Spice

I ran out of Dill on Thursday. Lamb, with garlic and dill. It was easy to shake the jar until the whole mound of dill, saved from the farm and hung to dry in the kitchen last August, was in my hand, ready to be rubbed between my palms over the roasting pan.

I scribble "dill" on the chalkboard reserved for such purposes, and will transfer it to my shopping list for the co-op (for the CSA doesn't start for three weeks yet, and it's too early for fresh dill anyway). The empty jar goes in the dishwasher.

But the clean jar in my hand stops me dead in my track: the plastic tub of spice jars is overflowing, a testament to my love affair with flavors from near and far (thus the empty juniper berry jar). There is no room at the inn for one more.

I could chuck it in the recycle bin, and then I think better: the jar will join my shopping bags in the car for the next trip to the co-op. For there I can buy herbs and spices in bulk (and they will gladly weigh my empty), meaning I can not only save a jar from the landfill, but I can buy just enough to tide me over until the end of summer, when I will be sure to pick more than I did last year.

And what do you know--I ran out of cloves on Friday.

Shopping at home

The dish has gone through a family evolution: in my childhood, it used plastic-wrapped ground beef from a white styrofoam tray from Fred Meyer, two cans of Contadina sauce  and a packet of Lawry's spaghetti seasoning. By the time I had moved out to my college apartment, the ingredients list on the seasoning packet was a turnoff, so I replaced it with real (well, Spice Island) herbs.

In the piles of my past is an essay written as part of a freshman English class in which we were to instruct someone how to do something: I wrote, unsurprisingly, about preparing a meal. Spaghetti, as it would have it, and I instruct the dutiful reader to add red wine to the mix and to pour a glass for themselves and whomever else might be around. I'd like to tell you I waited until my 21st birthday before I started adding it to the mix, but given that I was underage throughout my university career, that seems unlikely.

In France, it took patience while the slow hotplate heated water to boil noodles, and I admit to resorting to jarred sauce--cold. It was one of the first dishes I taught my darling to-be-husband, and soon became a code for I'm not making it:

"Hi honey, I'm home! What's for supper?"
"Spaghetti."
"Oh, that bad? I'll make it."

As food sensitivities mounted and our numbers increased, the basics have been replaced by fare from the co-op, including pork sausage (my Italian Girlfriend admonished me).  My shopping list and habits changed. Until this year. This year, or rather last summer, we shopped the farmers markets, peeled, chopped, boiled, dried, and stuffed our larder and freezer full. Add to it a quarter pig that we affectionately call 'Porker,' and I haven't had to shop for anything but the pasta and onions since July.

Instead of making a shopping list, I head out to the garage, and reach into the arctic box for some Porker sausage and a bag of chopped heritage tomatoes (Yellow? Black? Or red?). Behind me, one jar breaks rank from the soldiers of tomato sauce. Upstairs, hanging from wrought iron hooks (from the blacksmith who visits at Michaelmas) are garlic and herbs.

This is the first year we have tried this, and it has been a glorious 7 weeks. Only seven, as the last of Porker's sausage (there are still chops and ribs and bacon) went in the pan this evening, so we shall revert to the co-op's decent-but-not-as-good stuff. The chopped tomatoes should last until late spring, and the canned ones should last 32 more weeks--until just about the time that the first local tomatoes start showing up at the farmer's market.

Squeaky clean

Annie Leonard is at it again, this time with a video talking about the incredibly icky stuff in our personal care products. She throws stones at the use of "organic" on top brands riddled with petrochemicals, and rightly dings one producer for displaying a pink badge for breast cancer awareness on the outside of the bottle, all while putting known carcinogens in the bottle.

When I was a girl, my father picked up a copy of The Foxfire Book, a compendium of lost and disappearing lore in Appalachia. He was revved by the notion of making his own soap, and managed to find someone at church who was slaughtering a pig: could he have the fat? A bit of lye from the hardware store, and a foul-smelling brew over a fire in the backyard (no way was Mom letting that in the house!), and he produced a tray mounded with oddly shaped bars that he touted as usable as soap, shampoo and laundry detergent. We all gave it a go, but it was soon relegated to my father's corner of the shower and the utility sink--the caustic concoction was ace for getting automotive grime off and cutting through Brylcreem.

Now you know where I get it. I have never felt the urge to render my own pork fat (well, maybe a little), but certainly prefer a fine hand-cut bar to the mass-packaged uniform cakes in the big box. Currently in my shower is a hemp and honey bar, the last of a handful from the West of Ireland that I had tucked into my luggage before returning. And next to it stands an empty shampoo bottle.

