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Why we love dogs, eat pigs, and wear cows

In Author Event, Food to Avoid, Recommended Reads,

Posted on August 17, 2011
Author: Linda,
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Mainstream American culture embraces meat as healthful and even natural. Well, we’ve learned that industrially produced meat is not safe for us or the planet, but can’t we still believe that meat eating is natural?

Not according to Melanie Joy, Ph.D., who received her doctorate in psychology for researching the beliefs that we engage in when we tuck into a steak or a drumstick. Turns out that a concerted campaign keeps us ignorant of what goes on in factory farms and slaughterhouses. Recently, several states almost passed laws making it a crime to take pictures at such places. Undercover videos have revealed ghastly conditions and practices there. Not so secret any more! And big meatpackers tried to keep us in ignorance.

Enter Melanie Joy. She focuses on us, the consumers, and what makes us vulnerable to the ad campaigns (happy cows in green pastures…. not!) and cultural habits (barbecuing in the summer) that keep the meat industry going.

Full disclosure: I was one of Melanie’s dissertation advisors, so I’ve seen the research and her analysis in all its detail. Since graduating, Melanie has continued her work and published a really cool book, “Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows.” Contrary to what you might think, it’s not a shock-filled expose but a very gentle, kind guide to awakening to our thinking habits. What we do after that is up to us.

Melanie Joy will be speaking next Tuesday, August 23, at 6.30 pm at the Unitarian Universalist Center at 1187 Franklin St (at Geary Blvd) in San Francisco. Personally, I can’t wait!

A great contribution

Are sustainable fish really sustainable?

In Food to Avoid,

Posted on August 3, 2011
Author: Linda,
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At Whole Foods, you’ll see fish coded by color: green for “sustainable,” yellow for “not-so-sustainable,” and red for “you really shouldn’t be buying this, but we’ll sell it to you anyway.” While sockeye salmon might make you feel virtuous, knowing you’ve chosen responsibly using the color codes, there are some factors that aren’t on the codes.

The International Program on the State of the Ocean released a report that over-fishing and pollution from aquaculture have triggered a “phase of extinction unprecedented in human history.” The solution goes beyond consulting your Seafood Watch card. since these cards and color-coded systems don’t take into consideration the carbon impacts fisheries create while their fleets are chasing down fish species the whole Earth over. For instance, Seafood Watch classifies salmon caught in Alaska, which is over 2,200 miles away from the Bay Area, as the best choice you could make on your next grocery run. Tilapia caught somewhere in South America, which could mean anywhere from 6,000 to 9,000 miles of one-way travel, is listed as “a good alternative.”

So simply following the guides will not solve the over-fishing crisis. These guides help, but they should be improved. The world’s governments should create more marine conservation areas, with small organic fisheries located near the coast of most countries. Other solutions are being enacted. Will all this happen in time? Let’s hope so, as something needs to be done, soon.

The best thing you can do is to stop eating fish and other seafood. If you feel you must have them, buy small quantities of sustainable fish from a trusted source, as you never know how much of the information provided (such as how the fish were caught – one hook per line, or in a mile-long net that scoops up everything in its path?) is true.

Grist has a good story about this, and a great graphic.

Note: Mina Arasteh contributed to this story

Green junk food?

In Uncategorized,

Posted on August 1, 2011
Author: Linda,
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A recent study by Interbrand (which helps companies create and exploit their brand, e.g., their image) assessed global corporations to see which ones were making their operations more environmentally responsible. The report is “Best Global Green Brands 2011.”

As an advocate of fresh, organic, and local, I am skeptical that huge food corporations may have justifiably made the list. But as an admitted list junkie, I checked it out to see if any were among the top 50. To my amazement, there were:

#27 Coca-Cola
#29 Pepsi
#35 Campbells
#36 Kellogg’s
#42 Starbucks, and hang onto your hats,
#45 McDonald’s.

Yes, I nearly fainted too. But read on.

The Interbrand report also lists how big a gap there is between what the company is doing, and what people perceive it as doing. Nor surprisingly, McDonald’s had the biggest gap, Coke is third, Kellogg’s fifth, and Starbucks eighth.

Should we believe this? The Interbrand report is interactive and gives much more information – check it out for yourself! And an informative writeup on all this can be found here
on Greenbiz, which is an excellent source for information on the good and bad eco-deeds of corporate America. Greenbiz also sends out regular newsletters (GreenBuzz), which you can sign up for on the website.

Joel Makower, who heads Green Biz, once wrote about what he called “Makower’s Paradox” – when companies are doing good environmental things WITHOUT talking about it. He suggested that perhaps they don’t want to go out on a limb and risk being called out for greenwashing. That makes a certain amount of sense…. if you’ve just started exercising and are still something of a couch potato, you wouldn’t advertise yourself as an athlete… yet.

