Ruminations

In his newest book, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan writes:

The first time I heard the advice to “just eat food” was in a speech by the nutritionist and author Joan Gussow, and it baffled me. Of course you should eat food - what else is there to eat? But Gussow, who grows much of her own food on a flood-prone finger of land jutting into the Hudson River, refuses to dignify most of the products for sale in the supermarket with that title. “In the 34 years I’ve been in the field of nutrition,” she said, “I have watched real food disappear from large areas of the supermarket and from much of the rest of the eating world.” Taking its place has been an unending stream of food-like substitutes - “products constructed largely around commerce and hope, supported by frighteningly little actual knowledge.”

Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

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Jared Diamond on the Consumption Factor

Jared M. Diamond, professor at UCLA and author of the best sellers Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, asks in a January 2 Op-Ed piece for the New York Times, “What’s Your Consumption Factor?”He writes, “The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.”

This level of consumption cannot be maintained, he writes, as our world resources dwindle and as people in developing countries strive to adopt our high-consumption lifestyle. What is the answer?”Willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable. Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life.”

Read the entire editorial.

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In his runaway bestseller “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” Jared Diamond brilliantly examined the circumstances that allowed Western civilizations to dominate much of the world. Now he probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to fall into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Using a vast historical and geographical perspective ranging from Easter Island and the Maya to Viking Greenland and modern Montana, Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of environmental catastropheone whose warning signs can be seen in our modern world and that we ignore at our peril.

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Alice Waters is likely more responsible than anyone for the revolution in the way Americans eat, cook, and think about food. She was named the most influential figure in the past 30 years of the American kitchen by Gourmet magazine, and she has “single-handedly chang[ed] the American palate” according to the New York Times. Her simple but inventive dishes focus on a passion for flavor and a reverence for locally produced, seasonal foods.

With an essential repertoire of timeless, approachable recipes chosen to enhance and showcase great ingredients, The Art of Simple Food is an indispensable resource for home cooks. Here you will find Alice’s philosophy on everything from stocking your kitchen, to mastering fundamentals and preparing delicious, seasonal inspired meals all year long. Always true to her philosophy that a perfect meal is one that’s balanced in texture, color, and flavor, Waters helps us embrace the seasons’ bounty and make the best choices when selecting ingredients. Fill your market basket with pristine produce, healthful grains, and responsibly raised meat, poultry, and seafood, then embark on a voyage of culinary rediscovery that reminds us that the most gratifying dish is often the least complex. All of her beef recipes specify grass-fed beef.

She is the owner of Chez Panisse restaurant and the author of nine cookbooks.

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A Recommendation
by Ridge Shinn

Tune into the most recent things to cross Allan Nation’s desk. Allan Nation, the long time editor of the Stockman Grassfarmer, was promoting grass-farming long before it was popular. His vast knowledge, relationships accumulated over the years, and his passion for a steep learning curve keep him constantly in front of the pack. I always turn to Allan’s Observations when I get my new issue of the magazine to see where he’s been, what he has read and his critical appraisal of what he has learned.

If you don’t get the magazine, you should at the least visit his blog: http://www.stockmangrassfarmer.net/Allan_Blog.html

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by Susan Beal, DVM

The rest of the book is arranged by organ systems, with each chapter addressing a major system. Within each chapter the common (and some not so common) ailments are arranged alphabetically by diagnosis.

In each subsection, Doc discusses the presentation, some of the contributing factors to the conditions, and then offers some treatment advice. The treatment advice is sound and ranges from herbal remedies, homeopathic medicines, naturopathic treatments (hydrotherapy, massage, nutritional and special needs supplements, for example) and topical and supportive treatments. Doc Dettloff continually emphasizes the need for species appropriate nutrition and husbandry as well and is clear that the conventional industrial agriculture system does not always provide that.

Some of the diagnoses may be a little difficult to find when you look at the chapters. For instance, nutritional diseases such as iodine deficiency and copper toxicity are found in the chapter on endocrine diseases, as is pregnancy toxemia. Many readers might initially hunt for those things in different places, such as digestive system or reproductive system chapters. This minor fault is offset by the extensive index that helps in referencing the contents of this book.

There are additional chapters addressing the immune system and nosodes. The Immune System chapter contains good information on stray voltage and ley lines - again, not topics one might immediately associate with the title of the chapter but things which commonly influence the health, production and behaviour of stock.

The material on nosodes is presented as an alternative to vaccination – and while reducing dependence on vaccination is of real concern, over the years I have found that simply replacing the use of vaccination by the rote use of nosodes often creates health problems down the road. Oft times is it better to reduce or eliminate the use of vaccines and concentrate on bolstering the health of the individual and herd through proper nutrition and attention to the subtle signs of chronic illness than it is to rely on nosodes.

Dr Dettloff a real advocate of using the team approach to health care, realizing that there are some things the herdsman is able to do, while other things require the expertise of a veterinary professional. Doc also discusses management with an eye to prevention as well.

His advice is practical – ranging from how to administer medicines to how to roll a cow with a DA (displaced abomasum) (as well as when not to roll a cow with a DA!) to how to replace a prolapsed uterus. The photographs in the text are clear and illustrate his points well. Tales of practice and real life situations are rampant and help make the material in this book all the more real and easy to integrate into the day to day.

This book reminds me a little of the old Humphrey’s patent medicine books common near the turn of the last century in that many of the treatment suggestions are for products formulated and sold by the author.

