End of Part I: Eating People

Among several challenges of this project is finding the balance between keeping the focus on the food in all of its beauty and flavor and summer variety and, on the other hand, giving robust treatment to the macro-level issues that complicate the story of that food and what it means for those not sitting at the table. As you can tell, my default is to run my mouth and err on the side of exposition.

The last Big-Picture topic I wanted to touch on is how our food affects our fellow humans. It is one thing to be a "tree hugger" and harbor Gaia-type affinity for all of Creation, but such emotional appeals do not warm every person's heart. (Even I, a pretty touchy-feely guy, still draw a line in the sand between myself and my bovine fellows such that I feel beyond reproach even as I eat them.) I would argue that there are two very strong reasons that we should all be concerned about how our food affects our fellows: an economic argument and a moral argument.

The Economic Argument

Constructing an economic argument may seem callous, familiar, or both depending on your prior exposure to the Econ 101 crowd. I think I can generalize and say that most people who have been in an undergraduate environment in the last twenty years are plenty familiar with the unique frame that this discipline brings to policy conversations. Rather than getting caught up in anecdotes and mood-ring analysis, the economist dutifully closes off bias and preference and justice and love and rigorously analyzes the world with respect to twin criteria: Rationality and Efficiency.

I would argue that the global food system falls short of the economist's standards as measured by either criterion. Let's consider Rationality: a look at our marketplace and our social institutions reveals that we value both affordable food and a healthy, productive society. The deluge of obnoxious direct mail we all receive is a testament to our desire for the cheapest food we can get, yet we also value social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicaid, TANF, SNAP, and so on. We support our fellows with Pell grants and other taxpayer-funded programs as well as through charitable giving.

But our food system irrationally splits these goals and prioritizes cheap over healthy. (I'll be borrowing from Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" throughout this post because he lays out the idiocy of our food system as clearly as anyone else I've seen.) We are fat and diabetic in part because we consume lots of processed food and simple carbohydrates, much of it in the form of corn-based derivatives like HFCS. We eat excessive amounts of conventionally produced beef and pork and chicken fattened up with corn and other grains. These phenomena can be blamed in part on our use of corn subsidies, which have perverted the defensible concept of counter-cyclical support for farmers into a leviathan of skewed priorities. We pay farmers to produce more corn than we need, which leads us to break it down into dirt-cheap sugars and additives or to force-feed to livestock to fill our $0.99 hamburgers and $.39 tacos.

The irrationality continues: we grow massive swaths of identical crops to gain marginal increases in efficiency of collection in exchange for heightened vulnerability to crop loss. (Same crop, same bug/disease/mold wipes it all out. Alternatively, we fend off these threats to our crops by using chemical fertilizers that poison farm workers, rural communities, and even end-users. We embrace senseless water-use policies that suck aquifers dry (example: Alpaugh, CA) to grow thirsty crops like rice in arid climates like the Central Valley. I don't need to unpack further the way in which these patterns trade health and wellness for cheap food.

What about Efficiency? The talking points are similar but distinct: our food system is penny smart and pound foolish. Our policies promote fatness to shave pennies off the cost of crops and meat; our use of petrochemicals poisons us to boost short-term yields. Instead of embracing nature's rhythms (inter-cropping) we attempt to subjugate Mother Earth to our shortsighted preferences (mono-cropping) while depleting soil and ecosystem health in the long term. To worsen our screwy corn/food policies, we impose mandatory corn-ethanol quotas which drive up food prices without fighting climate change.

I could go on and on, as you can imagine. I haven't even discussed collapsing fisheries, seed monopolies, GMOs, or steroid and antibiotic use in CAFOs. This blog is not the forum to discuss these topics in detail, and truth be told I'm not the expert to analyze them. But if you are curious to learn more, there is a growing community of voices discussing these harmful trends.

The Moral Argument

Now let's talk about how -- by eating cheap food -- we are Eating People.

