Saving the Planet, One Meatball at a Time

The good news is, if you can't find studies and articles to support your point of view, you need only let a little more time pass. Take, for example, this recent Time Magazine article on the environmental virtues of grass-fed beef. It used to be that vegetarians alone held the environmental high ground, but now fans of pastured beef are clawing their way up because--surprise!--when cows eat grass, it benefits the cows, benefits the grassland, and benefits the consumer. Next time you're at the Bellevue Farmers Market getting your Samish Bay or Skagit River Ranch grass-fed beef, remember this:

• Cows benefit. They don't have all those stomachs for nothing. Cows are built to eat grass, not soybeans or corn. When cows eat grass, they don't require antibiotics to doctor their ailing stomach(s).
• Grassland benefits. In short: manure and close-clipped lawn-mowing. Cows may also graze on land unsuitable for other purposes.
• Eaters benefit. As Michael Polland and others have noted, grass-fed beef is higher in cancer-fighting antioxidants and Omega-3s, the same Omega-3s found in salmon! It's also leaner.

And, as added frosting on the hamburger cake, a recent study by the American Journal of Clinical nutrition discovered that, after all, Nina Planck might have been on to something because saturated fat does NOT seem to be correlated to reduced risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, and cardiovascular disease. All this time, it wasn't the butter and bacon grease, it was the trans fats in the man-made margarine and vegetable shortening!

"Yippee!" about sums it up, folks.

(Oh, and a P.S. for you pescatorians who wouldn't eat beef if it was the last thing between humanity and planetary destruction: on Feb 4, Ray's Boathouse will be featuring our very own fishermen, Loki and F/V St. Jude at a special dinner!)

Loki Online, for Starters

Just FYI, BFMers: our own Loki Fish is offering a 15% discout to first-time online orderers in the New Year. Just type in the code NEWYEAR. They've added shipping options, and of course you will find their delicious line of products. Good news, considering RealAge reports that eating one serving of fish per week will make your "real age" (must be like wind-chill factor) up to 2.7 years younger.

A recent CBS poll finds that only a third of Americans feel "very confident" that the food they buy is safe. I do wonder who fell in that "very confident" bucket, since just the other day I was buying a bag of baby spinach at QFC with misgivings. I hate to get the big tubs of organic because I don't like buying giant pieces of plastic, but if I went with the conventional bag of baby spinach, was I going to be laid low by e Coli? Or was I fooling myself, and it was just as likely that storebought organic could be contaminated, but thankfully with organic cow manure?

At least with spinach I could be sure my children wouldn't eat any. I can't say the same for the downed cows--I mean school lunches--I let each child buy twice a month, out of my laziness and their desire for hot food. I figure the food supply is a game of roulette; by knowing my farmers and food sources some of the time (read: during Bellevue market season), I increase our chances to stay healthy.

Oh, and a final tidbit for those of you who have not yet abandoned your New Year's Resolution to work out: Eating Well blogged about foods that build endurance. The short list? Onions, apples, grapes, berries, cabbage, and broccoli. All contain a certain antioxidant that--in supplement form, at least--helped bikers bike that extra mile. If you go for the onions, just watch out who you do all that extra exhaling around!

Happy New Year

January can be a bummer of a food month in our household. Just for starters, after the solid Day-After-Thanksgiving-until-New-Year's-Eve food extravaganza, my husband and I are now two days into the 2nd Annual Sugar-Free January. We aren't legalistic about it--last night I had a soda and kettle corn in a nicotine-patch kind of approach to it--we just don't do candy, sweets, and dessert in January. Sigh.

On the plus side, we're back home from family visits and can keep an eye on our food sources and ingredients again. My brother-in-law received Kurt Eichenwald's THE INFORMANT, which recently got made into a Matt Damon movie, and before he could start it, I picked it up. It's a book with great appeal for urban farm junkies like myself, being all about the sinister goings-on at agroindustrial giant Archer Daniels Midland--take, for example, how they manipulated the sugar market to keep prices high and expand the demand for their own delightful high fructose corn syrup, or how they got the government so excited about ethanol. I didn't get to finish, but I'll keep you posted.

In other news, if you're looking for some possible sun, Nash's Organic Produce in Sequim will be the featured tour farm for PCC's Farmland Trust on Saturday, January 16. Please register ahead of time! The tour lasts from 11-4 and includes lunch.

And finally, if one of your New Year's resolutions includes pinching pennies foodwise, you may be interested in Siobhan Phillips' Salon article. After hearing about the sales declines in organic, sustainable food, she set out to see if eating frugally and eating thoughtfully were mutually exclusive. Probably few readers will want to go to the extremes of her experiment, but she does mention some good cookbooks and ideas for stretching ingredients without losing flavor. I did manage three meals out of my last Skagit River Ranch chicken, not including lunch leftovers, so I'm with Phillips there, but I'm not about to empty my spice rack. Giving up cinnamon or pepper or tea, to be honest, are never going to be on my to-do list.