So should we see this Interbrand list as good news? Or should we remain hugely skeptical? What do you think?

Peanut butter and celery

In Food to Try,

Posted on July 28, 2011
Author: Linda,
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Remember this timeless dynamic duo? Healthier than s’mores, and don’t require building a fire. If you grind your own peanut butter fresh at the supermarket, you know you’re avoiding all the sugars and added trans fats that go along with conventional store-bought peanut butter. What you may not know, however, is that peanut butter, both organic and nonorganic, contains aflatoxin. Uh oh! Aflatoxin is a mold found (by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences) to be directly linked to liver cancer. While the aflatoxin in food may not exceed minute amounts, according to the FDA, exposure to hot or humid environments can cause these small amounts of mold to grow. A particularly risky place is the grinding machines that customers use in the grocery store, which are not tested by the FDA for levels of the mold.

To minimize the amount of aflatoxin in your peanut butter, you can do the following:
* If you grind the peanuts yourself, refrigerate the resulting peanut butter as soon as possible. Or,
* Buy store-bought organic peanut butter which has already been put into sealed containers.

credit: kafka4 on flickr

Johns Hopkins University researchers found that eating celery, parsnips, carrots, parsley and other leafy greens with peanut butter actually reduces the amounts of aflatoxin in your body, so feel confident and healthy the next time you crunch away on your organic peanut butter and celery, with raisins on top. This artistic concoction is also called “ants on a log.”

Submitted by Mina Arasteh

Meat, health, and planet

In Animal Cruelty, Food to Avoid, Toxins and Pesticides, Uncategorized,

Posted on July 21, 2011
Author: Linda,
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The Environmental Working Group has released a new report. Working with CleanMetrics, they assessed the rates of greenhouse gases emitted by 20 types of proteins (meat, fish, dairy, and vegetable sources). Here’s the take-home message : “Lamb, beef, pork and cheese generate the most greenhouse gases. They also tend to be high in fat and have the worst environmental impacts.”

I love it when experts not only give you the worrisome news, they show you practical steps you can take to respond. From EWG’s exhortation to “Eat ‘greener’ meat when you do eat it,” I’ve condensed some key recommendations:

For your health:
Avoid highly processed meats like lunchmeats, hot dogs, and smoked meats.
Choose leaner cuts, which may have fewer toxins than fatty ones

For the animals:
Choose certified humanely raised. You don’t want to participate in the torture perpetrated by factory farms! Niman Ranch, which began forty years ago north of San Francisco, has grown to partner with over 650 independent ranchers and states that all its animals are raised humanely.

For the environment:
Avoid farmed and airfreighted fish. Well, we in the Bay Area have access to local fish, so the air freight has less relevance here. But what about endangered species? What about. Monterey Bay Aquarium has a list here.

And of course, the most powerful recommendation of all is, “Eat less meat and dairy.”

This report and its website version are goldmines of information. For instance, you can find out which part of the life cycle of a given product made the heaviest environmental impact. Weird fact: “Roughly 20 percent of all meat sold in the U.S. winds up in the trash. That makes the pesticides, fertilizer, fuel and water used to produce and process it, as well as the resulting greenhouse gases and environmental damage, unnecessary and preventable.”

For the full report, go here.

Amazing short video on food problems and solutions

In Useful tools,

Posted on July 19, 2011
Author: Linda,
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Roots of Change, the San Francisco think tank and funder with the vision to remake California’s food system, has released a marvelous short video that compresses most of the problems I write about – and some of the solutions – into a short, three-minute video. Find it here. The sound track is percussive, so you may want to turn down the volume while you watch it!

Mina Arasteh, a Lafayette high school student, saw the video and concluded, “What we are putting into our bodies and everything that happens to our food before it winds up on our dinner plates is directly correlated to how we treat the land, the workers, and ourselves. Thankfully, every cloud has a silver lining, and the video does a great job of depicting it.”

We in the Bay Area have a wealth of activists, organizations, chefs, and all-around food geniuses who are working to save us from the excesses of industrial food. You can participate as much or as little as you like. Not a foodie yourself? Small steps count a lot in boosting the economy of healthy food and agriculture. You could spend $10 a week or organic produce in your regular grocery store, grow tomatoes in one pot on your patio, and patronize vegetarian restaurants. Got some time? Shop at farmers’ markets and talk to the vendors, compost your scraps, and attend healthy food events. Becoming an enthusiastic food revolution supporter? Join an urban farming group, go vegetarian, and check out the many careers available in the new food world.