These same food policies have a human cost that is felt both here and abroad. You've already read the domestic-sphere talking points: we skew toward fats, meats, and sugars that harm our health; we poison our farming communities and their downstream neighbors. We exploit immigrant labor by relying on toxic factory farms and dangerous slaughterhouses; this cheap food propagates in cheap restaurants that create low-wage, dead-end jobs for native and migrant workers alike. We embrace a homogenized food system that prizes low costs over all other factors, and this facilitates the chain- and big-box stores that drive small businesses from our communities.

But the picture abroad is arguably even worse, especially through a moral lens. When we subsidize corn production, it has all the above-mentioned effects and more. Our excess corn floods local markets in other countries and lowers the market cost of corn/maize. (Remember supply and demand?) Local buyers vote with their dollars and local farmers cannot make ends meet. Eventually these farmers give up -- sometimes leaving family farms that have existed for generations -- and seek work in urban areas. This influx of labor drives down wages and creates potential for unrest; it also stimulates cross-border labor flows with various negative effects. [I'll bow out here and punt on the topic of Fair Trade, which seems like a conceptually strong but perhaps practically stymied response to these trends.]

Taken together, neo-liberal policies such as NAFTA and CAFTA combine with misguided programs like the IMF and the World Bank in ways that undermine local farming, disrupt social structures, and create the circumstances for civil unrest and unauthorized migration. All this, and it hurts human health as well! Wee!

Yes, phenomena similar to what I've described in the domestic context occur elsewhere. The same processed foods flood markets the world over and in some cases distort prices in incredible ways. It is not uncommon for a bottle of Coca-Cola to cost less than a bottle of water in Mexico or Kenya or elsewhere in the world; sugary, package-intensive snacks are often less costly than whole, healthy foodstuffs. And as the global population continues to urbanize and see rising incomes, tens of millions of newly empowered consumers are embracing the same dysfunctional food patterns that we Americans have vividly shown to be problematic.

Why do we allow this to happen? I can offer two explanations, both disappointing in their weakness. I think a considerable portion of our business and political leaders are operating in an ideological frame. They took undergraduate Econ 101, it shifted their paradigms, and they never looked back. I have seen firsthand how the allure of a simple but powerful idea (libertarianism, economic efficiency, perfectly rational arguments) can blind otherwise thoughtful people to the childish or even destructive throughputs of their new-found ideology. Without personally knowing any of the (white, male) policy makers with all the power, I will venture the assumption that some portion of them support these myopic policies because their textbooks told them to.

The other explanation I can posit is even more disappointing, and I have to say that I find it more plausible. I think that we have a societal pathology that leads us to prize bargain hunting above all else. Mind you, I am not above this -- I have also spent precious minutes of my life comparing disparate cans of tomatoes to choose the one cheaper by the ounce. But at some point we have to make meaningful choices about the tradeoffs between cheap-o conventional tomatoes and pricier heirlooms, and we are prevented from doing so both by imperfect regulations and hidden information and by our own single-minded price consciousness. Is our sense of fraternitas really so weak that we will choose to save a dollar per pound on bananas even if it means relegating another human being to a life of misery? I defiantly say that we would not, but I must acknowledge that we are easily blinded to the oppressive cogs of the food system as they grind away behind the curtain of our modern foodscape.

El Fin

At the end, I wonder if this post was grossly overwritten...the chances are good that it was. But I hope this has been a limited but cogent assessment of a complex system that is counterproductive in every way except those that matter least. With the economy weak and joblessness high, it is easy to focus on inflation rates and unemployment claims and GDP growth in frantic hope of signs of recovery. But just as we put too much faith in the infallibility of an endlessly rising housing market, so too are we at risk of inviting collapse by impoverishing the world's consumers by overemphasizing corporate profits and dollar menus.

Now that I have dispensed with the "required reading" of this project, I hope to turn my energies to the fun stuff!

Still more Part I: Eating Animals

We haven't exactly stuck to our proposed schedule for this project, but I wanted to take a little more time to frame the food issues that give this project meaning. I've already touched on some of the major criticisms of Big Ag and conventional agriculture. We've also talked about waste itself, which is, of course, the immediate focus of this effort.

But I feel like I also ought to address the issue of veganism. We eat a mostly vegetarian (non-meat) diet but dairy, eggs, and animal byproducts are commonplace in our kitchen. We also have meat on occasion, most commonly driven by Audrey's iron urges.

