard a lot of immigrants say: American milk will make you sick.

It takes HOW much water to make a glass of milk?!

It turns out that they could be onto something. An emerging body of research suggests that many of the 1 in 4 Americans who exhibit symptoms of lactose intolerance could instead be unable to digest A1, a protein most often found in milk from the high-producing Holstein cows favored by American and some European industrial dairies. The A1 protein is much less prevalent in milk from Jersey, Guernsey, and most Asian and African cow breeds, where, instead, the A2 protein predominates.

“We’ve got a huge amount of observational evidence that a lot of people can digest the A2 but not the A1,” says Keith Woodford, a professor of farm management and agribusiness at New Zealand’s Lincoln University who wrote the 2007 book Devil in the Milk: Illness, Health, and the Politics of A1 and A2 Milk. “More than 100 studies suggest links between the A1 protein and a whole range of health conditions”—everything from heart disease to diabetes to autism, Woodford says, though the evidence is far from conclusive.

Holsteins, the most common dairy-cow breed in the United States, typically produce A1 milk. Sarahluv/Flickr

For more than a decade, an Auckland-based company called A2 Corporation has been selling a brand of A2 milk in New Zealand and Australia; it now accounts for 8 percent of Australia’s dairy market. In 2012, A2 Corp. introduced its milk in the United Kingdom through the Tesco chain, where a two-liter bottle sells for about 18 percent more than conventional milk.

But critics write off the success of A2 Corp. as a victory of marketing over science. Indeed, a 2009 review by the European Food Safety Authority found no link between the consumption of A1 milk and health and digestive problems. So far, much of the research on the matter is funded by A2 Corp., which holds a patent for the only genetic test that can separate A1 from A2 cows. And in 2004, the same year that A2 Corp. went public on the New Zealand Stock Exchange, Australia’s Queensland Health Department fined its marketers $15,000 for making false and misleading claims about the health benefits of its milk.

The A1/A2 debate has raged for years in Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Europe, but it is still virtually unheard of across the pond. That could soon change: A2 Corp. recently announced plans to offer its milk in the United States in coming months. In a letter to investors, the company claims that “consumer research in Los Angeles confirms the attractiveness of the A2 proposition.”

The difference between A1 and A2 proteins is subtle: They are different forms of beta-casein, a part of the curds (i.e., milk solids ) that make up about 30 percent of the protein content in milk. The A2 variety of beta-casein mutated into the A1 version several thousand years ago in some European dairy herds. Two genes code for beta-casein, so modern cows can either be purely A2, A1/A2 hybrids, or purely A1. Milk from goats and humans contains only the A2 beta-casein, yet not everyone likes the flavor of goat milk, which also contains comparatively less vitamin B-12—a nutrient essential for creating red blood cells.

About 65 percent of Jersey cows exclusively produce A2 milk. langleyo/Flickr

The A1 milk hypothesis was devised in 1993 by Bob Elliott, a professor of child health research at the University of Auckland. Elliott believed that consumption of A1 milk could account for the unusually high incidence of type-1 diabetes among Samoan children growing up in New Zealand. He and a colleague, Corran McLachlan, later compared the per capita consumption of A1 milk to the prevalence of diabetes and heart disease in 20 countries and came up with strong correlations.

Critics argued that the relationships could be explained away by other factors, such as diet, lifestyle, and latitude-dependent exposure to vitamin D in sunlight—and in any case started to fall apart when more countries were included.

African cows also tend to produce A2 milk. United Nations Photo/Flickr

Yet a 1997 study by Elliott published by the International Dairy Federation showed A1 beta-casein caused mice to develop diabetes, lending support to the hypothesis, and McLachlan remained convinced. In 2000, he partnered with entrepreneur Howard Paterson, then regarded as the wealthiest man on New Zealand’s South Island, to found the A2 Corporation.

Starting in 2003, A2 Corp. sold milk in the United States through a licensing agreement, but pulled out in 2007 after it failed to catch on. Massasso blamed mistakes by the company’s US partner, but declined to elaborate. But now the market dynamics may be changing in A2 Corp.’s favor as compelling new research on the A1/A2 debate grabs headlines in the Australian and UK press.