Since you can't see me,  I'll let you know that I have long hair. Down-to-my waist, hints of grey, thick, wavy hair. You would think I would have a whole hair care system, a daily routine to keep my tresses looking photo-shoot ready. But I don't. A single bottle of shampoo, used sparingly and weekly, is all I need. And I'll tell you another secret: shampoo is only ever used on the top; the ends are far enough away from the scalp that they don't need washing (unless they've dragged through something). What this means in practical terms is that I use very little shampoo--much less than my shorter-coiffed counterparts.

Which brings me to back to that empty shampoo bottle: it's taken just shy of two years to get it to that state. There have been times when I'm traveling that I used hotel samples (they're very smelly, and really strip oils off hair, which isn't good), and the odd camping trip that pushed a wash out a few days, but by and large, I buy shampoo about as often as some people buy jeans or cars.

So I need to do a bit of research before I buy. This particular bottle was purchased shortly after we arrived in the Emerald Isle, at my favourite health shop in Blessington. I also knew I was in the EU, which adheres to a precautionary principle, meaning chemicals must be proven safe before being added to foods and personal products. So I chose what smelled good to me, in this case lavender and geranium--from the real thing, not a chemical fragrance.

But I can't be that sure here. With no governmental oversight and laws that allow companies to largely hide their ingredients under umbrella terms like "fragrance" and "color," we could only guess. But the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics provides an online database of brand-named products and their ingredients. I am delighted to see local brands like Ballard Organics, and most of the brands from our local coop represented there. And I'm even happier to see that I have several options. And that I don't need to render any pig fat.

Solid

I was reading through this month's issue of the PCC Sound Consumer (love the name, a play on words between our region, the Puget Sound, and the soundness of our consuming via a co-op), and a number popped out at me: "Only five retailers - Walmart, Kroger, Albertson's, Safeway and Ahold USA - control 46 percent of the grocery industry." Like any good researcher, I wondered about the numbers, as well as what they meant. So I started digging.

I was unable to locate the exact numbers cited in the article, but numerous other sources, the vast majority of whom were industry-oriented, paint the same picture. Most frightening to me is the hand-rubbing glee with which these kinds of figures are reported, as if industrialization of food retailing is desirable.

In all my digging, I found one table that very helpfully broke down top retailers by market. I like specifics more than general information, so this is a good thing. I'll disregard the fact that there's a market publication dedicated to the food and beverage industry, and share that I learned that the Seattle-Tacoma area ranks 18th in the nation as a food market, and that our best performers in 2006 and 2007 (in percentage of market share) were: 

Safeway                              23%    25%
Quality Food Centers          17%    19%
Costco                                12%    N/A
Albertsons                           10%    12%
Fred Meyer                           9%    10% (source: MMR) 

Well, you say, at least we appear to be bucking the trend: we all know that QFC and Costco are from right here, and Fred Meyer was founded in Portland, so things look pretty local. And Safeway and Albertson's are only one state away (California and Idaho, respectively). None of this national distribution stuff for us, no sir!

But the school of hard knocks tells me I should at least scratch the surface of the appearance. I know that rebranding is used extensively in the food industry. All you have to do is try to chase down some Salmonella-tainted hydrolyzed vegetable protein (yum!) to illustrate the complexity of the food maze, and how naming the same product different things doesn't make anything different--except the label, and perhaps the price. I imagine most people aren't aware that branding strategies are equally applied to supermarkets. So I scratch away.

Number one on our list is Safeway, headquartered in California, which operates "1,730 stores in the Western, Southwestern, Rocky Mountain, Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States and in Western Canada." (Quote from the Safeway corporate website.) Thirty-nine of them are right here in the Puget Sound area. A very helpful graphic at the top of the web page tells me their eight store brands are Safeway, Vons, Dominick's, Genuardis, Randall's, Tom Thumb, Pavillions, Carrs/Safeway. They also own a 49% interest in Casa Ley, which operates in Mexico.

Ok, so if top gun Safeway is the big guy from out of town, how about QFC? We all know that it was founded just around the corner in Seattle--why, the original store is still operating! Alas, in 1997, QFC was sold to the Fred Meyer company in Portland, Oregon. Which explains why, when I search for QFCs in our area, they return results for both QFC and Fred Meyer, 50 stores in all. Portland is still kind of local, right?

Not quite. The history of QFC and Fred Meyer reads like a convoluted genealogy of mergers and acquisitions, and the final chapter in the story has QFC/Fred Meyer joining the Kroger family of "nearly two dozen banners, all of which share the same belief in building strong local ties and brand loyalty with our customers." (Thanks to Kroger for that marketing-speak.) At least they're clear about their goal: to sell their brand to you. Conspicuously absent is anything mentioning providing food that is good for people and the planet. But I digress.

