Boiled egg, anyone?

Imagine if you will, a nation of Irishmen waking up late on a very frosty Sunday morning, with just a wee bit of a hangover from a company Christmas party that went until three in the morning. The smart ones--that is most of them--booked a room at the hotel, both to enjoy a night away from the kids as well as to not have to worry about driving after far too much Guinness.

Our Irishman and his wife both emerge from the shower feeling a bit better, and head downstairs to that staple of Irish luxury, the full Irish breakfast. Their mouths are salivating at the thought of a plate piled high with eggs, back rashers, sausage, black and white pudding (well, maybe she moves the black pudding to his plate), and a token tomato, all washed down with some strong black coffee. Imagine their disappointment, then, when their waitress explains that there is a nationwide recall of pork, and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) is asking everyone, from merchants to housewives to restaurateurs, to destroy all pork and pork products produced in Ireland since September 1 of this year.

Like those fellow partygoers, I awoke to a headache and the same headline, and though pork was not on the menu for Sunday, I do have a pricey organic loin roast in my freezer, purchased a few weeks ago from a local farm stand. An email to my friendly contact at the farm stand gets her on the phone with her farmers and her inspector. It's a blanket recall so she can't tell me it's OK to eat, but reading between the lines, I think I should wait before chucking it, as it is likely that over the next few days many farms will be declared clean. As a postscript, she notes that Dominic makes his own pig feed, and expects the "pro organic/anti-cheap food debate" to rage for a few days. She sounds happy about this bit, because it can only be good for business.

As an American, food recalls are nothing new to me. The last major one, of over 20 million pounds of tainted beef, is an order of magnitude larger than this one, which, though it encompasses all pork produced in this island nation for two months, is inherently different, and not just because of its size.

How so? First up, the wording in yesterday's refreshingly concise press release: "The FSAI is requiring the food industry to recall from the market all Irish pork products produced from pigs slaughtered in Ireland." Imagine, a government agency requiring industry to do something without asking. What's more, they extended the recall to all farms and immediately banned the transfer of pigs between farms, even though they suspect that the feed has only contaminated about 10% of the island's pork. But they want to be sure. The contaminant, dioxin, was detected last week; the ban came down Sunday, "as a precautionary measure." By Monday, they had named the source of contamination, and warned that some beef may be affected. They will be out testing in the next few days, and as farms show themselves to be free of the contaminant, they'll be allowed back into the supply stream.

Contrast this to the massive recall of American ground beef last September: USDA inspectors detected the E. coli O157:H7 pathogen. The initial press release lists products with production dates in June and July of 2007; the recall came nearly two months later. Note also that the USDA cannot actually enact a recall themselves, which is why we see the wording 'XYZ Company is voluntarily recalling so-and-so-many-thousand pounds of meat.' By the time the USDA released more information, nearly two weeks later, the recall had been expanded to meat produced at one factory for an entire year--21 million pounds.

Now, dioxin is a bad thing for people to eat, but small quantities eaten over the short term don’t usually have serious consequences. But a trace of E. coli, ingested even once, can make people extremely ill, and can even kill those with weaker immune systems. And yet, US government inspectors had to prove--not just suspect--that meat was tainted before they could ask the business to pull the meat. Given that both the FDA and USDA are chock a block with representatives from agribusiness, it's amazing that recalls ever happen at all.

I ducked into the market today, and there is an empty case both at the butcher's counter and where the bacon and sausage live around the corner. They will likely begin filling in the days to come, as FSAI gives producers a clean bill of health. The huge display of Christmas hams is equally void, and is likely to stay that way, as there isn't enough time to cure new hams.

That doesn't mean all is perfect in Europe, as industrial animal production is alive and well here: Sunday's front page article of the Irish Times appends the customary listing of similar outbreaks at the bottom of the page, and I have to read it twice to make sure I got it right: "In 1998 dioxin-contaminated citrus pulp from Brazil was used in feed for dairy animals in France and resulted in contaminated milk." Mention of just how ridiculous it seems to be shipping citrus pulp from Brazil to France is absent.

I reflect on how food waste recycling has only come to Dublin this year (and certainly not out here), and how I and millions of French housewives are scraping their plates into the garbage. I wonder, why do they have no local food waste to feed their cochons? The thought of making the food stream run both ways crosses my mind briefly.

