There has ostensibly been a dialogue among New York City legislators around food, as seen through Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s Food Works resolution, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio’s (at the moment dormant) NYC Foodprint legislation, and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s Blueprint for Sustainable Food System initiative. But there has yet to be a watershed policy that explicitly acknowledges and addresses the connection between “cool foods” and reducing the effects of climate change.

Food is a tremendous component of our global ecological footprint, specifically the livestock sector. With regards to anthropogenic green house gas (GHG) emissions, livestock production generates nine percent of the carbon, 65 percent of nitrous oxide, 37 percent of methane, and 64 percent of ammonia.

Cool foods, mainly plant-based foods (e.g., fruits, legumes, vegetables), require fewer GHG emissions to produce than animal-based foods (e.g., beef, poultry, dairy products). The livestock industry alone is responsible for 18 percent of global GHG emissions (including CO2, NO2, and methane)–more than the entire global transportation sector (to learn more, click here).

Given the apparent inertia in NYC to move legislation encouraging cool foods consumption, New York University’s Environmental Studies program dedicated one of its undergraduate senior Capstone Seminars to this very issue.

Led by Mia MacDonald, the Executive Director of the non-profit action think tank Brighter Green, we were among a group of nine students tasked with creating a set of policy recommendations for the aspirational client of the Mayor’s Initiative on Food and Climate Change, a yet uncreated programme out of the Mayor’s Office. In addition, a supplementary campaign and toolkit was designed to empower individuals and communities to increase cool foods in their diet with–and without–the support of the government.

The client remained “aspirational” in light of the omission of food issues in NYC’s 2007 PlaNYC report, a strategic framework to reducing NYC’s GHGs by 30 percent by 2030, while improving the economic, social, and environmental well-being of the city. That said, we were careful to be wary of the practical limitations faced by a city government.

By encouraging cool foods consumption, the hyper-urban NYC (the most populous in the States and among the most ethnically diverse in the world), has the potential to reduce the local and national carbon footprint while fostering a culture of cool foods consumption. With programs designed to reach various demographics, cool foods will be neither a fad nor a kitschy way of life for the wealthy, but a fundamental shift in how we understand the health of our bodies and planet.

After an extensive literature review of policies and campaigns designed by different municipalities around the world that were both related and unrelated to food issues, the students created the Eating for the Green Apple initiative.

We found that a purely top-down approach would not suffice; thus, an integral component was increasing education and awareness around cool foods. Additionally, programs increasing cool food consumption, working in tandem with food aid and welfare programs (e.g., NYC’s EBT program) can increase access of fresh fruits and vegetables to lower-income communities, leading to lower incidences of diet-related illnesses, increased workforce capacity, and improved academic performance.

Over the course of the three months, we designed a set of responsive strategies for NYC to reduce its GHG emissions.

• Establish the Cool Foods Systems Assessment (CFSA) Task Force that will:

(1) Develop baseline measurements of New Yorkers’ animal-product consumption and the associated GHG emissions;
(2) Identify and assess differences, if they exist, in animal-product consumption amongst various cultural and socioeconomic demographics; and
(3) Identify opportunities to reduce animal-product consumption and/or associated GHG emissions, educate New Yorkers on the connection between diet and GHG emissions, and propose efficient and cost-effective recommendations to increase cool foods consumption.

• Increase geographic and monetary access to cool foods in low income communities

• Develop a public schools campaign that includes the promotion of wellness committees in public schools and the establishment of a NYC school-wide Meatless Mondays campaign to raise awareness and increase consumption of cool foods

• Work through afterschool program and partnerships to increase awareness and consumption of cool foods

The proposed public awareness campaign consists of an interactive, user-friendly Web site containing several features including additional facts on cool foods, a recipe index, and a downloadable version of the toolkit; a poster series to be distributed throughout the city on subways, bus stands, and buses with photos of ethnically diverse New Yorkers a factoid about climate change and cool foods, and a link to the EGA Web site; and partnerships with grocery stores in various boroughs to help raise awareness and gauge levels of interaction with the campaign.

The toolkit includes a set of key actions New Yorkers can take to increase their cool foods consumption, including joining a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), cooking your own food, and talking to your grocers. Individuals can adopt and share these actions easily, and refer to the entire toolkit for further guidance and rationale. We also included a few New York University-specific actions to demonstrate how the toolkit can be tailored to specific institutions, communities, and organizations.

The final report is available for free download here.

New York City has an impressive track record when it comes to pushing through progressive and groundbreaking legislation, as well as orchestrating comprehensive initiatives for social causes. Take the stomach-churning but nonetheless memorable “Pouring on the Pounds” campaign posters and videos reminding New Yorkers to not “drink themselves sick” with soda and other sugary drinks. Or the mandate to restaurants and quick serve food outlets that make calories publicly available to post them on menus.

So what’s stopping NYC from taking on cool foods? EGA presents a realistic approach to address the clear and present need for addressing climate change through our dietary choices in New York City.