With Freddie's now part of the Kroger family, Costco is next on our list. There are about 20 locations in the Puget Sound area, but that number is deceptive, as the word to comes to mind when describing Costco is big. They are refreshingly transparent in their corporate structure: when they aquire a business, it is rebranded; they don't carry competing brands; and their house brand (named for the suburb up the road where it was founded), often makes it clear whose product is being re-branded (or more correctly co-branded). But still, with a position as the third largest retailer in the US and ninth in the world, with stores on three continents, we can call Costco neither small nor local.

How about Albertson's then? They're from Boise, right? There are 49 stores in our area, and a visit to their website reveals that they are not immune to acquisition fever: A smilng woman with an armful of grocieries informs me the "As of June 2, 2006, your local store has joined the SUPERVALU family." To add to the confusion, a separate LLC was created to license the Albertson's name back to some (but not all) of the original stores. The Supervalu site boasts that they are number five in the US, and is emblazoned with 18 brand logos.

An aside: I start to wonder if it is purely coincidental that Kenny's in Blessington, Ireland was also dubbed Supervalu? No, in this case, my fears are unfounded: it is part of the retail franchise division of the Musgrave Group, Ireland’s largest grocery and food distributor. So Kenny's is big, but only in the Irish sense.

With online yellow pages reporting more than 800 grocery stores in the area (including gas station quick marts), it becomes impossible to determine who the fat cats are, and just where your grocery store dollars are ending up. Unless, of course, you shop at farmer's markets or at the aforementioned co-op, where food producers are readily identifiable, and the dollars you spend locally actually stay close to home.

Big brother

I was happily puttering in the kitchen this evening making supper (spaghetti day: plus sautéed fresh spinach and garlic and parsnip chips and hummus), when the phone rang. Nothing out of the ordinary about that, but the call was anything but ordinary.

It was a fellow from our local co-op, and he asked for me by name. Fair enough, I thought, I just wrote them a missive about some changes in the deli, and thought this might be a follow-up to my email. Though probably not, since I had already received a well-thought-out reply the same day to that one.

Nope, this cordial fellow wanted to let me know that the sun-dried tomato and chicken sausage I bought last  week--and ate last night--may have contained traces of turkey that were not included on the label. No problem here, no allergies to that particular bird. My guess is that they didn't clean the machine well enough between batches. Says the woman who uses the same workbowl on the food processor for slicing the parsnip chips and making the dip.

Even if it is kind of scary that the co-op knows that I bought it, but even that's not really scary, because I was using my member discount that day, so they scanned my membership card. So of course they knew. That they put together the data is nothing that mainstream supermarkets don't do when they extract demographic data to drive their marketing efforts by asking you to swipe your club card.

Of course, recalls were on my mind this week, as I just filed a spate of FDA recalls (and yes, Virginia, they are a daily occurrence, it's not just you). This batch featured a voluntary recall of Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein (HVP) tainted with salmonella that's an unlabeled additive in many items, including spice mixtures that are sold as is or contained in other processed foodstuffs. Already I've seen recall notices for bouillon cubes, pretzels, Pringles, ready-to-eat bacon, and a curry spice powder sold in bulk. More will come.

In this case, the apparent abuse of the voluntary nature of the recall system and the hidden nature of the ingredient (the FDA does not require disclosing it on the label) is a particularly nasty combination, and one that food writer Marion Nestlé blogged about this morning. Her piece quite rightly calls for a stronger FDA, one that does not have to beg manufacturers to do the right thing.

So it is a reaffirmation that the co-op is doing the right thing: calling me to check and make sure things are right when they made a mistake.  While it was good of them to call (wouldn't you call your friend if you found out something you made for them was bad?), I also applaud their use of media channels to get the word out: they issued a notice on their website, and used Facebook and Twitter to spread the word. All things that, by the way, cost them nothing at all to do. I got to thinking that this is probably what was intended when the system of voluntary recalls was developed. Unfortunately, like all reasonable institutions, it is open to abuse by those who play the system to their own benefit.

If we had been talking about two schoolchildren, one who owned up to making a mistake and did their best to make it right, and one who had obfuscated a deed for their own benefit, the teacher's course of action would have been clear: reward the virtuous child, and both remove the privilege of trust and require retribution of some sort from the other. To subject both of them to a harsher regime would be a mistake, and the fallen angel must have a chance to re-earn his wings.