I wonder if Dominic would like my kitchen scraps for his pigs?

Misbehaving

Our neighbor has his birthday today. He smiled and stated that he was 56 today. I told him he was lying, and he admitted he was. He's 44, but by adding a few years, he either gets compliments or honesty in the form of no challenge or someone like me calling him on it.

Just for kicks, I took one of those "what is your real age?" tests. Depending on how I fudge the answers, my "real age" is between 5-10 years less than my chronological age. I also learned that my media behavior makes me Gen-X (and nearly Gen-Y) even though my birth year technically makes me a Baby Boomer. One of my buddies even noted that my cell phone is for 20-somethings. But my old Bell telephone ring tone dates me.

My mother, on the other hand, is acting more than her age. Since the double-whammy of losing husband and pets in one year, compounded by not being able to keep up her walking (too much smoke from California's bad summer of fire), she has been feeling poorly. So, like any self-respecting medicare-card holder, she high-tailed it to the doctor.

Seems this young whippersnapper had the unmitigated gall to say that her cholesterol is high enough to warrant medication. Out comes the prescription pad, but bless my mother, the pills' side effects means she stops taking them. Instead, she says, she's loosing a little weight, and starting to walk again.

The cholesterol number. Doctors wield it mightily, as a magic predictor for our lives and deaths. But I want to know if this one-size-fits-all number means anything in the face of our great-grandmother's wisdom.

I jaunt over to the American Heart Association, where I am admonished to eat a heart-healthy diet no matter what my magic number. The "safe" level--used since the 70s--is that I should consume no more than 300 mg of cholesterol a day--in other words, eat an egg, and I'm done for the day. But wait, I'm sensitive to eggs.

So, I dig deeper, to learn that this "safe" level was determined in a single meeting of food scientists back in 1968. Based on the assumption that serum cholesterol levels reflect the amount of dietary cholesterol, they quite arbitrarily guessed that 300mg should be safe.

But there's more bad news: not only is that number a best guess, it's based on a flawed assumption: serum cholesterol reflects the cholesterol you produce yourself, not what cholesterol you consume. Numerous studies have confirmed this, but the myth continues to be promoted, even by the Heart Association.

Which isn't to say that what you eat has no bearing on your cholesterol level. Indeed, if you eat a poor diet, rich in processed foods, and low in real food, it's a pretty safe bet your levels will go up.

What's more, my naturopath also explained that she sees dangerously high serum cholesterol levels in people who are eating relatively well, but who are eating foods to which they are sensitive or allergic. Metabolizing allergens (and living a stressful life) gets the liver producing cholesterol in the body: Eliminate the allergens, she notes, and levels drop drastically, without medication.

Imagine that. Eat well for who you are. Grandmother knew all along.

Dear Mr. President-elect

I am writing in the hopes that mine is not the only voice emphasizing the importance of your choice for Secretary of Agriculture. It is my deep-seated desire to see someone in this role who understands just what is at stake, that agriculture has as much to do with feeding people and the environment as the economy, national defense and public health. The effects of powerful industry lobbying have placed us all in a precarious position. The person chosen for this key position must be a person of deep conviction with an unwavering moral compass.

If the priorities reflected in our nation's budget are defense and human services, consider just how vital the role of the Department of Agriculture is: if conventional food production is reliant on petroleum for production and distribution, it reinforces our country's dependence on foreign oil; where local, sustainable agriculture becomes a policy of independence from imported oil and a matter of national security: If intensive industrial farming and livestock operations have depleted the life in our soil and taken animal cruelty to new levels, leading to the degradation of the nutritional value of foodstuffs, then encouraging small-scale biodiverse agriculture becomes a matter of moral and public health.

Every one of these issues can be traced back to the cozy relationship between our representatives in Washington and lobbyists representing corporate interests. We all pay for "cheap" food in fighting wars to protect our petroleum habit, the staggering costs of epidemic health issues related to eating nutritionally inferior food, the damage to the soil, water and air around us, and in the moral corruption of selling out to the mighty dollar every day, not to mention the loss of the simple joy of eating well.