Three of our close friends are strict vegans, and other people in our lives whom we respect and value also choose to purge animal products from their lives. For all the thought and effort and additional cost that we willingly incorporate into our diet, and for all the talking and prosletyzing we do about our choices, shouldn't we have the courage to take all this to the next (last) level?

In short, yes. Kant tells us that one should not make an exception of himself; Matthew 7:12 tells us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Put another way: we should put our money where our mouths are. At present, I would say that we fall short of the goal of unalloyed idealism in our food choices but that overall these choices are defensible, even if they are not vegan.

[I'm no expert on veganism, so the following analysis should be read with appropriate skepticism.]

I am aware of three reasons that people choose veganism. First is a concern for one's own health: a diet of animals and their byproducts contains a lot of fat, cholesterol, and risk for gnarly diseases and forms of contamination. Second, some are vegan because they believe that eating animals causes those creatures to suffer indefensibly. Third, some vegans are motivated by concerns for the environment: from CAFOs to over-fishing, our hunger for meat contaminates the natural environment even as we divert precious food resources from human mouths to fatten up animals for slaughter.

The first motivator (health) lacks a moral imperative, so it seems philosophically inconsequential whether or not we choose to consume animal products insofar as they are more or less healthy for us. One could argue that avoiding fats and cholesterol is a morally important act insofar as it reduces overall social medical risk, but I can imagine a threefold counterargument: 1) this fat and cholesterol, in moderation, is statistical background noise; 2) eating animals is an efficient way to get some essential nutrients and vitamins that promote health; and 3) there may be health consequences to vegan diets that have their own negative impacts. (To the last point, consider that there is evidence that heavy consumption of soy products and processed foods [two common, but not necessary, features of mainstream vegan diets] can harm us.)

The second concern (suffering) is deeply in the realm of pure philosophy. Peter Singer (Animal Liberation) and Steven Wise (Rattling the Cage) are two thinkers among many who have shaped my thoughts on the ethics of eating animals. My clumsy recollections of their ideas are thus: Singer argues that we are ethically obligated to minimize/reduce suffering and therefore we cannot defend the slaughter of animals merely to satisfy our tastes; Wise argues that the lines we draw between ourselves and other species are arbitrary and therefore indefensible.

May I dismiss these ideas with a mere wave of the hand and utterance of "I disagree"? I feel pretty comfortable drawing a line in the sand between my fellow man and a cow, but I haven't examined that feeling very deeply. I also have to think that our domestication of many of the animals that we eat satisfy mutual goals (for us, tasty meat; for them, evolutionary drive to procreate); if we ceased to eat modern-day cows and chickens, would they survive as species? Where is the line between keeping animals for slaughter and keeping them as pets, and what does that line look like from the standpoint of animal liberation or self-actualization? The strongest philosophical counterpoint I can make to veganism is this: don't many of these arguments fall aside when applied to byproducts such as milk and unfertilized eggs?

[I need to make a BIG DISCLAIMER here: the two paragraphs above are NOT intended as a defense of the vast majority of animal products in today's marketplace. In pushing back on veganism here, I am presupposing the most ideal, dignified treatment of these animals. I have personal experience with the dignified production of chicken eggs and cow's milk, but I'm not sure that animal slaughter can be done humanely. I have seen it performed very intimately, but I think it still relies on a gut-level belief that we humans are justified in taking animals lives and my thoughts are not fully mature on that matter.]

Now, the third concern here (environmental) seems the most compelling. For reasons detailed elsewhere in this blog and more extensively all over the intellectual sphere, it is clear that eating lower on the food chain is better for the environment. But this is what economists might call a ceteris paribus comparison: holding all else equal, it is better to eat a brand-name vegan veggie burger than a McDonald's hamburger.

But what about a veggie patty versus a locally produced hamburger made of grass-fed beef? If you take animal suffering as a philosophical trump-card, the analysis ends there: eating animals is prima facie objectionable. End of story. But if you are trying to make a planet-saving analysis of the environmental impacts of food choices, I think you have to dig deeper. I can imagine that a veggie patty sold by ConAgra and made of a frightening concoction of corn-derived pseudo-foods grown with pesticides and harvested by exploited migrant workers and shipped thousands of miles in its factory-to-fork journey carries a heavier moral and environmental burden than does a chicken breast harvested from a hen that lived a full and happy life in one's backyard before it was efficiently slaughtered.