Image: Ariel Dubov

The Farm Bureau is none too happy with the EPA today for publishing a blog post urging Americans to give up meat.

The post in question was written by an EPA intern and recounts her decision to stop eating meat. The author, Nicole Reising, cites the “environmental effects of meat production” and urges readers to stop eating meat.

….

The American Farm Bureau Federation issued a statement today decrying the post as disrepectful to ranchers.

“While this is a position taken by an intern of the agency, EPA should control its blog space,” said AFBP President Bob Stallman. “What is written on its blog comes across as its official position toward farmers and ranchers that it regulates and shows a terrible disregard for them and the agriculture industry.”

To be clear, the American Farm Bureau Federation calles itself the “Voice of Agriculture,” but it’s really the voice of industrial agriculture–and the few companies that benefit from it. To say that the EPA “regulates” concentrated-animal feedlot operations (CAFOs) is a bit fanciful. As the Washington Post recently put it:

Despite its impact, manure has not been as strictly regulated as more familiar pollution problems, like human sewage, acid rain or industrial waste. The Obama administration has made moves to change that but already has found itself facing off with farm interests, entangled in the contentious politics of poop.

The brazen intern in question, Nicole Reising, had proposed–without considering the feelings of meat-industry execs or CAFO operators!–that “Regulations can be made to help prevent the effects of meat production, but the easiest way to lessen the environmental impacts is to become a vegetarian or vegan.”

Over on TNR, Brad Plumer quibbles with Reising: “if you’re trying to tamp down on the consequences of meat production, the ‘easiest’ approach may be to start small and just convince people to eat less meat, rather than swearing off it altogether.”

I would quibble with Reising and Plumer. Habits form and congeal over decades. Historically, meat has been dear; it’s now cheap largely due to specific government action and inaction over the past 30 years.

People aren’t going to cut back on meat because EPA interns and political bloggers want them to. Curbing the ruinous practices of the meat industry starts with enforcing the regulations already on the books; and that means a new commitment on the part of Reising’s bosses at the EPA, as well as leaders at FDA and USDA, to make the meat industry pay for the messes it creates.

When that happens, people will surely eat less meat–and the meat that they do eat will tend to come from ecologically robust agriculture, and not the dark, Satanic meat mills that now dominate. Check out my recent post on what it would take to expand human-scale, pasture-based meat production.

Originally published on Grist

I blame Bakesale Betty.  If the blue-haired Aussie-American Alison hadn’t lured me into her store with lamingtons and sticky date pudding I would never have succumbed to the charms of her legendary fried chicken sandwiches, which cause perfectly sane people to line up on Telegraph Avenue in North Oakland. For a sandwich. I kid you not.

It also doesn’t help that Bakesale Betty is on my way home from my editing gig and I’m often ravenous as I drive by, doing a quick scan to see if there’s 1. a line snaking down the street or 2. any parking.

If the parking gods and queue karma are on my side, I’m in and out with one of her sandwiches before you can say hello hypocrite.

Let me explain. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 17, when I gave up meat in what my mum, a good cook, viewed as just another one of my rebellious teenage acts. Despite growing up in a meat-loving land, where the backyard barbie rules, I became a greens and legumes kinda gal.

For more than a quarter of a century, I lived the veg life. To be precise, I guess I’m technically a pescatarian, as I sometimes eat seafood. Especially in my hometown, Sydney, because — news flash — fabo fish to be had Down Under peeps.

So how to explain the recent chicken sandwich obsession? What can I say? I think I’m having a middle-aged meat crisis. Some 20 years ago I introduced the man who would become the father of my child to the virtues of a vegetarian diet. Hell, I married him at Greens. My 11-year-old kid has never, ever eaten an ounce of animal flesh.  (His choice. I’m no zealot.)  My blog is called Lettuce Eat Kale. I’ve watched Food, Inc. I frequent farmers’ markets. You get the idea.

I should be a poster girl for a pro-produce life.

And yet…a couple of years ago around a certain time in my cycle I began craving protein. No worries, fish usually did the trick. Then I started to slip a bit when sharing food at ethnic restaurants around town. Chicken raised with love, care, good feed, and bucolic views began to find its way into my mouth. What the heck was happening?

I wasn’t sure, but I suspected hormones played a role. I also knew I wasn’t dealing with this particular omnivore’s dilemma on my own.  My friend Connie was a vegetarian — until she got pregnant with her first kid 16 years ago. Then it was off to the steak house for her and she’s never looked back.  My dance instructor, Amara Tabor-Smith, eschewed animal protein for decades — she didn’t like the texture — and is now tentatively getting reacquainted with meat.

I’d always assumed, along with many others I suspect, that vegetarian cookbook superstars Deborah Madison and Mollie Katzen didn’t eat meat. Not so, I discovered in the past year during chats with both chefs. Mollie describes herself as a “meat nibbler,” and Deborah’s not opposed to the occasional piece of grass-fed, local beef.