It is possible to use this book without using the particular patent medicine suggested by the author, but that requires a little more work and understanding of herbal medicines on the part of the reader. And, unlike the Humphrey’s remedies, which were only identified by number, Dr Dettloff does list the basic ingredients of the medicines in the Resources section provided at the close of this text.

Alternative Treatment for Ruminant Animals is a primer of alternative treatments to common conditions in ruminant animals (goats and sheep as well as cattle). It is written from the perspective of a clinician offering care in a system that does not use conventional medicines, whether the producer is officially certified or not. This is a great resource for the herdsman or the hobby-type farmer as well as for veterinary professionals who may not have extensive experience in organic herds or in managing illness with other than conventional medical approaches. It is a resource that all herdsmen should have – and not stuck somewhere on a shelf looking pretty, and staying clean, but out in the barn or truck or medicine box, being used.

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by Lynne Pledger

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan, Penguin Press, 2006

This book is by one of our favorite authors who is also a long-time friend of the Bakewell Repro Center. As fans of Michael Pollan know, he brings a fresh perspective to the often complex topic of what we eat. Below we present our own book review, by Lynne Pledger.

Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma could be a revolution-maker. In one engaging, comprehensive volume, Pollan reveals more than any of us knew about the way industrial agriculture, backed by government policies, erodes our health, environment, and quality of life. But he also addresses alternatives — notably the grass-fed meat movement — leaving us with hope that the situation can be righted

In light of the abundance of food, varieties of food and conflicting advice about food in our culture, the book asks, What should we eat? and then follows with a critical companion question, What are we eating now?

In a disarmingly earnest quest, Pollan leads us up and down the food chain to consider all the implications — health, environmental, ethical — of food he consumes as we read. These meals include take-out from McDonald’s, a chicken dinner from Joel Salatin’s family farm, and a “personal” meal that the author hunts, gathers, grows and prepares himself. In the hands of a lesser writer — or less thoughtful human being — this documentation might be a tedious tome or an evangelical diatribe. But Pollan is provocative, moving, and humorous, serving up fresh insight with every page.

Appropriately, the book starts with a beleaguered American farmer, George Naylor, who we join in his Iowa cornfield where he is planting yet another subsidized crop of that already over-abundant, cheap commodity fertilized by fossil fuels. Following the trail of kernels from cornfield to grain elevator, and then on to a feedlot and a maze of food processing, we end up at a McDonald’s, where Pollan and his wife and son purchase three meals to go.

Pollan takes his research down to the level of the atom, utilizing a laboratory spectrometer that identifies the corn atoms, to find out how much of the carbon in McDonald’s various offerings comes from corn. The results: soda , 100% (high fructose corn syrup), milk shake, 78%, salad dressing, 65%, chicken nuggets, 56%, cheeseburger, 52%, French fries, 23%. Even those of us who eschew McDonalds are likely to be corn-fed without realizing it. Corn-derived substances are in many processed foods. And a great deal of corn passes through a steer on its way to being beef at the supermarket or steak house.

A central point is that cattle are ruminants, and ruminants have evolved to eat grass, not corn, which makes them sick, requiring medication to live long enough to be slaughtered. For those who think feedlots are an advance of modern agriculture, Pollan offers this chilling analogy:

“A feedlot is very much a premodern city …teeming and filthy and stinking, with open sewers, unpaved roads, and choking air rendered visible by dust…. As in fourteenth-century London, say, the workings of the metropolitan digestion remain vividly on display, the foodstuffs coming in, the streams of waste going out. The crowding into tight quarters of recent arrivals from all over, together with the lack of sanitation has always been a recipe for disease. The only reason contemporary animal cities aren’t as plague-ridden or pestilential as their medieval human counterparts is a single historical anomaly: the modern antibiotic.”

In Chapter 9, Big Organic, Pollan buys an organic TV dinner at Whole Foods. The meal turns out to be,

“… a highly industrialized organic product, involving a choreography of thirty-one ingredients assembled from far-flung farms, laboratories, and processing plants scattered over a half-dozen states and two countries, and containing such mysteries of modern food technology as high-oleic safflower oil, guar and zanthan gum, soy lecithin, carrageenan, and ‘natural grill flavor’… Several of these ingredients are synthetic additives permitted under federal organic rules. So much for ‘whole’ foods.”

He also purchases a “free-range” chicken and subsequently investigates its provenance:

“The last stop on my tour of California industrial organic farming took me to Petuluma, where I tried without success to find the picturesque farmstead, with its red barn, cornfield, and farmhouse, depicted on the package in which the organic roasting chicken I bought at Whole Foods had been wrapped.”

Instead he finds the chickens crowded into “barracks,” with fans on either end; not caged, but not ranging freely either.

Pollan’s week at Joel Salatin’s “beyond organic” grass-based operation is the author’s crucible for testing the wisdom of organic agriculture’s heroes such as Sir Albert Howard, who wrote (in 1943), “Mother earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion …” At Salatin’s Polyface farm, Pollan finds that both the theories and the food can take the heat.

A key observation of the book is that while agriculture has always been the business of capturing free solar energy for human use by growing plants or raising plant-eating animals, industrial agriculture has made a fundamental shift in this relationship by relying on a finite resource—fossil fuel– for fertilizing, processing, and transporting food. The products may have a cheap price tag, but the cost to our society is incalculable.

Fed up with the system? Buy The Omnivore’s Dilemma for your family, friends, and elected representatives. Better yet: buy grass-fed meat and dairy, and pastured pork, poultry and eggs — and vote with your food.

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