While the media screams increasingly loudly about the economy, the effects of lobbying are clear here as well. With no regulation, and unchecked by any moral sense, the players were courting disaster, one we must all pay for. This obsession with the economic climate will likely make many insist that something as mundane as agricultural issues need to take a back seat, but even in hard times, people need to eat. And if they eat well: healthy food raised by people who can make a decent living using time-proven methods, we will all benefit, in terms of reduced dependence on oil, increased national security, improved public health and healthy and sustainable economic activity.

While it has become a common way of doing "business" in Washington it is no longer a viable option: We need to get government out of bed with corporations now, not just because it is a gross adultery of democracy, but because our very survival as humans and Americans depend on it.

I wish you all the best in the coming years, and hope that you will find the fortitude to maintain your guiding principles in the face of many pressures.

Running around

Sometimes things just don't work out the way you want: my intention to get to Naas for the farmer's market Saturday fizzled as the day turned greyer and greyer and the mud stuck to the bottom of my boots, making that horrid schlocking sound when I walked. It was a day for a book and cocoa.

Which meant that when Monday rolled around, I had to do some grocery shopping. Little One and I donned our soggy jackets and headed into town, where we have three choices: Harvest Fare, the little, funky health store owned by one of his classmates' parents; Dunnes, in the new shopping centre, and Kenny's SuperValu on Main Street. I always start at Harvest Fare, where they have figured out how quickly we burn through soy milk, and now order it without being asked. But Mary, the owner, is a militant vegetarian, and recoiled visibly when I asked her where I might find organic meats. I favor the local store, which means across the main street to Kenny's I go, where the usual mass-produced fare is interspersed with a few local and homemade items (pies and jams live near the butcher case). Every now and then, they have a few trays of organic meats and the odd free range chicken.

This Monday, there is one lonely free range chicken. Its label notes that it is fully traceable, something foreign to Americans (and resisted by the US meat industry), but essential in a country where BSE is a very real possibility. My chicken's label tells me it is from Martin Nash's farm (2) in Ardagh in County Limerick.


Out of curiosity, I wonder what I can find out about this chicken and its life before my pot (its carcass is bubbling away in the stockpot as I write). I plug his name into the search engine, and learn from the Limerick Leader that he was the first in his area to harvest silage this spring. Martin, who puts his good fortune down to reseeding his fields, is referred to as a dairy farmer.

I find no more mention of Martin, but further digging unearths ugliness in the industry. On the heels of a protest in 2004 by the West Limerick Co-op Poultry Producers Association Limited, (I briefly wonder if Martin is one of the approximately 28 members), the government is asked to intervene (no surprise, they decline). It appears that standard practice is for corporate processors to supply day-old chicks and feed to producers as well as cover some costs. The producer then provides labor and other overhead, including electricity. Producers receives a negotiated price per bird--and this is where the protest came in. In this particular case, the producers involved were protesting the low price of 30.85 cent per bird, which includes the transport of the birds to the processing plant. (Yes these are Euro cents, but gas also costs upwards of $6 a gallon.) I take another look at the label on my bird: that's right, it cost me €12.59.

I am sincerely hoping that Martin received more than a handful of coins for this chicken; but more importantly, I am hoping against hope that Martin could give the bird a relatively good life, and that the breed of chicken is not the standard white thing. I recognize that visualizing him raising chicks hatched from eggs laid by happy heritage birds on the green rolling hills of his Ardagh farm is a pipe dream.

The heady aroma and steam from the stockpot tell me my stock is finished. I seriously toy with leaving the whole chicken story alone, but it's like a scab I can't stop picking. How is free range defined in Ireland? In the States, I know that it is a hollow term that means that the creatures have access to the a barren spot of ground for a very minimum amount of time, usually in a way that makes no significant difference in their feed or behavior. I want to know that the regulations here give some meaning to the word. So I keep digging.

I find the latest EU directive, from 2007, that states that indoor chickens can be kept at a density of about 18 birds per square meter of floor space, which is more than a little cramped. Free range chickens, as the name implies, have complete access to an outdoors that must have vegetation (and can include orchards, woodland and other pasture) and are provided with shelter which they can go into as they choose. The farmers must provide four square meters per bird. That same area in high-density floor confinement would be stuffed with 72 birds in Ireland or 80 birds in the US.

As I pick the last bits of meat off the bones of Martin's broiler, that knowledge means that I can breathe a little easier. And so can Martin's chickens, running around the green rolling hills of his farm in Limerick.