What might the upstream and downstream consequences be of nutritional supplements for vegans? How do these negative factors compare with the eco-benefits of eating low on the food chain?

An illustration of the challenge of analyzing veganism comes from a superstar co-founder of the Great Basin Food Co-Op. She was, for a time, an avowed vegan and would not stray from her principles. One day, a roommate called her out for hypocrisy: she was snacking on a banana -- neither fair-trade nor organic, a sliver of a dangerous global mono-crop that was flown to her grocery store from perhaps 2,000 miles away. She was eating this non-sentient snack with its heavy social and environmental footprint, but she would not eat the eggs being laid daily in her backyard by the group's chickens.

I often come back to this simple but powerful illustration, and it is a good check on my own efforts to vote wisely with my dollars. Seldom can we fully analyze a choice along a single dimension, and that means that we have to get creative and peel back the layers of the systems that supply us with our food, household items, and fun consumer gadgets.

Apropos this project, we would be enduring a very austere month if we were also keeping vegan. Because many vegan alternatives to non-vegan foods are creative endeavors of food science, they are extremely difficult to come by without packaging. Obviously we could still rely heavily on fresh fruits and vegetables and grains, but it is not obvious that we could go very far beyond those options.


So, those are some of my thoughts on the matter. I want to restate one final thing in closing. As I said to JM in a recent conversation, I think that regardless of the analysis above he deserves more credit for sticking to his vegan guns 100 percent of the time than I do for eating consciously 90 or even 95 percent of the time. It would be dishonest to suggest that Audrey and I eat only the grass-fed flesh of self-actualized cows. Probably once a month on average we have a meal of "restaurant meat," which is to say meat whose social, ethical, and environmental impacts are unknown to us and therefore must be presumed to be deleterious and therefore indefensible. I think I speak for us both when I say that we admire the discipline that it takes to keep a strict vegan diet.

Playing catch-up (ketchup? catsup?)

It turns out that this project has been almost as much of a challenge on the daily-blogging front as it has been on the creating-no-waste front. Here's a little catch-up for those out there who are most interested in what we've been stuffing our faces with:

August 4 --

Leftovers, wee! As I recall, we ate Fridge Smorgasbord for lunch and dinner. Breakfast was some combination of some of the waste-free goodies we had already been eating on a regular basis: these include Aud's homemade yogurt and homemade granola, loose-leaf tea with Strauss milk and bulk sugar, fresh fruit, or chicken eggs. Only the yogurt is a new development brought on by this project, and Audrey seems to be enjoying that process enough to continue it beyond this month.

August 5-7 --

More leftovers for lunch...but then we ran into a challenge. Our dear friend PE had begun his siren's song to attract all Pomona College alumni to the Bay Area suburb that he calls home for a BBQ to celebrate his imminent departure to graduate school.

Audrey was quick to run the white flag up the pole -- better to assimilate and compromise our no-waste project than demand that others (in this case, her parents and the entirety of PE's event) accommodate us in our absolutist endeavor. [I didn't put up my typical fight.] So as we resolved to head to the Bay for the weekend, we agreed to put the project on hold for the duration of the trip. We'll tack on extra days to compensate for our folly. Still, there were two "highlights" from this period.

Anyone who knows and loves Audrey knows that "The Beast" comes out when hunger strikes. Audrey baited me -- "I can hold out until Auburn or Davis or maybe even until we arrive" -- with a show of stoicism and pledging that she could survive the late-afternoon drive without a meal, but I've called her bluff enough times to know better. After considering several sit-down (package-free) options, she ultimately chose to get a hot dog from Freeman's Natural Hot Dogs, a local restaurant that strives to use organic and otherwise responsible ingredients to make exciting gourmet hot dogs. Audrey steeled her nerves and requested her meal in a reusable plastic container…and was happily obliged by the staff. Dog-gone good, Aud!