When digested, A1 beta-casein (but not the A2 variety) releases beta-casomorphin7 (BCM7), an opioid with a structure similar to that of morphine. Studies increasingly point to BCM7 as a troublemaker. Numerous recent tests, for example, have shown that blood from people with autism and schizophrenia contains higher-than-average amounts the BCM7. In a recent study, Richard Deth, a professor of pharmacology at Northeastern University in Boston, and his postdoctoral fellow, Malav Trivedi, showed in cell cultures that the presence of similarly high amounts of BCM7 in gut cells causes a chain reaction that creates a shortage of antioxidants in neural cells, a condition that other research has tied to autism. The study, underwritten in part by A2 Corp., is now undergoing peer review in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry.

Nearly 80 percent of Guernsey cows tested in the US are pure A2, the highest percentage of any traditional breed, according to the American Guernsey Association. Jean/Flickr

The results suggest that drinking A2 milk instead of A1 milk could reduce the symptoms of autism, Trivedi says, but, he adds: “There’s a lot more research that needs to be done to support these claims.”

Researchers without ties to A2 Corp. are also lending increasing support to the A1 hypothesis. One peer-reviewed study conducted at the National Dairy Research Institute in India, published in October in the European Journal of Nutrition, found that mice fed A1 beta-casein overproduced enzymes and immune regulators that other studies have linked to heart disease and autoimmune conditions such as eczema and asthma.

The leading explanation for why some people but not others may react poorly to A1 milk implicates leaky gut syndrome—a concept that got its start in alternative medicine circles but has been gaining wider traction in the medical establishment. The idea is that that loose connections in the gut, like tears in a coffee filter, allow rogue proteins such as BCM7 to enter the body and run amok. The body brings in immune cells to fight them off, creating inflammation that manifests as swelling and pain—a telltale symptom of autoimmune diseases such as arthritis and diabetes, and autism.

The A2-producing Normande is a popular breed in France. dominiqueb/Flickr

Though many adults may suffer from leaky guts, the condition is normal in babies less than a year old, who naturally have semi-permeable intestines. This may pose a problem when they’re fed typical cow-milk formula. A 2009 study documented that formula-fed infants developed muscle tone and psychomotor skills more slowly than infants that were fed (A2-only) breast milk. Researchers in Russia, Poland, and the Czech Republic have suggested links between BCM7 in cow milk formula and childhood health issues. A 2011 study implicates BCM7 in sudden infant death syndrome: the blood serum of some infants that experienced a “near-miss SIDS” incident contained more BCM7 than of healthy infants the same age. Capitalizing on those findings, A2 Corp. also sells an A2-only infant formula, a2PLATINUM, in Australia, New Zealand, and China.

The mainstream dairy industry in the United States may be more interested in the A1/A2 debate than it lets on. For example, US companies that sell cow semen for breeding purposes maintain information on the exact A1/A2 genetics of all of their offerings. And breeders have already developed A2 Holsteins to replace the A1 varieties typically used in confined agricultural feeding operations. “There is absolutely no problem in moving across to A2 and still having these high-production cows,” says Woodford, the Devil in the Milk author, who has in more recent years worked as a consultant for A2 Corp.

But the transition to A2 milk would take a bit of money and a lot of time—probably about a decade, Woodford believes. “The mainstream industry has always seen it as a threat,” he says, “whereas another way of looking at it is, hey, this can actually bring more people to drinking milk.”

Indian cows produce A2 milk. Poi Photography/Flickr

For now, here in the United States, the best way to get milk with a higher-than-average A2 content is to buy it from a dairy that uses A2-dominant cow breeds such as the Jersey, the Guernsey, or the Normande. In Northern California, for example, Sonoma County’s Saint Benoit Creamery specifies on its milk labels that it uses “pastured Jersey cows.”