Their most recent books, Get Cooking by Mollie, and What We Eat When We Eat Alone by Deborah, include meat recipes. Still, both women favor a diet where greens, grains, and legumes dominate the dinner plate.  Mollie supports the Meatless Monday campaign and both believe most meat eaters would do well to eat less animal and more plant foods.

Eating meat after years — or even a lifetime — of a solely plant-based diet seems to be something of a trend. For people who chose vegetarianism for ethical or environmental reasons, sourcing meat sustainably is now often a viable alternative to factory-farmed animals, and so some have decided to include it sparingly in their diet.

(Bucking this seemingly female shift, is wonder boy writer Jonathan Safran Foer, who dabbled with vegetarianism for years but fully committed after he became a pet owner. He will probably convert masses to the cause with his description of chicken fecal soup and other horrors of industrial animal slaughter in his recent book, Eating Animals.)

In this confusing time, I feel I’ve found a kindred spirit in Tara Austen Weaver, the warm and witty writer who blogs about meat and many other food matters at Tea & Cookies.  I can so relate to the mental tug-of-war that underlies her recent book The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Woman’s Romp through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis.  Tara didn’t have a choice in her vegetarian childhood — she was raised that way by a Northern California hippie mama.

Several years ago, she started exploring eating meat for health reasons.  Her descriptions of buying, prepping, and cooking meat resonate with me because I haven’t actually ever gone and purchased a chicken or, um, chicken bits and made dinner. That notion makes me feel nauseous, to be honest. I don’t even like looking at raw meat.

I know, I know, I’m the worst kind of turncoat. I leave the house to get a bit of hot flesh on the side. When my son stopped by home unexpectedly the other afternoon, I found myself hiding aforementioned cluck, cluck sandwich before opening the door. Clearly, I have some conflicted feelings about my dietary changes.

So what to call myself: A lapsed vegetarian?  A vegetarian who cheats?

I thank the funny Adair Seldon of Lentil Breakdown for introducing me to the term flexitarian, which seems to fit for now, loathe as I am to saddle myself or anyone else with a label.

For the record, I seem to have no desire to move on to “harder” meats, like beef, pork, or lamb.  (An aside: Why isn’t it cow, pig, and sheep? I suspect it’s a way for many of us to remain in denial about where meat actually comes from.)

And I’ve never had any interest in eating creatures I see on hiking trails such as ducks, rabbits, quail, deer, elk, and the like. But since chicken is becoming a somewhat regular fix (once or twice a month), I’ve learned never to say never.

My vegetarianism stemmed in part, from my inability to kill an animal, hence my healthy respect for folks like Novella Carpenter, who don’t flinch at taking responsibility for ending the life of an animal they’ve raised for food. I feel cowardly in the carnivore arena by comparison.

Penning this post has probably blown my chances of ever writing for Vegetarian Times or VegNews (though I do think this topic is one such mags would do well to cover.)

But you won’t find meat recipes on my blog, although I’m sure some veggies will unsubscribe in disgust at my wishy-washy vegetarianism.

That would be a shame. Because I am still the girl who obsesses about eating greens. Nothing makes me happier than a meal packed with produce. I am, to borrow a term Mollie Katzen used in a recent story on Civil Eats, very much a pro-vegetable person, a vegetabilist.

And I view healthy eating in much the same way I see sexuality.  In my mind, most humans are basically bisexual, it just depends where on the spectrum you fall in terms of how you define your sexual orientation.

Similarly, we’re probably all on an omnivore continuum, with some of us falling firmly on the carnivorous end and others of us way down on the other end of the line very much in vegetarian or even vegan territory.

In the end, come dinner time, it’s a personal choice what we put on our plate and the justifications we make with ourselves and our sometimes contradictory culinary choices are our own to live with as we figure out our place on the food chain and what our bodies need to stay well.

I welcome your thoughts below.

Originally published on Lettuce Eat Kale

Vegetable expert and bestselling cookbook author Mollie Katzen’s handwritten and illustrated cookbook, The Moosewood Cookbook, (not to mention The Enchanted Broccoli Forest and her cookbooks for children, Pretend Soup and Honest Pretzels) introduced many to the love of cooking. She was inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2007 and her most recent book, Get Cooking, was recently nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals Award. Beloved by many, new to some, Katzen continues her clarion call for taking back our food system one delicious meal at a time. I recently spoke to Mollie about vegetables, the new Good Food Movement, and the radical necessity of cooking.

CE: What do you make of the so-called Good Food Movement?

MK: It depends on who you talk to. It does seem that young people in their 20s mostly have food awareness, but you can’t generalize. I have a daughter in college and she’s a conscious eater, but her friends think she’s weird for eating healthy. So there’s still a stigma that eating healthy is weird, it’s not American. Back then, I was considered a “health food nut” because I broke away from the meat and potatoes that my mom served. And here, a generation later, my daughter is getting the same reputation.

What’s encouraging and exciting is that there are more farmers’ markets and there’s a growing awareness around food. For example, the campaign against transfats has been very effective. I’m also seeing a lot of encouraging food activism—but there’s a lot of work to do. And healthy food consciousness should not to be confused with our new food celebrity culture—TV shows like Top Chef, Iron Chef—have created a gap in what people are seeing on TV and the reality of what they’re eating.