[Is a meal out a packaging-free meal? Our unexamined assumption has been that -- as long as we refuse disposable napkins and the like -- we're leaving a similar waste footprint by eating out as we would had we cooked the meal at home. This is most likely a fiction, though, as restaurants tend to rely on canned ingredients.]

The other eco-impact "highlight" was our trip to a Whole Foods outside of Danville on the day of the BBQ. No big insights here, but we opted to bring along some beer for the festivities and get some snacks. I'm mainly using this as an opportunity to make three quick points:

1. 21st Amendment Brewery is excellent. I am in love with their Back in Black IPA, both for its complexity and its name.
2. If possible, embrace the canning revolution in microbrewing. Many small breweries are turning to aluminum cans. I beat this horse pretty thoroughly in my last post on recoiling, so 'nuff said.
3. An idea that I hope to unpack in the forthcoming vegan post, there are meaningful choices everywhere. When we reached the checkout line, I observed that Audrey's snack choice (a California pluot) was more environmentally responsible than my own (a banana flown in from South America).

I feel like these posts are getting more and more boring by the day. I'll continue the summary with plenty of pictures of food and minimal verbage. I promise.


-k

Feeding the Addiction

I checked this weather report this morning, and the high seems to be hovering between 90 and 95 degrees for the indefinite future. On days like these, there’s nothing that quite hits the spot like a cool glass of iced coffee. Fortunately for me, several of the small coffee shops in town offer for-here cups, which aligns nicely with our diet. Monday morning, I chose to partake.

Alas - the things you don’t think about! Although the beverage was served in a reusable ceramic cup, I found a bright red plastic straw glaring out at me from the center of the glass. I drank it anyways, but not without a mild sense of failure.

As I finished my drink of shame, I began to wonder how difficult it could be to create my own cold brew. A quick search yielded a recipe on SmittenKitchen.com (check it out! I have a serious crush on this bloggess). Turns out, cold-brewed iced coffee is about the easiest thing in the universe. Simply add ¼ cup coarsely ground coffee to 1.5 cups of water. Leave it at room temperature in a jar overnight. The next day, chill it, mix it with equal parts water, and serve on ice. VOILA!

More Part I: What is waste?

We really fell off for a while there. Sorry. We last left you after dinner on August 3rd.

This is as good a time as any to contextualize the idea of living "waste-free." In terms of outright food waste, we were already producing very, very little of it. Cooking for two is pretty manageable, especially if you're not opposed to eating leftovers for lunches and snacks. This was not something I was raised doing -- my parents spared us from Mystery Casserole Night and other culinary horrors the likes of which are portrayed in pop culture and Audrey's therapy sessions. (J/K, Aud.) But I was raised in an environment that lauded my bottomless adolescent stomach, and since an early age I've been happy to perform in the capacity of human garbage disposal.

Every once in a while we'll let the last fifth of a container of sour cream sit for too long in the back of the fridge, or we'll go too many weeks between making patches of pasta sauce and a half a tin of tomato paste will mold. But other than that -- between lunchtime leftovers and my own unflinching dietary habits -- we mostly don't throw out food. Anything that does go bad or stale or stinky or uneaten (rare) is composted or becomes chicken feed, which is arguably not even *waste* as it becomes an additive to our next season of gardening or batch of eggs.

Yeah. Yeah! We don't waste food. Not us.

Or do we? I came across this article from Grist.Org recently on the InterWebz, and it made me realize that there is a lot more we can do to reduce even the amount of food "uneatenness" we produce. Audrey already follows some of the basic suggestions -- she makes generous use of broccoli stems when she makes her famous broc-cheddar soup -- but there's definitely room for improvement. We often talk about making vegetarian broth/stock out of inedible leftovers yet those scraps seem to always find their way into the compost jar. The article also shares some more extreme techniques such as "milking" sugary syrup from kernel-denuded corn cobs. Cool! Definitely some room for improvement there.

Here's a quick bullet-list of our definition of waste for the purposes of this project:

Waste is...