The heirloom A2 cow breeds tend to be hardy animals adapted to living on the open range and not producing a ton of milk, but what they do produce is comparatively thicker, creamier, and, many people say, a lot tastier than what you’ll typically find at the supermarket.

“People taste our milk and they say: ‘Oh my gosh, I haven’t tasted milk like this since I left home,'” and came to America, says owner Warren Taylor, the owner of Ohio’s Snowville Creamery, which has been phasing out A1 cows from its herds. For the time being, the switch to A2 milk “is going to be for the small producers—people like us,” he adds. “It’s just a part of our responsibility.”

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You’re Drinking the Wrong Kind of Milk

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You Don’t Have To Be a Foul-Mouthed White Guy To Be a World-Class Chef

by NanceeDundalli Posted on March 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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What does it take to break the mold in a prestigious, white-male-dominated industry? I took that question on in a recent piece on how women chefs, who, despite impressive advances in recent years, get short shrift when it comes to big-name awards and invitations to high-minded culinary confabs. But restaurants’ diversity problem is bigger than just a gender imbalance. More then two centuries after the invention of the fine-dining restaurant in the wake of the French Revolution, chefly prestige remains largely—but not completely—the domain of not just males, but white males. What gives?

On a frigid evening in Harlem last week, I got the opportunity to put the question directly to four mold-breakers in a public conversation at Ginny’s Supper Club, the cozy, red-tinted, speakeasy-like saloon in the cellar of Red Rooster, Chef Marcus Samuelsson’s neo-soul-food establishment on Lennox just north of 125th Street. The evening started with wine and snacks, which included house-made charcuterie, cheese, and cornbread madeleines—the latter, I thought, a clever mashup of French and US traditions, a Proustian nod to our most memory-drenched and historically fraught region, the South. My own melancholic musings aside, the room buzzed and glowed in the hour or so leading up to the panel—a diverse crowd of 150 or so chatted and circulated, young, old, and in between, culinary students, chefs, writers, and food lovers of all stripes, from the neighborhood and other parts of Manhattan, from Brooklyn, and even, I hear, from Chicago.

Eventually, we took to the stage: to my right Marcus himself; then Gabrielle Hamilton, chef/proprietor of the highly influential East Village spot Prune; then Charlene Johnson-Hadley, a daughter of Brooklyn’s West Indian diaspora who worked her way up through Samuelsson’s Red Rooster kitchen and is now executive chef at his Lincoln Center outpost American Table Bar and Cafe; and finally Floyd Cardoz, chef at North End Grill in Battery Park City, who brought the cooking of his native India into the glamor of a buzzy Manhattan restaurant with the late and much-lamented Tabla.

Unfortunately, our conversation wasn’t recorded; but Eater delivered a “10 Best Quotes” piece; Serious Eats’ Jacqueline Raposo has a very thoughtful post on the event, also with several quotes; and the blogger Ronda Lee offered worthy commentary on the event.

My favorite parts of the discussion were:

Two New York icons: Samuelsson and Hamiton.

1) Marcus—wgo was born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden—talking about coming up as an ambitious young cook in France, where the message he got was “ce n’est pas possible,” i.e., it’s not possible for a black man to command his own kitchen. His outsider status served as a spur, he said: with the conventional path to chefdom blocked to him, he had to forge his own, which included moving to the melting pot of New York and grabbing the reins of the Swedish restaurant Aquavit.

2) Gabrielle talking about how she found herself in the restaurant world not out of a passion for cooking but rather out of the need to support herself at a very young age—and about how being a woman in kitchens when she came up in the 1980s meant having to forge an identity, a way to fit in, since there was no pre-existing identity to fall into. Here’s her money quote, which I’m cribbing from Eater because I didn’t take notes:

Yes, there were horrible white men in the kitchens and the hardest part of that is the contortions you’d put yourself through to figure out your place in that kitchen. Should I be a chain-smoking dirt-talking motherfucker who can crank it f*cking out? Or should I be kind of a dainty female with lipstick and be like ‘Can you help me with this stock pot because I just can’t?’ Frankly it’s a freaking second job on top of what you’re already doing. One of the hardest parts is trying to a viable self that you can live with and and go home and respect at the end of the day.

