The Meat of the Matter

After reading Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma several years ago, I decided to give up meat for Lent. It stuck for two or three years after that, and I never missed a bite; well, maybe I missed a lovely medium-rare steak every now and then. Then I met Anthony and rejoined the meat-eating world. We only ate chicken because we deluded ourselves into believing that organic chicken, free of hormones and antibiotics, was good food.

For the past eight months, we have limited our meat consumption mainly to the 16 pounds we get each month from Randle Farms' meat share with an occasional trip to the meat counter at Earth Fare. We like that the animals on Randle Farms graze on grass-covered hills in a large pasture, that they aren't pumped full of antibiotics and other drugs to make them grow faster, and they aren't fed food that wasn't meant to be eaten by them.

The news this week about bacteria inhabiting the meat we buy at the grocery store--all manner of meat--suggests organic is a little better for you, and local, farm-raised meat is even better.

On April 15, Time posted, "What's Lurking in Your Meat and Poultry? Probably Staph" that reported on a study by Lance Price, a professor at the Translational Genomics Research Institute. Price began the study when he noticed reports of farm workers picking up staph infections from the animals, and he wondered how this affected the meat from those animals once they were slaughtered. The results of the study indicate you're likely to bring home something extra with your beef, pork, and poultry: consumers purchasing meat at the grocery store have a one-in-four chance of bringing home meat contaminated with a strain of staphylococcus aureas resistant to three classes of antibiotics. We can now add staph to the list of bacterial contaminants we've become familiar with in our food: E coli, listeria, and salmonella. Yum.

The Christian Science Monitor posted an article one day later, "Staph in meat. Are US cattle and poultry over drugged?" This article put a precise number on the study: 47 percent of the meat and poultry sampled was contaminated with staphylococcus aureas, half of which was resistant to three classes of bacteria. In this article, Prince clearly states the problem is a result of how antibiotics are used in food-animal production. He continues to say that proper cooking of the meat kills the bacteria, but I like my cow nearly mooing when it reaches the plate. I don't see why I should have to kill the steak twice when contamination occurs in the "production" process. Oh, and guess what? The National Cattlemen's Beef Association questions the study and called it's findings irresponsible. Isn't that a surprise. Again, I point to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle to get a glimpse into the conditions factory farmed animals live in and are slaughtered in. Pollan may also address this in his book.

Another survey of chicken in Seattle grocery stores found similar results: 42 percent of the chicken sampled contained staphylococcus aureas, and a host of other bugs. You can read it on the Marler Blog. Bill Marler is a lawyer who began prosecuting cases of foodborne illness in 1993 and runs a blog about food poisoning outbreaks and litigation.

While surfing the net to find these stories and related material, I also came across "Egg recall: DeCoster-linked farm releases contaminated eggs. Again" in The Christian Science Monitor. A "megafarmer" Jack DeCoster, as the Monitor describes him, was involved in a 550 million egg recall from retailers in Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. The article is dated Nov. 9, 2010. Don't breath a sigh of relief just yet; DeCoster has been cited at least three other times for problems ranging from how he cares for his animals to how he cares for his workers. Iowa named him a habitual violator, so it's likely he'll strike again. He may not sell his eggs in Alabama, but I'm willing to bet there's another DeCoster out there who does.

So, the moral of the story? We have to care more about the food we eat and how it's raised--I say raised rather than produced because these are animal products, and I still prefer to refer to them as animals rather than products. Americans balk at spending more for food; we'd rather have big screen TV's and drive gas-guzzling SUV's. Okay, a generalization that isn't fair to all, but we do spend less per capita on food than most nations. A report by Rosen and Meade on Askville by Amazon states: "Within each income group, percentages differ considerably (table 1). Residents of Canada, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom, like the United States, spend less than 12 percent of their PCE on food. Among the 24 countries in the high-income group, 5 spend more than 20 percent of their PCE on food, with the highest share held by Israel (22 percent)"(see the figures here and read here). We have to stop believing that big corporations, "megafarmers" and government agencies have our health and welfare as their top priority. They don't.

I feel very fortunate that I can buy my meat and eggs from farmers I know and talk with, whose animals I see in the fields. (The steaks in the photo are from Randle Farms.) I'm also glad Auburn is home to places like Blooming Colors and Dayspring; both businesses sell eggs gathered by local farmers, and Blooming Colors sells a variety of locally grown vegetables. Supporting local farmers and businesses is good them, and it's good for consumers.

To Be (a Locavore), or Not to Be (a Locavore); That is The Question

That really is the question. After reading Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is as entertaining as it is informative, I have been plagued by one more aspect of my eating habits. For those of you who don't know the premise behind the book, Kingsolver and her family left their home in California to return to the family farm in the South with a resolve to eat only locally. The family agreed that each person could have one non-local food item (I agree with the selection of coffee and bananas!), and all other foods would come from their garden/homestead or the local farmers market. They began with vegetables but expanded their project to include turkeys, chickens, and beef, as I recall. It was an effort of love, research, patience, and experimentation, all of which Kingsolver chronicles in her book. I would give more specifics, but I think I lent the book to someone (I'm getting more careless/carefree in my lending habits).

We have friends in British Columbia who are growing and buying as much as they can, if not all, of their food locally, but what of the rest of us who don't live on a farm or in a bountiful agricultural area or in an area that supports favorite foods? For example, I love asparagus but am not a huge fan of collard greens. Unfortunately, sources abound for collard greens, but there doesn't seem to be a local source for asparagus even though it can be grown in the South. Instead, we usually have to choose asparagus from Peru or Mexico or some other locale thousands of miles away--so we choose not to buy asparagus except on special occasions. If our experimentation goes well this year, we may plant asparagus next year and wait three years for the first harvest.

I'm sure some people dismiss the idea of eating only locally because it is so difficult to eat 100 percent local fare. Even Earth Fare's idea of local is produce from North Carolina, and they violate the local premise by importing some of their red peppers from Israel and some of their beef from Australia. There are times I must decide if it's more responsible to buy from Mexico or California. In part, that is why we decided to expand our gardening efforts this year.

Anthony and I don't begin to pretend that we eat 100 percent local food, but we do try to be as local as possible. Blooming Colors, which is where I took the above photo a couple of years ago, has a market place offering wonderful, fresh goat cheese from a local farm (in Tallapoosa County, I think) and vegetables from Auburn and the surrounding area. Not everything is local, but quite a few items are. We also participate in Randle Farms CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and purchase 98 percent of our meat, most of our eggs, and some vegetables and fruit from them. The Randles grow their food using sustainable, organic practices. They offer half shares of meat and you can split a vegetable share with a friend as we did this season. Email them for details if you're interested.

Why eat local? Some say that it saves on fossil fuels, though I found a site on the web that disagrees with that premise. Everyone, I think, could agree that local food tastes better than food shipped from, say, Peru. I know that our decision to eat more locally and grow what we can is based in part on trying to save fossil fuels and having fresher food, but it's also about supporting local, small businesses and farms, and loosening the grip of giant corporations on our food supply. We don't like the practices of international corporations and their increasing control over the food supply. Every little bit an individual does helps, or so I like to think.

If you're interested in starting your own local, food-growing "experiment," you're just in time. The season is right and resources are a key stroke away. I started my planning phase with a book by Rosalined Creasy titled Edible Landscaping. The National Gardening Association has a website with tips, as does Mother Earth News and universities and extension services, including ACES. The good news is you don't need a lot of space in one area because you can spread plantings throughout your front and back yard where the light best fits your growing needs. If you live in an apartment, you can try a method called vertical gardening.

So, get gardening! It's therapeutic as well as delicious!