Post-Easter Guilt

The Hamm even vegetarians like

Bellevue Farmers Market  
THURSDAY OPENING DAY
May 12th
3 - 7 pm
First Presbyterian Church
SATURDAY OPENING DAY
June 4th
10 - 3 pm
Washington Square

Easter dinner in the UrbanFarmJunkie's household was not exactly an EatLocal Fest. Not only was I not organized enough to order my Skagit River Ranch ham (or lamb) in time, but when I swung by Bill the Butcher's (which advertises local, sustainable, etc. etc.), I was even too late for their Oregon(?) hams. They sold me one from Iowa. Darn. And then I overheated it. Double darn.

I think only our peach cobbler (frozen from last summer), potatoes, half-and-half, butter, and Beecher's cheese hailed from the great state of Washington. The furthest food on offer was probably the fresh pineapple, but, man, was it worth it.

To assuage my guilt, at least no part of this distant Iowa ham will go to waste. I'm a sucker for hashes, and if you have a ham chunk sitting in the refrigerator, give this recipe a try.

Ham and Sweet Potato Hash * Modified from a Nov 2005 Bon Appetit recipe

Olive oil
2-1/2 cups peeled, sweet potato or yam chunks (about 1/2")
2 cups 1/2" cubes of ham
1 onion, chopped
2 cups chopped fresh spinach
4 eggs

In a large skillet, heat 3 T olive oil over medium-high. Add sweet potato cubes. Cover and cook 5 minutes. Mix in ham and onion. Cover and cook until sweet potato is tender and bottom of hash begins to brown, about 5-8 minutes. Sprinkle with pepper. Use spatula to turn over, smooshing it down. Cook uncovered until golden, turning occasionally, 5-10 minutes longer. Stir in spinach until wilted. Fry eggs separately or make room in the hash.

If you have kids like mine, you may want to increase the ham, since you'll just have to pick it out of the hash for them to eat.

That's it for this week! There's plenty of awful news in the food world, but I'll save it for another day...

EATING Lots of Different ANIMALS, Part II

Possum. It's What's for Dinner.

As promised, I've finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals. If you missed the first post on it, it's a thoughtful, well-written account of Foer's personal struggle with deciding whether or not to go vegetarian. (I didn't.) The discussions of factory farming were revolting enough--despite being familiar from Food, Inc. and The Omnivore's Dilemma--to reinforce my personal bias toward seafood and proteins from our Bellevue Farmers Market suppliers, but not repellent enough to make me a pain at dinner parties. Just make sure your host cooked that meat or chicken really, really, really well.

Foer raises the topic of antibiotic overuse in agro-industry and its connection to antibiotic-resistant bugs. Which made this recent claim in Wired disconcerting: roughly one in four packages of meat and poultry from across the United States contained multidrug resistant staph. That is, MRSA. Ick. And bummer about these bugs responding less and less to antibiotics because a Seattle microbiologist from the Institute of Environmental Health took 100 samples of raw poultry from Seattle-area grocery stores (including Whole Foods and PCC) and "found the pathogen Staphylococcus aureus on nearly half, and Campylobacter on more than half...The contaminated poultry included organic as well as conventionally grown chickens." Double ick. But, as Foer points out, "free-range" and "cage-free" and "natural" mean next to nothing. Industrially-raised chicken is industrially raised. I wish they had included chickens from Skagit River Ranch or Tiny's Organic in their study to represent alternatives for consumers. A study done by three universities found that, yes, organic chickens were also infected with nastiness, but at a lesser rate. These people claimed, "[t]he overall prevalence of Salmonella across all farms, sample types, and age group was 4.3% (13/300) in organic broiler farms compared to 28.8% (115/400) in conventional broiler farms."

Beyond health and infection reasons, Foer builds a case for respecting animal pain and intelligence. Animals we think of as dumb as doorknockers (cows, fish, birds) each have their particular species' intelligence, and each is capable of registering and wanting to avoid pain. While I found his arguments compelling, doggone if I still didn't want to eat them. I think I must fall in the Temple Grandin camp. In the excellent biopic, Claire Danes delivers a version of Grandin's philosophy: ""I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we've got to do it right. We've got to give those animals a decent life and we've got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect." (Hence her experience in more humane slaughterhouse design. Read the fascinating Animals in Translation for her thought process.)

If, dear meat-lover, after reading Eating Animals, you find yourself swearing off any protein that has to be killed, there's still a ray of hope for you. Food Safety News ran a recent article on the advisability of eating roadkill. Yes! Moose, deer, elk--heck--anything anyone can hit with a car and leave for dead can become guilt-free dinner. (Unless you were the one who hit it.) Just be sure to really, really, really cook it because even those wild animals have their share of undesirable bacteria. Combine a little roadkill with The Road Kill Cookbook or Manifold Destiny and you've got your Easter potluck dish while you drive to Grandma's. Talk about reduce, re-use, recycle.