3) Charlene talking about how she was drawn to cooking as a child through her grandmother’s Jamaican-inflected kitchen, and how, while in college in the 1990s, she realized she wanted to make a career of cooking, which sent her to culinary school and her current path. It struck me that unlike Marcus and Gabrielle, who came up by in the 1980s, Charlene could envision for herself a conventional path to success: go to chef’s school, get a job. Here’s Charlene’s take on being a woman of color in the professional kitchen (quote from Raposo’s piece): “I just think you need to get past yourself and not think of yourself as ‘the different one.’ That shouldn’t be your focus. Your focus should be following your ambition, making sure you are doing what it is you want to do, and making yourself an asset to wherever you are.”

4) Floyd on aspiring to cook professionally while growing up middle class in India—and the culture shock it gave his parents, who hoped he would be a doctor. Until pretty recently, the professional kitchen was a place middle class people aspired to flee. Now, with the rise of the celebrity chef, it has emerged as a site of aspiration. Hamilton touched on that topic, too, when she mentioned that suddenly, “40-year-old white males” are applying to work in her kitchen. She went on (quote from Raposo):

Now we have the whole new problem of, “I used to be an architect” and “I have a trust fund” and “I have so much more money and power than you’re ever going to have in this world.” And you have to go up to that guy and say, “You know, your sauce is a little salty.”

As Ronda Lee put it in her blog post, “gender and race in the professional kitchen is a lot to cover in a two-hour discussion.” And our panel in Harlem last week barely scratched the surface. I learned again what I learned when writing my piece on gender: This is a fascinating and complex conversation, one that people working to make the restaurant world more inclusive are eager to have. There’s so much we didn’t get to—for example, what about the role of Mexican immigrants, who are the lifeblood of kitchen lines from Los Angeles to New York? We at Mother Jones plan to continue exploring it. Stay tuned.

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You Don’t Have To Be a Foul-Mouthed White Guy To Be a World-Class Chef

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Survey: These Are the Most and Least Obese States in America

by CarriMontague Posted on March 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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West Virginia’s tenure as the most obese state in America—a three-year run that no one ever called a dynasty—is over.

According to Gallup, which just released its 2013 survey on obesity in America, 35.4 percent of Mississippians have a BMI above 30, giving the home of 3 Doors Down the highest obesity rate in the Union. West Virginia came in second at 34.4 percent.

Meanwhile, Montana toppled three-time defending least-obese champion and budding marijuana tourist destination Colorado, with a svelte 19.6 percent.

You can check out the full results here.

On average, residents of the 10 most obese states were—unsurprisingly—less likely to eat healthily, consume fruits and vegetables, or workout regularly than residents of the least obese states.

Overall the national obesity rate rose to 27.1 percent in 2013. It has risen every year since 2008.

Impeach.

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Survey: These Are the Most and Least Obese States in America

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Sorry, California. A Little Rain Isn’t Going to Save You.

by AustinTPXU Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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California, supplier of nearly half of the fruits, veggies, and nuts produced in the United States, is on track to experience its driest year in modern history. And though the state was lucky to have some rain this week, even a torrential storm would not be enough to fill its aquifers, replenish its soil, and save many of its crops.

We’ve been tracking the drought through the US Drought Monitor, which uses satellite imagery, water flow, and precipitation data to create weekly drought maps. (Data is collected on Tuesdays, and released the following Thursday.) As of this week, 21 of the state’s 58 counties are experiencing “exceptional drought”—including those Central Valley areas where so many of the state’s crops grow. Above, check out the maps we’ve compiled from the past few weeks, starting with the one that prompted Gov. Jerry Brown to announce a state of emergency on January 17.

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Sorry, California. A Little Rain Isn’t Going to Save You.