CE: How do you think we got here?

MK: It used to be that we didn’t trust food in packaging and now we don’t trust food not in packaging. In the early 20th Century, the best job that a psychologist could have was working in advertising, which was really fashioned around selling and packaging food. The very first food packaging came from Heinz—they were pickling tomatoes, making horseradish, and experimenting with putting food in cans and jars. Somehow, they convinced folks to accept packaging and advertising—and we really received the message. They excelled at convincing people they needed something that they couldn’t live without it. And in fact, we came to not only trust it, but to think it was better and more desirable.

We’ve gone so far away from the source of our food. There was a time when we knew our farmers and where our food came from. But we’ve been greatly urbanized. By the time I became a cookbook author, I began working in an urban pre-school, planting vegetables so the children could see where their food comes from. I once asked them where they thought pizza came from and they said it came from a telephone—because that’s how they got pizza, from a delivery service. So I took them on a little field trip to a working farm called the Pizza Farm—it had an herb garden with oregano and thyme, they grew wheat and had a cow. Then we made a pizza together. That kind of literacy is essential.

CE: How do we undo this? How do we rewire people to learn the basics about food?

MK: The very basic act of cooking is becoming a radical necessity. That’s why I wrote Get Cooking, because people asked me to lay out the simple basics of how to cook. I wanted to give people the tools they need to make easy recipes, four to five things you can cook well. It sounds simple, but that’s the key to people digging their way out of bad food. They need to know how to shop and how to make food in their busy day and in a small kitchen. I wish cooking was required in school, but until then, we’ve got to teach simple lessons.

CE: You’ve got a fantastic companion Web site to Get Cooking and you’re now on Twitter. How has social media changed the game for you?

MK: I wanted to keep the book small and inexpensive, but I also wanted to provide videos online to allow for interactivity. So, on my own behalf, and with the backing of Kashi, I put together the Web site Get Cooking for the YouTube generation. I wanted to provide the basics: how to shop for a melon (look for “Melon Knowledge”) or what knives you should buy (look for “Knives”) and how to cook basics like stirfry, polenta, and pilaf. The videos are free and accessible to everyone.

I promised my publisher I would engage in social media and I’ve found Twitter to be more in the moment and vital than Facebook. I try and follow people who I believe are doing good work. I’m strict with what I tweet. I try to use it to be useful and retweet information I find important, or as a means to exposing people and ideas which I think need more exposure. On occasion, I might tweet what I’m cooking or I might describe what I’m eating if I think it might be of interest. But, I also take time off from Twitter.

CE: People seem surprised to find out you’re not a vegetarian.

I’ve never said I was a vegetarian, or that anyone else should be one. What I have said is, here are some ways that you can go meatless if you want to. I’ve said, here is my cuisine—it doesn’t include meat. And somehow, it’s been interpreted by some that I am a leader of a movement, which I never saw myself as. I will always eat vegetables and grain. I’m a vegetablist, a pro-vegetable person. But, I’m very tired of people who define themselves by what they don’t eat. For some, being vegetarian is more about the absence of meat and not about the presence of vegetables. I know plenty of vegetarians who don’t eat vegetables. I’m more interested in getting people to eat healthy food. I want to know: “What’s your attitude towards food, do you cook your own food, do you like it?”

Recently, Newsweek wrote a piece about lapsed vegetarians and even though I’m quoted, I was never interviewed for the story, which created a lot of misinformation. As a result, I received a lot of angry letters from a lot people. I wrote this rebuttal, which was not printed:

I feel a bit misrepresented by this article, which seems to draw a line in the sand with “animal eaters” on one side and “leaf eaters” on the other. I have always seen healthy eating as a continuum, not a dichotomy (and certainly not a game of “which side are you on”). I have never been dogmatic against meat-eating. Rather, my goal has always been, and continues to be, to inspire everyone (including meat-averse vegetarians, some of whom often find themselves eating fewer actual vegetables than one would think) eating greener—more of what I like to call “garden- and orchard-based” foods. My ideal Wonderful World would have everyone loving (and able to access) abundant, delicious dishes made from leafy greens, earthy grains ,and tasty nuts and legumes—and to have these items dominate every dinner plate. As you’ve mentioned, I included a few meat recipes in my most recent book, as I have many readers (old and especially new) who are beginners and omnivorous and want to learn to cook the things they love to eat. I’m hoping that meat-lovers (and also occasional meat nibblers, such as myself) will gain enough knowledge to know how to source it sustainably, and to learn how to eat less of it. Thus empowered, everyone will be able to happily avoid supporting the highly destructive fast food industry and factory farming of animals. If this sounds contradictory, let’s all talk about it more. It’s a discussion worth having–a big-tent conversation toward our common goal of sustainability, regardless of our food choices and tastes. Cook on!