• kitchen waste only (i.e. we're still using TP, floss, and other hygenic goodies with impunity)
• recyclables, but not return-ables (i.e. a cardboard milk carton isn't allowed, but a glass bottle of Strauss milk that we return to the Co-Op is okay [yes, the plastic top to the Strauss bottle is a no-no])
• packaging, but not bulk or "unavoidable" packaging -- a disposable bag/box of rice is obviously not allowed, but we do know that even the rice we buy in bulk from the Co-Op originally came out of a 25-pound paper bag or plastic sack. This is the minimal amount of packaging we can "stimulate" without harvesting our rice directly from the paddy 
• not basic, basic materials -- we can reduce a lot of packaging waste by making our own bread and buying fresh bread rather than the standard sliced-bread-in-a-bag. But the yeast has to come from somewhere, so we're giving ourselves a pass on über-basics like yeast, baking soda, etc
• not uneaten food, because we compost it, but we should (and do) generally avoid this
• not Freegan food -- if we glean a cardboard case of individually wrapped granola bars, we get to eat them in all their nutritious glory. Think about it -- the bars were on their way to a landfill already. I swooped in and grabbed them, ate the majority of their bulk/weight, and recycled the foil wrappers and cardboard box. It's actually a net reduction in waste, which I would argue gives us some wiggle room on the overall project
• not the small stuff -- try as we might, it's hard to avoid the stickers that come on produce, the twisty-ties that bind bunches of cilantro, etc. But don't we get some credit for going Freegan in some ways? Also, compare the amount of waste you'd produce in a year buying hyper-packaged Trader Joe's produce to the trash you'd create in twelve months living off Co-Op and farmers' market produce. After all, 98 percent is just as much an A-grade as 100 percent, right?

Some other thoughts on waste...

Check out this video (courtesy of MB) that focuses on a family that has taken waste-free living to another level. Interestingly, the video's opening concession (yes, the family does produce some waste) reveals what appears to be random candy wrappers and maybe string cheese wrappers. (Rather than, for instance, produce stickers.) We used some of this family's techniques in preparing for (and executing) our own experiment.

What about recycling? One could argue that only waste ends up in a garbage can is truly waste; by corollary, anything composted, recycled, donated, or reused is not waste. I'm sympathetic to the claim, but we also have to look all the way up- and down-stream before we pass judgment.

• If you accept a plastic grocery bag at the store and then "reuse" it by filling it with pet waste and throw it in the garbage, you've really just turned a stinky organic mess into a stinky organic mess wrapped in an inorganic, possibly toxic sack that will break down into thousands of tiny flakes over time.
• If you "donate" your 32" CRT television set to a thrift store that doesn't want it or can't sell it and which then turns around and sticks it in a shipping container bound for Ghana where it will be smashed into bits by child workers poisoned by its toxic innards, you haven't done Mother Earth any favors.
• If you buy lots of over-packaged food and then place the plastic boxes and wrappers in your municipal recycling bin, you may or may not be helping. Does Waste Management or Allied Waste actually "recycle" that stuff, or do they send it to the landfill whenever the prevailing market price for the material isn't high enough?
• Even if it is recycled, what are the up- and down-stream effects of that process? In this country, we recycle glass by melting it down and re-forming it into new glass containers. (Everywhere else in the world, they recognize that you don't get cooties from sanitizing a beer bottle and reusing it. They also use the Metric System. Go figure.) Glass recycling in the U.S. is extremely energy-intensive (say, compared to aluminum recycling), and the recycling of plastics can create byproducts and additional wastes. So we are stuck trying to measure the trade-offs between various important goals (reducing landfill waste, protecting the planet, using resources effectively, etc). The best option seems to be avoiding the packaging in the first place.
• And yes, composting is great but as we pointed out above it would be better to harvest every possible calorie or flavor molecule out of our food before setting it out to rot.

Sorry for the bummer of a post. One of the many lessons we are learning from this experiment is that achieving eco-perfection is nigh on impossible unless we're willing to drastically re-work our lifestyles. But we can make some huge steps away from the status quo by making some very palatable adjustments to our lives.

(Quick shoutout to JM for his comment on my last post re: veganism. I'll try to touch on that soon and continue the discussion about absolute changes vs. tinkering at the margins.)