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Giant Slaughterhouse Recalls Fancy Grass-Fed Beef After Processing "Diseased and Unsound Animals"

by dpfu2f Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last month, Rancho Feeding Corp., a slaughterhouse in Petaluma, California, issued a small recall notice, for beef it had processed on a particular day in 2013. That much was routine—meat processing facilities have to pull back product with some regularity when contamination is discovered. But the Rancho recall was different: Earlier this month, the company announced that it needed to recall all the beef it processed in 2013—8.7 million pounds in all, found in more than a thousand grocery stores in 30 states. The most famous of the recalled items are Nestle Hot Pockets, but the plant produced a lot of other beef products for wholesale, including cheeks, lips, liver, oxtail, and other parts. So have you eaten any of that beef? Here’s some background:

What is Rancho Feeding Corp.?

Before it ceased operations last week, Rancho Feeding Corp. was the only USDA-approved slaughterhouse within about a three-hour radius of Petaluma. According to Stephanie Larson, the livestock and range advisor at the University of California’s Cooperative Extension system, about 25 percent of Rancho’s customers were “niche-market” operations—many of which raised grass-fed and organic beef. The other 75 percent of the company’s business was meat destined for burgers, tacos, chili, and other processed foods for supermarkets and restaurants. Many of Rancho’s clients were dairies seeking to slaughter cows that were no longer giving milk.

Just how much meat is 8.7 million pounds?

A few years back, my colleague Tom Philpott calculated that Cargill’s 36 million pounds of recalled ground turkey was enough to make burgers for the residents of the world’s six most populous cities. By the same logic, the 8.7 million pounds of Rancho recalled beef could make burgers for every resident of New York, London, and Tokyo. As Gwynn Guilford at Quartz points out, letting that much potentially dodgy meat slip through the cracks is what happens when the government skimps on inspectors.

Why did they recall it?

According to the USDA’ s Food Safety and Inspection Service, Rancho issued the recall after FSIS inspectors determined that it had “processed diseased and unsound animals and carried out these activities without the benefit or full benefit of federal inspection.” It was a Class I recall, which means the FSIS considered it “a health hazard situation where there is a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death.” Beyond the recall notice, though, FSIS has offered few details. So far, there are no reports of people getting sick after eating tainted beef processed by Rancho.

How does the recall affect ranchers?

Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times reported that Marin Sun Farms, an artisanal meat producer in Point Reyes Station, California, has bought Rancho Feeding Corp. If the company reopens the facility as a USDA-approved slaughterhouse, Rancho’s former clients will likely be relieved, since Rancho was the only game in town. (Consolidation of slaughterhouses is a problem for ranchers across the nation.)

Bill Niman, the founder of sustainable meat company Niman Ranch who now runs a grass-fed operation called BN Ranch, told the Village Voice that Rancho’s closing would be “a great loss to the Northern California food community.”

Sally Gale and her husband own Chileno Valley Ranch, a 600-acre, hundred-head beef operation in Marin County that sells grass-fed beef directly to consumers. The Gales, who have owned their ranch for 15 years, used to hire a slaughterer to dispatch their steers on their property. (A few years ago, Bonne Azab Powell profiled a traveling slaughterer in Mother Jones.) But about five years ago, they received a notice saying that the practice was illegal and that they must take their animals to a USDA-certified slaughterhouse. The only one in the area was Rancho.

Because of the recall, the Gales have had to dispose of three adult steers—worth about $1,600 each—that Rancho had slaughtered. If Rancho closes, Sally Gale worries that the long drive to the next closest slaughterhouse, more than 150 miles away, will stress the animals and add an extra expense to what Gale describes as an “already marginal business.” California’s drought has hit ranches like hers hard, she says, and she expects that many will have to charge their customers more to make up for the losses.

Typically, Chileno Valley Ranch sends about 6 cows to slaughter every week. Now, the Gales will be waiting until they have 30 ready to make the long trip worthwhile. “The government told us that we couldn’t slaughter our own meat,” says Gale. “And now they’re telling us that we can’t bring them to Rancho either.”