Bottom line

Like many these days, I have avoided looking at the bottom line of my bank statements. And like many these days, when I did look, I was shocked, and then scared. That’s a big chunk of our retirement gone, or, looking at it another way, many more years of working and less playing than I was hoping for. For some, it is dreams that are lost, for others, it is much more.

I think that those who choose to plug into the media are a bit worse off, as both journalista and advertising moguls try to get more blood from an increasingly dry stone. I had the opportunity break my usual television fast during my annual translation pilgrimage this year. I wanted to see election returns: my hotel room screen blared images of hope (the three big networks), and rheotric forecasting gloom and doom (my first encounter with Fox news). And yet, I still needed to eat every day, even as markets crash and foreclosures loom around me. And I still need to eat, even in a hotel. Navigating a restaurant menu is always a challenge, and after a week, I had exhausted the possibilities and was into reruns.

As is usual for these events, I am happy to return home, in spite of the things that may have piled up in my absence (though Darling Husband does hold down a fairly tight fort and is easy to come home to). Without a TV blaring canned messages, I am free to think about things and make up my own mind. Without a grueling conference and meeting schedule, I am free to respond to my and my family’s more human needs. Without the confines of a restaurant menu, I am free to eat as I wish.

And joy of joys, my inbox was replete with good stuff: an invitation to a birthday party, an invitation to what promised to be a congenial work party at school, and an invitation to join a box scheme from a local farmer. I found it easy to say yes to all of them.

And so yesterday, I picked up carpool kids and a huge crate piled with muddy potatoes (scads of them), carrots, parsnips, cabbage and kale, intoxicatingly fragrant bunching onions and a handful of sweet pears and apples. And it is good news for our bottom line: even with an unfavorable exchange rate, this bounty of local and organic produce, farmed by people we know and have broken bread with, cost us less than $30. I shall go to the market tomorrow, and invest in a $15 chicken, and improve our bottom line for the week.

Yellow bowl

For many years, we have used a rotation diet in our household to help us balance between foods that act as allergens and eating what most people call "normally." A rotation gives us the chance to have lasagna and ice cream cones--but not every day. And the knowledge gained from learning to think and cook a different way makes it possible to adjust our diet to the stresses and illness that ebb and flow through our days.

Over the years, the rotation was honed to the rhythm of our lives: a lighter breakfast for those early dismissal days, wheat and diary allowed on Sundays when we were all home for tea and cake. Loads of spaghetti (spelt pasta with sheep's milk romano) on Wednesday, golden waffles on Sunday morning. When we were sick, we could use dairy substitutes even on "dairy" days; when traveling, we can choose the days to "blow the diet." The goal is to maintain our health in the long-term, and the method was not to deprive ourselves of things we loved to eat every single day of every week, of every month, for years or forever.

We bought the waffle iron six years ago, at a school auction. It was a whim, and we have used it almost every Sunday since then. There are exceptions: muffins when there were fresh blueberries; buttery hot cross buns for Easter morning, pancakes when camping. Over the years, we found a waffle mix we liked a lot, and it was sheer luck that it was based on a rice flour.

During our first weeks on the Emerald Isle, I acquired a few items that I knew we would need: a drying rack (two actually, since jeans and towels take two days to dry), a printer/scanner/copier (the scanner part to be paperless, and the printer part because paperless is still a distant dream), a good sized stockpot (pasta in teenage-sized portions), and a yellow mixing bowl. I couldn't bring the waffle iron with because of the voltage thing, but I figured I could still make pancakes from scratch.

I had read that Ireland, like many northern European nations, has a fairly high rate of celiac sprue, so I was expecting that gluten free products would be relatively easy to find. There are three different types of GF flour made by Odlums (the Irish equivalent of Pillsbury) in the supermarket, but they contain egg albumen as a binder, which means I can't use them. Luckily, the health food store in town had a little bag of rice-based bread flour, and the Internet had several GF pancake recipes to choose from.

The first pancakes out of the pan were pale and flavorless. I added some salt and sugar, and they started to taste better, especially when slathered with jam and yogurt. But they were still pale, and I knew I was in trouble when Number One used the term gelatinous when referring to them the second weekend.

So yesterday in Tesco, I bought what they call a sandwich pan. It looks a bit like a shallow pie pan, almost like a cake pan. What it does hold nicely is scones. Before kids, I had perfected buttery oat scones; this morning, my yellow bowl served to mix up some GF scones laced with chunks of green apples from the neighbor's tree. It may be that waffles will have to wait until we're home again.