My point is that everybody needs to work together to create a food supply that’s as sustainable as possible. Whether you like meat or not, everybody needs to fight against industrial food production. All meat eaters need to eat less meat and to eat more of a plant-based diet. We forget we can sit down at the same table and do this together. That’s why I’m involved in the Meatless Monday campaign; I want to make sure that people have plenty of choices low on the food chain.

CE: What advice do you have for someone who wants to get started in food now?

MK: Get over the food celebrity and cooking-on-TV-as-entertainment. Don’t try to be famous; learn how to cook and you will always have a job, because people will always need to eat. The gap between celebrity and real food being cooked is huge. People are watching TV, but there’s so few people cooking good, honest food. That is the stuff of daily life. If you know how to cook you’ve got a skill. Long after the TV’s off, you’re still going to need to eat. Go to the other end of the spectrum and become a skilled cook. Learn how to cook in volume, learn how to make soup for 80 people, a vegetarian casserole for 100 people. Develop a trade that enables you to go into an institutional place—schools and hospitals—and make food in the trenches. Become an activist so that food cooking is as respectable as it possibly can be.

I grew up in Kansas – the land of corn-feed beef, boneless, skinless chicken breast, and pork: the other white meat. I never gave much thought to meat except whether it was low in fat and calories, so when I told my family I was becoming a vegetarian, I was met with blank stares and a heated disagreement surrounding my anemia (with the lack of red meat, the family was concerned about my iron levels). My shift towards vegetarianism began slowly with Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation followed by Peter Singer’s The Ethics of Eating Meat, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and eventually, I found myself reading Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s The Face On Your Plate. For three years, I was vigilant about my food, checking the labels of grocery store purchases and grilling restaurant servers about the ingredients in each dish. It took me nearly 6 months to go completely meatless and only one In-and-Out cheeseburger, three years later, to fall off the proverbial wagon. What happened? How did I devote such a significant amount of my life vegetarianism only to be tempted by a cheeseburger?

To be perfectly honest, part of me just missed eating meat. There were so many items on restaurant menus to taste and I was limited by my choice to abstain from meat. I knew I didn’t want to support Tyson, Smithfield and/or National Cattlemen Beef Association, but I just wanted to eat a cheeseburger again. I started to seek out small ranchers who raised animals with respect of the animal, the land and their customers. My personal food journey lead me to Bay Area ranchers such as Marin Sun Farms, Prather Ranch, Soul Food Farm and eventually, Fatted Calf, an artisanal charcuterie shop in downtown Napa.

Two months ago, I found myself in a similar position as many Americans: my department at work down-sized and I was laid off. It was nearly impossible to find a job during the holidays, so I started to consider other ways to fill my time until the job market picked up.  Since I live in Napa, I decided to ask the owner of Fatted Calf for a kitchen stage (French term for internship used by the food industry). I had always wanted experience in a professional kitchen and I also felt that if I was going to eat meat, I should be able to see the entire process. Fatted Calf’s husband-wife team, Taylor Boetticher and Toponia Miller, support local farmers, use organic and hormone-free meats and organic produce, so for me, it was a perfect place to learn. I have no real kitchen experience, but I have been a home chef for years and I figured it was impossible that he would let me do any actual work. Maybe just some chopping or slicing: simple kitchen tasks. More than anything, I thought I would be learning from the sidelines. I was wrong.

In less than an hour on my first day, I found myself wrist-deep in a gallon of pig’s blood. We were making boudin noir, blood sausage, and it was my job to mix the spices, meat and blood. I looked down and I saw my forearms splattered with pig’s blood. It was then that I questioned my interest in learning the in’s and out’s of an artisanal charcuterie shop; just 14 months before, I was a strict vegetarian, and now I had my hands in pig’s blood.

In the Fatted Calf kitchen, no piece of the animal goes to waste. Organs are used for pâtés and sausage, chicken fat is turned into schmaltz (used for frying or spread on bread), duck fat is used for confits and rillette; and bones are roasted and later used for stock. Over the last three weeks, I have broken down multiple ducks, several chickens, 4 pork bellies, 20 picnic hams; I’ve chopped duck livers and gizzards, the heads and feet from chickens and trussed so many rib chops my fingers are starting to lose skin. I worked hard in the kitchen as local ranchers dropped off their chickens, pigs and eggs; and a few foragers delivered large, yellow wild chanterelles.

The thing I find the most incredible from my experience is that untrained migrant workers do this every day in factory farms all over the country. They have to move quickly through the animals because quantity trumps quality but butchering an animal is hard work that requires skill. For every duck I broke down into breasts, legs and thighs, the guy next to me was onto his third duck. Over time, I know I would be at the same speed as him, but until then, I had to take my time to prevent chopping off a finger or hurting the person next to me. And often times, these guys are working with cows and pigs – significantly tougher animals to break down in a short amount of time. Before Fatted Calf, I had never seen a chicken with its head or feet. I had no idea how much work goes into the meat on our dinner table.

