Peanuts, get your peanuts!

Along about the time that the Irish government issued a blanket recall for all pork products, I logged on to the FDA website, partially to see if there was any information there for American consumers of Irish pork products (there was, a single entry), and partly to research information on the large beef recall of 2008. While I was there, I subscribed to an email feed of recalls.

Every week, I receive a list of company XYZ and ABC company recalling a small batch of contaminated this, and another bit of mislabeled such-and-so. The fact that not a week goes by without one is a cause for alarm on its own. But there hasn't been a thing since the recent "peanut story" broke. Were there no active recalls? Were the servers overloaded? Or did they eat some Nutter Butters?

It is, of course, a classic example of the complicated web of industrial food supply. Many are questioning the slowness of the response (the toxin was first detected around Labor Day, it's Inauguration Day today). But tracing the ingredients in our food is no easy task, especially given the complex web of distribution, with trucks and boats ferrying ingredients all over the world. The ability of the government to oversee our food safety is severely hampered by the crushing pressure to produce cheap food.

Lest we point our fingers at the government and say it's all their fault, I would remind us that our own desire to save money means that we have also willingly aided and abetted business and our government. We are the ones who shop the discount stores, who stock up on the marked-down cookies and who look at the price per unit instead of the ingredients. Chain stores are doing their part too, putting suitable pressure on producers to not only keep prices low, but make them lower (thus increasing profit margins and shareholder value, cornerstones to our "keep growing" economy); retailers are marking down things before they go past date to increase profits; and mother corporations continue funding lobbying to resist labeling requirements such as country of origin or genetic modification of ingredients.

But I would put to you that there is a way around all this mayhem. When bags of spinach from California were contaminated with E. coli, we munched on fresh spinach from Carnation; when the Irish government told us pork may have eaten dioxin-contaminated feed, we dined on apricot-glazed pork loin chops, reassured by the farmer that his beast had eaten kitchen scraps; and if we really want peanut-butter cookies, we can grind peanuts at the co-op to make fresh peanut butter, and then go home and bake our own.

Is it cheaper? I may have had to shell out a few more cents for my bunch of organic spinach, but the loss to the industry topped $350 million; those loin chops seemed expensive at the time, but no amount of money could buy any bacon or sausage during the first two days of the recall; and my peanut butter sandwich cookies are far tastier than anything you can find in a big box store. Whether they cost more--in terms of time or money--is your call, since I personally consider the time spent making (and eating) them enriching, not costly.

I guess it's just a matter of value. Or values.

Peanut Butter Cookies

1 1/4 c flour
1/4 t. salt
1/4 t. baking soda
1/2 C butter
1/2 C freshly ground peanut butter
1/2 C granulated sugar
1/2 C brown sugar
1 egg

Combine flour, salt, and baking soda, and set aside. In large mixing bowl, mix butter and peanut butter until well blended; add granulated sugar and brown sugar, mixing well, and beat in egg. Stir flour mixture into peanut butter mixture until well blended. Drop by spoonfuls onto lightly greased cookie sheet; flatten with a fork, and sprinkle lightly with granulated sugar. Bake at 375 for 10-15 minutes, or until lightly browned. (the key is really to watch them very closely--pull when just browned and let set before moving to the cooling rack / paper sack or whatever you use).

We dunk in this:

Chocolate soup

2 cups half & half
6 oz. bittersweet chocolate, chopped

Pour milk into a 2 quart heavy-bottomed saucepan and bring just to a boil. Remove from heat. Add the chopped chocolate and stir until well combined and the chocolate has melted. Cool a bit and serve in small espresso cups.

Of cabbage and kings

A mention that we were in Germany over the Christmas break triggered a dormant thought in my English friend's brain: had I ever heard of something called a Gaitopf for making Sauerkraut, and did I know of any less expensive option than the one on Amazon?

I checked out the link she sent, to the Harsch Gaitopf, with its jaw-dropping prices. It's a nifty-difty old-fashioned looking ceramic crock designed to ferment lowly (and plentiful in winter) cabbage into delicious and healthy sauerkraut. The trick is a rim of water that the lid sits in; it forms a seal to keep the bad bacteria out, and let the beneficial ones multiply.

There is a long-standing tradition of fermented foods (think yoghurt, cheese wine, sauerkraut, oh, yes, don't forget yeast for bread and beer…), and the white coats that have deigned to look at traditional foods are still scratching their heads on why they are so good for us. But even they readily admit that these ancient foods are still around, both for taste and their benefits.

Which meant I was equally baffled as I helped her hunt online for a more reasonably-priced version of such a clearly traditional vessel. It turned out to be a two-fold problem: the Germans have been/are slow to adopt "new" technology (Number One son actually got to see someone use a typewriter--in the hospital no less) so online shopping is a hit-and-miss proposition.

The other problem turned out to be linguistic: the term to use was gaeren or gären, not gairen. Once I figured that one out, Google's floodgates opened, and we found oodles of them. I laughingly joked that prices were so reasonable that she couldn't spend a hundred dollars unless she really wanted to make 25 liters of the stuff. Turns out she did, and at the latest report, she had bought the 16 liter pot, which arrived in only two days from Leipzig. I can only hope that she also invested in the nifty slicer they had for preparing that much cabbage too.

And so I thought of her cabbage bubbling away this evening, as I chopped up a heavy purple cabbage and threw it into my bubbling pot on the stove for tomorrow evening's meal. We'll be out all day tomorrow, exploring by train (the destination is secondary to the mode of transportation as far as Little one is concerned), so I'm making supper ahead. And I know that my Rotkohl will taste better tomorrow anyway.

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.