-k

Easy as...yogurt?

When Kyle suggested this project, I was initially excited… until I started thinking about all the delicious food I’d be giving up for a month. The harder I thought, the longer the list became: no more cheese, yogurt, honey-nut cheerios, wine (!), ice cream (!!!), or hummus. I’ve been running a bit recently, which means I’m constantly ravenous, so this was no small issue.

My challenge in this, my one month of glorious unemployment/summer vacation from classes, is to replace as many of those everyday food items without purchasing any packaging. “Impossible!” you might say, and I would answer “No! But often really frustrating!”

My first project, and arguably the most urgent, was homemade yogurt. I eat yogurt almost every day for breakfast, and I wasn’t about to give it up. I know that yogurt can be made, because every time I mention it to someone who’s made it, they say “Oh my gosh it’s sooooo easy!” As I found out, easy is a relative term.

Making yogurt involves heating up some milk to approx 180 degrees F. Don’t let it boil. Then you have to cool it down to 110 degrees (warm, but not hot). Add a bit of yogurt (to start the culture) and something sweet, if that’s your preference (I recommend pure maple syrup). Then place it in a jar and incubate for 4-12 hours, depending on how thick and tangy you want it to be. I put it in the oven with the light on, and this worked fine. I’ve also heard that you can wrap a heating pad around the jar or do the whole shebang in a crock pot. The kitchen is your oyster!

My first yogurt attempt ended up wasting an entire half-gallon of Strauss organic whole milk and turning it into sour, lumpy, cheese(ish) stuff. SOOOOOO EASY! Part of my problem was low-quality tools. Most of my kitchen implements (minus my one true love, a year-old kitchenaid mixer) come from thrift stores. This includes a meat thermometer, which I’ve never used, because I’ve never cooked a giant piece of meat. This meat thermometer, while quaint, also turned out to be unbelievably indecisive. If I tapped it with my finger, or even looked at it the wrong way, it would jump 20 degrees in a matter of seconds. Suffice it to say, the yogurt was doomed.

My second attempt was more successful, and I’m beginning to believe the homemade yogurt enthusiasts of the world. I bought a new thermometer (welcome to the digital age!) and came out with something that, while soupy and mild, was definitely yogurt. I only fermented for 6 hours, and next time I might try 8-10 and see what happens.

Join me next time for sorbet, which is currently a shit-show, but for which I have high hopes.

Cheers,

Audrey

Part I: Let's talk eco-logic

We'll start with the fun stuff tonight: pictures of food. Then, if you stick around, you can sit in on a sermon about the food system.

Without further ado, here's dinner on August 2: pan-fried tilapia fillet accented with lemon and parsley, more carrot-currant bread, and garden-veggies medley.

The tilapia is the obvious issue here. As it turns out, we had these fillets hidden in the back of the freezer and decided it would be better to purge them now than have them crowd the icebox for a month. Packaging aside, these were a pretty good eco-choice: choosing sustainable seafood is of great importance. We make regular use of the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch Program's responsible seafood guide. These frozen tilapia fillets from Whole Foods are farm-raised in Vermont, making them a "Good" choice. They also work for us -- we like to incorporate fish into our mostly vegetarian diet every now and then, and having frozen fish on hand allows for a tasty meal with less planning and fewer cross-town trips.

If we return to this meal (or another like it) later this month, we'll be able to get fresh fish from the Whole Foods seafood deli and meet all our targets: eco-friendly, package-free, and tasty.

The veggies medley was simple and not especially inspired, but it made good use of our garden's late-summer bounty. I chopped a beet (and baby beet!) and a handful of gorgeous purple potatoes into small chunks and cooked them in a pan with some water and salt until they were mostly tender. The beet greens and some kale came next, chopped and thrown in to cook down. Onions, garlic, some frozen dumpster jalapeños, and zucchini followed in a stir-fry technique with tamari and savory spices.

Tonight (August 3) was another instance of compromise cuisine. Audrey took our ground beef and inputted the term in Smitten Kitchen's search engine. The result: delicious ground-beef empanadas. She hand-made the dough and filling, using all package-free ingredients except for the ground beef. (Once again, in the future we can and will get fresh ground beef in bulk from Whole Foods.) 