I have learned more about food, cooking and meat in three weeks than in the last 27 years of my life. It has been an incredible experience which has allowed me to get up close and personal with my food. However, eating meat will be a special occasion for me. I believe that we eat too much meat as a society and it encourages companies to speed up the production line to get meat quicker to the plate of each American. Animals become a source of fuel rather than a living, breathing creature. Factory farm workers become machines instead of humans. And the art of butchering becomes a lost skill. Now every time I eat meat, I will appreciate all the work that has gone into my food.

Meat industry luminaries including Don Tyson, Jimmy Dean, and the late Frank Perdue were inducted that evening, along with litigious feedlot owner Paul Engler, who you might remember for suing Oprah Winfrey over mad cow disease and getting spanked in court. By all accounts, it was a truly magical evening, what with Kurtis’ gripping keynote address offering up a 30 minute history of the American meat industry.

Despite the glitz, an undercurrent of worry pervaded the event. See, the meat industry was in the midst of its most horrific year on record, being seemingly besieged by all sides. Robert “Bo” Manly, CFO of pork titan Smithfield Foods put it best: “Anything that breathed lost money.”

Most of the meat industry’s pain was from a faltering economy that was creating countless “recession era vegetarians.” An August USDA report showed that beef, pork, and chicken production had all dropped substantially. That month, meat giant Tyson Foods warned its investors that quarterly sales had dropped 3 percent from a year before.

The end of burgers and fries as the quintessential American meal may be at hand. In America, the furthest you can possibly get from a McDonald’s is just 107 miles. But it appears the industry has overbuilt, and franchises are closing up left and right. In a sign of the times, one failed KFC was converted to a marijuana dispensary.

Nowhere was animal agribusiness’ pain more keenly felt than in the milk industry. American dairies were failing at such a rate that one observer predicted that a third would go out of business in 2009. To deal with the glut of milk, government and industry combined to organize a mass slaughter of more than 100,000 cows. Dairies spent 2009 looking for every excuse to cut herd sizes, and keep only the most productive cows. Overall, it appeared likely that more than 1.5 million cows would be slaughtered in 2009. The dairy industry’s pain was borne disproportionately by organic farmers, as cash-strapped consumers switched back to cheaper factory farmed milk.

Happily for US dairies, the USDA once again came riding to the rescue, this time with a $290 million taxpayer-funded bailout. Imagine if that money had instead been spent to subsidize the production of healthful fruits and vegetables, instead of producing more unwanted milk and nasty government cheese. Adding to the industry’s woes, agribusiness giant Cargill announced an invention that could dramatically reduce demand for milk: a plant-based substance that can be used to produce gooey, stretchy, totally realistic cheese.

The chicken industry likewise tightened its belt in 2009, eliminating its national chicken recipe contest. The grand prize—which once stood at $100,000—had been slashed to $50,000 before the contest was cancelled outright.

The pork industry had a horrifying year. Smithfield Foods’ CEO, Larry Pope, said, “I sort of feel like the world has been against us for 12 months.” In November, America’s 22nd largest pork producer abruptly quit the business. The company had an inventory of more than 30,000 breeder sows. USA Today reported in November that, starting in late 2007, pig producers were losing about $23 on each animal they raised.

Business was comparably bad at feedlots, with nearly all hemorrhaging cash. Twenty percent of feedlots were up for sale in 2009, but, given the beef industry’s bleak prospects, there were no buyers. When National Beef attempted to raise $276 million through an IPO this year, they were forced to withdraw the offering for lack of interest. The future looked even worse for ranchers in the UK, where it turned out the minister put in charge of rescuing the beef industry is a vegetarian.

Excerpted from Vegan.com, Read the rest here

Hospitals around the country have taken a crucial first step toward building a sustainable meat production system by joining the Balanced Menus Challenge. Launched in late September, the Balanced Menus Challenge is a voluntary commitment by healthcare institutions to reduce their meat and poultry offerings in patient meals and hospital cafeterias by 20 percent in 12 months. Balanced Menus is a climate change reduction strategy that also protects the effectiveness of antibiotics and promotes good nutrition. Fourteen hospitals are already participating in the national challenge, which was developed and piloted by the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility and nationally launched in partnership with Health Care Without Harm’s Healthy Food in Healthcare Initiative.

Americans eat an average of eight ounces of meat daily, roughly twice the global average. Hospital food service operations often mirror this trend, offering sizable servings of meat several meals per day. High consumption of conventionally produced meat and processed meat contributes to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, dementia, and some kinds of cancer. Overconsumption of meat contributes to the overwhelmingly high cost of the U.S. healthcare system (estimated to be $147B as a result of obesity management alone) as well as environmental damage such as climate change, water and air pollution.

Hospitals buy vast amounts of meat, typically through large distributors who source from the U.S. commodity beef, pork, and poultry markets. U.S. food production relies heavily on fossil fuels, and red meat production is particularly energy intensive as it requires significant inputs of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to grow crops for feed. The food system accounts for over 10 percent of overall energy use in the United States. Globally, livestock for meat and dairy production accounts for 18 percent of greenhouse gases, more than all of Earth’s cars, trains, and planes combined.