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Giant Slaughterhouse Recalls Fancy Grass-Fed Beef After Processing "Diseased and Unsound Animals"

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Why the EPA Can’t Manage To Block This Gnarly Herbicide

by TammaraMog Posted on February 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the February 10 issue of the New Yorker, Rachel Aviv has an outstanding piece on Tyrone Hayes, the University of California-Berkeley biologist whose research found that atrazine, a widely used herbicide, caused extreme sexual-development problems in frogs at very low levels. Aviv’s article follows a superb Hayes profile by Dashka Slater published in Mother Jones in 2012. Aviv’s piece gives some key background on just why it’s so hard for the US Environmental Protection Agency to take action on chemicals like atrazine, which in addition to harming frogs, is also suspected of causing thyroid and ovarian cancers in people at low doses. Here’s the key bit regarding the EPA and its reliance on cost-benefit analyses to determine what chemicals the public can and cannot be exposed to:

In the U.S., lingering scientific questions justify delays in regulatory decisions. Since the mid-seventies, the E.P.A. has issued regulations restricting the use of only five industrial chemicals out of more than eighty thousand in the environment. Industries have a greater role in the American regulatory process—they may sue regulators if there are errors in the scientific record—and cost-benefit analyses are integral to decisions: a monetary value is assigned to disease, impairments, and shortened lives and weighed against the benefits of keeping a chemical in use. Lisa Heinzerling, the senior climate-policy counsel at the E.P.A. in 2009 and the associate administrator of the office of policy in 2009 and 2010, said that cost-benefit models appear “objective and neutral, a way to free ourselves from the chaos of politics.” But the complex algorithms “quietly condone a tremendous amount of risk.” She added that the influence of the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees major regulatory decisions, has deepened in recent years. “A rule will go through years of scientific reviews and cost-benefit analyses, and then at the final stage it doesn’t pass,” she said. “It has a terrible, demoralizing effect on the culture at the E.P.A.”

Hat tip: Kathleen Geier.

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Why the EPA Can’t Manage To Block This Gnarly Herbicide

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New Supermarket, New Eating Habits? Not So Fast….

by Georgina51G Posted on February 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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A team of researchers recently carried out a study of two food deserts in poor Philadelphia neighborhoods. One of the neighborhoods got a new supermarket and the other didn’t. Here’s the good news:

Respondents perceived grocer choice and quality and fruit and vegetable choice and quality to have improved, and the cost of fruit and vegetables was perceived to have decreased.

And here’s the bad news:

Few residents adopted the new supermarket as their main food store, and exposure to the new supermarket had no statistically significant impact on BMI and daily fruit and vegetable intake at six months….At the planning and consultation stages, members of the community indicated their preference for having a new supermarket instead of selling the land for residential development. This suggested their readiness to use the new store and the lowering of barriers to change. However, few residents chose to shop at the store once it was open.

….Our findings suggest that simply building new food retail stores may not be sufficient to promote behavior change related to diet….The development of new food retail stores should be combined with initiatives focused on price and availability that could help bridge the gap between improvements in people’s perceptions of accessibility and behavior change. Such initiatives might be supported by local departments of health, which could provide targeted neighborhood-based health promotion programs in conjunction with supermarket developers to increase their effectiveness.

All the usual caveats apply. This is one study of one store in one neighborhood. And it’s possible that it takes more time to change behavior. A follow-up done six months after the new store opened may simply have been too soon.

Nonetheless, it adds to an increasing set of data suggesting that food deserts per se aren’t the reason for obesity and poor nutrition in low-income neighborhoods. There’s much more going on, and it’s especially discouraging that residents plainly knew about the new supermarket but still didn’t shop there. Even a highly publicized grand opening featuring a visit from Michelle Obama wasn’t enough. It was a struggle just to get local residents to change their shopping habits, which is almost certain to be a lot easier than getting broad-based changes in actual eating habits.

Aaron Carroll has more here. There’s no real way to spin this as anything but fairly bleak news, though.

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New Supermarket, New Eating Habits? Not So Fast….

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