Speaking of Easter, I leave you with this last enviro- and kid-friendly link. Forget poisoning your children with violently- and artificially-colored dyed Easter eggs. Make your own natural dyes, if you've got time on your hands. And you should now, since I've given you the roadkill idea. Bon appetit!

A Dog Eat Dog World: EATING ANIMALS, Part One

Right before reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, I treated myself to a conventionally-produced restaurant hamburger because I figured I would probably feel too guilty afterward to indulge.Well, I forgot to take the same measures before diving into Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, so the family had bean soup two nights ago (with a little Skagit River Ranch Polish Sausage for flavor) and black bean burritos yesterday. Foer covers much familiar territory in factory farming but from a fresh perspective, asking why we human beings eat some animals and not others, or draw certain distinctions between which kinds of animal intelligence we respect and which we don't. Very interesting, thought-provoking reading.

Taking a page from Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, Foer wonders why, for example, we euthanize thousands of dogs per year, only to render many of them into protein which is then fed back to livestock--shouldn't we just eat the dogs, and save a step? Cut out the middle-man, or animal, as the case may be? Why do Americans get sentimental about dogs and dog intelligence and not do the same for pigs, Charlotte's Web notwithstanding?

99% of meat purchased and consumed in the United States comes from factory farms. As one factory farmer points out, the cost of food has not gone up in decades. In most cases it's gone down. Which means, if a farm is to survive, it must produce the food at a lower and lower cost. Hence all the horror-movie craziness that goes on behind the scenes. If you have the money and access, you can be among the 1% of Americans buying your meat and seafood from humane, environmentally-sustainable operations like Bellevue Farmers Market's Skagit River Ranch, Samish Bay, Loki Fish Company, Fishing Vessel St. Jude, Hama Hama Oyster Company, Taylor Shellfish, and Tiny's Organic, but it's not an option for everyone. The higher prices found at the Market reflect the true cost of food, when it's raised with care for the animals and the earth, and not hidden behind government subsidies and efficiency-at-all-costs closed doors.

It's not just about factory chickens! Foer claims that, for every pound of Indonesian shrimp caught, 26 lbs of bycatch are thrown away, dead or dying. Yikes. Contrast that with Fishing Vessel St. Jude's claim that "our catch of other species while trolling for albacore averages about two fish per thousand albacore caught. None of the fish we catch is wasted, most provide a welcome change of diet to the crew." Or Loki Fish Company's Sustainable certification from the Marine Stewardship Council.

Maybe you're not inclined to go vegetarian. (I've yet to finish the book, but Foer will have an uphill battle with me. I love my meat, and I don't particularly like animals.) We can, however, inasmuch as the budget allows, reduce the proportion of factory-farm and big-seafood-operation protein we buy. It might mean switching completely to buying protein at places like our Bellevue Farmers Market. It might mean reducing the overall amount of animal protein we consume. It might mean a combination of both. But it would be hard to read Eating Animals without giving it some good, hard thought!

More on this next week. In the meantime, I have to place my Skagit River Ranch Buyers' Club order...

You Bet Your BPA

Good news, canned tomato fans! The Muir Glen brand has officially transitioned to BPA-free cans, reports Rebekah Denn on her blog. I'm thrilled because, as a canned-tomato-product-aholic, I was bulk ordering Pomi's boxed diced tomatoes but not finding a good price on strained tomatoes, which I wanted to substitute for canned tomato sauce. Eden Organic has introduced a line of tomato products in glass jars, but I haven't seen these in stores yet. They do sell the only canned beans that are BPA-free.

As I mentioned last week, BPA comes at us from many sources, not just our canned foods (it's in cash register receipts, for crying out loud!), but there's something particularly disturbing about eating the stuff. Environmental Science & Technology did some testing, as reported by Discovery News, with the gladdening result that NO BPA was found in "Similac infant formula, Bumble Bee Chunk Light Tuna in Water, Chef Boyardee Mac and Cheese, or Hunt's 100% Natural Tomato Paste. Canned pineapple, some soups, and a few other products also came up negative." The ones to stay away from? "Del Monte Fresh Cut Green Beans [came in] at the top of the list, followed by three types of Progresso soups."

Moving on to other chemicals, the European Union now requires products containing the "Southampton Six" of food colorings to carry warning labels, after a study done by that University suggested a link between the chemicals and increased hyperactivity in children. A similar bill was defeated in the United States. Clearly we Americans should conduct tests ourselves. May I suggest some of us schedule European vacations and see if our children are calmer and more pleasant, while the control group stays home feeding their offspring Skittles and Kraft Mac & Cheese and Gatorade? We might have to work on eliminating other variables, but I'm happy to volunteer for repeated iterations of the study...

Five weeks till the Market opens! Mark your calendar for Thursday, May 12 and all the BPA-free, artificial-color-free food you can eat!