While food choice is distinctly personal, the healthcare community should be at the forefront in modeling a healthy food agenda for the nation. Encouraging a reduced and sustainable meat diet is part of a primary prevention agenda to reduce the nation’s chronic diet-related illnesses, but also contributes substantially to climate mitigation, clean air and water, and protection antibiotic toolkit.

Most U.S. meat is produced under a system that relies on the routine feeding of antibiotics to make animals grow faster and consume less feed grain. Arsenic compounds and hormones are given to animals for similar reasons. These additives further contaminate animal manure, which then moves off the crowded facilities, polluting land, air and water. Sustainably-raised meat and poultry precludes the use of antibiotics for non-therapeutic purposes. Approximately 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the U.S. are given to healthy animals to promote growth and compensate for crowded conditions and poor husbandry practices in conventional animal production.

As institutions with considerable buying power, hospitals can demonstrate leadership to the marketplace by reducing the overall quantity of meat and poultry served and through purchasing of sustainably-produced meat. The healthcare sector is increasingly aware of its responsibility to model healthy behavior for the community. Reducing their meat purchasing will help reduce the overall cost of medical care in this country, with benefits ranging from savings in actual food service costs to reduction in pollution, but most importantly, to contribute to healthy lifestyles that will improve the health of Americans.

“It was amazingly simple to make an impact on our carbon footprint by starting with small changes in our cafeteria and working our way up to the more complex patient menu,” said Linda Hansen, CDM, CFPP, Director of Nutrition Services at St. Joseph Health System in Sonoma County, CA. “By implementing Balanced Menus for the last six months, we are able to remain cost neutral, or even achieve savings for the hospital, not to mention the savings to our healthcare system that result from providing patients, staff and visitors healthier foods.”

“As we debate healthcare reform in the U.S., it is important to recognize that eating less conventionally produced meat will reduce drivers of many of the major chronic diseases that threaten the sustainability of our health care system stated Ted Schettler, MD, MPH, of the Science and Environmental Health Network. It is good for people and good for the planet.”
Click here for more information about the Balanced Menus Challenge.

The liver was, to put it succinctly, a bust. We soaked it in milk for a few days, on the theory that this would dull some of the, well, livery taste. (It’s a good theory, since, as Matthew Amster-Burton explained in his column on milkshakes, the fat in dairy can flatten out sharper flavors.) Then we pan-fried it, ate a few bites, looked at each other, and gave the rest to the cat.

It was just too strong a taste for us. And, heck, we like liver, at least the kind that comes in poultry; we’re happy to pan-fry that stuff and spread it on bread any day. But this? This was overwhelming.

At least, until I unwrapped the beef tongue. Holy cow. Holy cow.

This was, recognizably, a tongue. An enormous tongue — from a 1,000-pound steer, remember? A black tongue, covered in bristly-looking taste buds.

I was, momentarily, horrified. I mean, I was perfectly willing to butcher and grill three of my chickens, but those were birds. Not mammals. For an instant, I fully understood vegetarianism, on that visceral level where disgust and revulsion congregate.

But we had friends coming over for dinner the next night, friends who had also bought a quarter-cow with us and had expressed a willingness to try the tongue. And I had come up with an ambitious plan for cooking it: braising it and saucing it the way we’d had something sort of similar — beef cheeks — at a popular Walla Walla restaurant, Saffron. (Thanks to local food-and-wine magazine Northwest Palate, we also had the recipes for both beef and sauce.)

So I dropped the tongue — thunk — into a Dutch oven and began braising it in red wine. It simmered for a few hours, and then I let it cool. It was still black, and quite firm. I poked it with a finger, watching the rubbery surface bounce back. Jesus. What was I supposed to do next?

“Call Anya,” my husband said. “She’ll know what to do.”

It was 8:30 on a Friday night, but why not? Anya Fernald — the former director of Slow Food Nation and the current force behind Live Culture — knows meat. She’d already suggested asking our butcher for eye of round, so we could cure our own bresaola in a wine fridge. (Alas, our butcher’s skills were limited to only a few basic cuts, and eye of round wasn’t one of them.) She would definitely know what to do.

Fortunately, she was home. “OK, first you take off the taste buds. Then cut off the cartilage at the back. Then slice it really thin,” she said. “Do you have a meat slicer? No? Well, take it to your local butcher shop and have them cut it for you. Buy a sausage or something, then hold up your tongue and say, ‘By the way, would you cut this for me?’ Once you’ve got it sliced, fan it out and pour a sauce over it, like a tonnato sauce or a salsa verde. Salt. You’ll need salt. And that’s it.”

Excellent. I took a knife to the taste buds and lo, they peeled away like, well, leather. The next night, my husband tackled the cartilage and the thin-slicing while I reheated my version of Saffron’s sweet-and-sour eggplant sauce.

Our friends arrived. If the tongue was truly terrible, I thought, we could always ditch it and boil water for pasta, using the eggplant as a pasta sauce. But it wasn’t. It was good. Soft, pleasantly chewy, and good. Our pals even took some home with them as leftovers.