After downing three of them, I can't really say that this was "compromise cuisine"; they were really, really tasty and made with love. We just need to find a plastic-free alternative! 

And let's not forget dessert: a perfectly sweet, juicy yellow watermelon. You've gotta love summer.

About that "Eco-Logic"

Okay. Enough frivolity. Let's get real, boys and girls.

I won't belabor this too much because this audience is probably a) self-selecting for the eco-conscious and/or b) already subjected to the normal deluge of eco-proselytizing that is the price of my friendship. In other words, I'm likely preaching to the choir here.

One of my chief axioms is that "every dollar is a vote," and this has major implications for the food system and how our food choices affect the world. If your only motivation is to get the cheapest food possible, or to get the most food for your money, you're likely benefiting yourself and your family at the expense of the larger community. On the other hand, when you choose to pay a premium for food that is produced in an environmentally and socially responsible way, you are telling "the Invisible Hand" of the market to wave on some more of that type of product, increasing its viability and market share and thereby promoting those same goals of social and environmental stewardship.

What is wrong with conventionally produced food, you ask? The secret is pretty much out at this point. Large conventional farms that produce gazillions of units of the same crop are environmentally devastating in a number of ways. They fatigue the soil by planting season after season the same crops that demand the same nutrients. To compensate for this, conventional farmers spend big bucks on synthetic fertilizers that are derived from scarce, planet-harming fossil fuels. Even these fertilizers are a short-term fix, as they do not replace all of the soil's nutrients or support underlying soil ecology. Further, excessive use of fertilizer leads to runoff during rain or irrigation. As this nitrogen-heavy sludge makes its way into waterways and the oceans, it encourages the growth of algal blooms that consume the water's oxygen. The end result are massive "dead zones" in the oceans that turn parts of our oceans into water wastelands.

But that's not all! By creating large "mono-cultures," conventional farmers trade crop security for efficiency. If a mold or pest or disease infects one part of an enormous swath of crops, the entire crop is imperiled because it lacks the biological diversity that normally shields ecosystems from system shocks. This same monotony gives farmers an incentive to use one-size-fits-all technologies such as massive pesticide spraying. Pesticide runoff poisons rivers, streams, and aquifers for man and beast alike. The pesticides themselves often leave residues on the crops even as they make it to the supermarket. And if you remember the basics of evolution, you'll know that natural selection drives the adaptation of bugs to these pesticides, creating super-bugs that can only be killed with stronger super-pesticides and churning the wheels of what is known as the "pesticide treadmill."

The story with conventionally produced meat and dairy is disturbingly similar. Mono-cropping is replaced by what is known as a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO. Diseases can spread like wildfire through dingy feedlots so the animals are pumped full of medicines and antibiotics that end-users then consume. (Other ailments like salmonella are also more likely to reach outbreak level due to these same conditions.) Instead of chemical fertilizer, the animals are given growth hormones and steroids and fed unnatural cocktails of cereal grains and ground animal meal. Yum! And instead of pesticide runoff, CAFOs pollute water sources with concentrated animal excrement and even dead bodies. That charming smell driving down I-5 in California? Pure CAFO, baby! Oh, and let's not forget about the inhumanity of factory meat. (Warning: that's one disturbing link.)

That's pretty much the short case for supporting organic agriculture: conventional farming attempts to apply factory logic to living systems, with the result that increasing amounts of chemical inputs are expended to gain a decreasing benefit all while imperiling both the consumers and bystanders of these products. In other words, it's a big fat fail. Writer Michael Pollan lays out these issues in thoroughly readable form in books like "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and other works.

(Straddling organic and conventional farming is the GMO phenomenon...There is a battle raging a present over the idea of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the role they can play in the food system. Based on the historical myopia of "food science" in the last century, there is plenty of reason to be suspicious of GMOs and the possible downstream impacts they can have on our food, families, and flora/fauna.)

You can count me to revisit this conversation to touch on other aspects of the food system vis-à-vis global trade and social justice. Stay tuned. =]

-k