Oatey Scones (GF)

1 3/4 c GF flour mix (I used Doves Farm White Bread mix, a base of white rice flour with potato starch, tapioca starch, and xantham gum)
1/4 t salt
2 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
1/4 c butter
2 T sugar
2 T brown sugar
1/4 c porridge oats
1/4 c apples, chopped
1/4 t cinnamon

1/4 c (soy) yogurt
3/4 c (soy) milk

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
Mix dry ingredients thoroughly. Cut in the butter. Mix in liquids as gently as possible. Dough should be moist & slightly sticky so add more if necessary, a little at a time.
Turn mixture into buttered pan, shape roughly, score in quarters (or eighths) with a floured knife. Bake 20-25 minutes. Serve warm with more butter and jam.

Institutionalized

Over the summer, I mooched a book about adult learners, specifically, how adults learn musical instruments, and how it differs from how children learn them. The author, John Holt, is an expert in learning himself, and has done much work on different learning styles, and how many children are failing, not because of themselves, but because the system fails them.

As a leading thinker, he has had the opportunity to meld minds with others in his field, and a South American colleague put his finger squarely on our tendency to create institutions. At some point, nearly every field where we used to "do it ourselves" has become institutionalized: we are being raised to believe that this is good, while a few questioning souls poke around the ragged edges and point out that the scale in the economy of scale is not a human scale.

Holt's point was that learning institutions often fail people who don't fit in the mold, and especially adults, who know themselves well enough to know how they learn. But what he says also applies to other institutions: Health care, from childbirth to medications, with the establishment trying to loosen the grip of centuries of wisdom. And then there's the food industry, for an industry is yet another institution.

Along the narrow lanes of Ireland and even the more civilized Britain, we often see signs of small food producers--literally. Hand-made cardboard signs for free-range eggs, more elaborate wood-burned signs for farm stands, even a hand lettered sign in a window advertising homemade ginger-rhubarb jam. Some farm stands even have meats and cheeses, and occasional sundries like flour and honey.

That window sign for jam makes me think of the hundreds of jars of jam on my shelves at home, how I throw fruit from our plum tree away every year. I could easily make up another hundred jars every year, but there is no way we would be able to eat it, and because mine is not a commercial kitchen, I cannot legally sell it. I ran into much the same thing when I made the wedding cake for friends. I toyed with setting up a limited shop, making the occasional special cake as it fit in my life, but an investigation of the regulations revealed that there is no place for the very small producer.

The irony, of course, is that this affects things that we proclaim as Good, such as the organic standard and reducing waste and even (what some would call Christian) charity. Since the institutions we have allowed to become gigantic place the onus on even small producers to conform to regulations that really only apply to large producers, we all miss out: the person with a few grass-fed cattle who cannot slaughter them because he would need to provide two washrooms for FDA inspectors in his facility; the home baker who makes just few heavenly rhubarb pies and jam; the ambitious gardener whose bumper crop of zucchini and tomatoes end up in the garbage because even the food bank isn't allowed to accept it.

This institution-driven culture of fear is not a new idea, but we have finally given it a name. Strip searches for airline travel are only the latest manifestation, as we have allowed so many institutions to grow beyond their intended purpose. The argument for the institution in the food industry is nearly always safety: to keep our food supply safe, we must hold every producer, large and small to the same standard. But we are seeing exactly the opposite: as we push toward more and more food-as-a-commodity and factory production, our food supply has never before been so fragile. These self-same centralized practices contribute to equally large-scale outbreaks of pathogens that didn't even exist a generation ago. But the small, human, scale makes sense: if you know who grew you food, and they know you (or you are one and the same), it becomes obvious that it is in everyone's interest to bring safe food to the table.

The other argument is that at no time in our history have we been able to provide so many calories to so many people for so little money. And yet this claim is undermined by the revelation that not only are a great many of these calories empty ones that contribute to a huge health crisis, but these same savings are realized through unbalanced subsidies lobbied in back rooms by two large institutions, government and industry.

It is not a mortal error to entrust an institution with a task we do not feel up to: but the institution we are free to choose must be worthy of our trust, and we must understand just what part of us we are abdicating to that body.