Will I tackle a beef tongue again? Probably not; I like lengua tacos, but not enough to devote an entire day’s worth of braising and chopping and saucing to them. Still, it’s good to know that nose-to-tail cooking at home can be successful.

Mr. Secretary, I was wondering if it bothered you… that… you were talking about the importance of the nutrition for the school children… and I was wondering if it bothered you that school districts like Baltimore, Maryland institute Meatless Mondays… not letting the children have protein in the diet by doing that. Does that bother you?

Seriously? He thinks Baltimore City Schools are denying kids their recommended daily allowance of protein? I hate to break it to you Mr. Riter, but meat isn’t the only food that contains protein. The United States is among the very few wealthy nations in the world where people derive the majority of their dietary protein from animal sources. The global average is 30% of dietary protein from animal sources, including dairy and eggs, and 70% from grains, vegetables, and fruit.

If Mr. Riter had bothered to contact the Baltimore City Schools he would have found that each meat-free meal contains more than the amount of protein required by the USDA. My guess is that Mr. Riter jumped to his mistaken conclusion after reading misleading quotes from a meat lobby organization, or he really needs to brush up on his basic biochemistry.

Not being a biochemist myself, I wanted to confirm with an expert that eating a meat-free diet one day a week in no way denies a child of a well-balanced nutritious meal. So I emailed Dr. Marion Nestle, a nationally renowned food expert and professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. Dr. Nestle responded:

Consider it confirmed.

But what about the claims that we need to eat animal proteins because they contain certain “necessary” amino acids that vegetable proteins don’t? Professor Nestle replied:

Prepare for a biochemistry lecture: all proteins are made of the same amino acids. ALL. No exceptions. The difference between animal and vegetable proteins is in the content of certain amino acids. If vegetable proteins are mixed, the differences get made up. Even if they are not mixed, all you have to do to get the right amount of the low amino acids is to eat more of that food. There is no ‘need’ for animal proteins at all.

However, Dr. Nestle did say:

Meat makes a huge difference in the diets of deprived kids in developing countries not only because of its protein, but also because its nutrients are sometimes more absorbable than those from vegetables. For American kids, who eat plenty of calories, it’s far less important.

By the way, if Mr. Riter had actually tried to find out what the kids were being served, he would have found animal proteins are still on the menu. Below is a sample of the meals Baltimore kids are eating on Mondays. You might notice that the meals contain dairy products.

Meatless Monday Menu 1

Veggie Lasagna or Grilled Cheese w/ Tomato

Mixed Vegetables, Steamed Broccoli, Pineapple Tidbits & Fresh Fruit

1%, Chocolate, Straw- berry, Non-fat milk

Meatless Monday Menu 2

Pasta Primavera with mozzarella sticks or Grilled Cheese w/ Tomato

Romaine Salad, Garlic Bread, Steamed Broccoli & Fresh Fruit

1%, Chocolate, Straw- berry, Non-fat milk

Meatless Monday Menu 3

Veggie Quesadilla on a Whole Wheat Tortilla or Grilled Cheese w/ Tomato

Black beans and rice, Refried beans, Corn, & Fresh Fruit

1%, Chocolate, Straw- berry, Non-fat milk

Regarding Mr. Riter’s leading question, Secretary Vilsack didn’t bite. Instead he made it clear that all of our schools are feeding students foods that are packed with too much saturated fats and salt:

It’s fairly clear from the [recently released] Institute of Medicine study and other additional studies that we’ve got far too much sodium, far too much saturated fat in the diets of children, and far too many discretionary calories. The result is that youngsters are not getting the nutrition they need and we need to do a better job.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that Feedstuffs, a popular agribusiness newspaper, recently took the time to get most of the story straight regarding the Meatless Monday program at Baltimore City Public Schools. Here’s an excerpt for an article published today:

Interestingly… Anthony Geraci, director of food and nutrition services for BCPS, doesn’t see Meatless Monday as having anything to do with denying kids meat. In his opinion, Meatless Monday is simply a marketing ploy he has adopted to expose kids to more plant-based proteins.

Feedstuffs’ Trent Loos, a rancher and radio show host, traveled to Baltimore and posted a video of his interview with Geraci. Geraci is a very persuasive person. He obviously won Loos over with his ambitious plan to change the way Baltimore students think about food.

ABC World News with Charles Gibson aired a comprehensive piece last week on Baltimore City Schools school lunch revolution as well. You might recognize the reporter, Dr. Richard Besser, former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Like Tony Geraci often says, we can’t lose sight of the fact that the campaign to improve the foods served in public schools isn’t about politics or corporate profits, it’s about the health and well-being of children.

Originally published on the Livable Future blog

Nora Ephron’s effervescent Julie & Julia has evidently sparked a mad dash to snap up Child’s epic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Butter’s back, and margarine’s been marginalized. Three cheers for real food! After all, as Joan Gussow says, “I trust cows more than chemists.”