Kimchi Festival In The News: Boston Globe

With a week and a half to go before the Greater Boston Kimchi Festival, the Boston Globe have covered it, on page 10 of the Food section (and also on their web site). Click here to see their article, A spicy cabbage pitch!

For full details on the Kimchi Festival, including how to enter your kimchi in the contest and how to get an early-bird discount, go to http://kimchi.lactoferment.com.

Book Review: The Vegetarian Myth, by Lierre Keith

In her book, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, Lierre Keith successfully assails not only vegetarianism, but also industrial civilization and even agriculture itself. The effectiveness of her assault may dishearten anyone with abiding fondness for these institutions. She puts the puzzle pieces together excellently and without holes; the resulting picture challenges the foundations of industrial capitalism. She gives no quarter, and, as in James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency, her proposed resolution is not an easy one.

She starts by explaining her motivation. She deplores factory animal farming, and seeks above all an end to cruelty and oppression of all kinds. In this, her goals are aligned with the goals of moral and political vegetarians and vegans.

According to her, their hearts are in the right place, but they've got the facts wrong.

First, she describes her own early, naïve attempts to grow a vegan vegetable garden. When it came time to fertilize the garden, she shunned industrial, fossil-fuel-based fertilizer, for political reasons. Using manure was morally questionable, because it would have made her garden dependent on the oppression of animals. The remaining option was organic fertilizer from the garden store. Imagine her surprise when she read the list of ingredients: blood meal, bone meal, and so on. As she said, "My garden wanted to eat animals, even if I didn't."

Next, she explores (and explodes) the notion that a grain-based diet is morally superior to an animal-based diet. Eating meat is demonstrably compatible with preserving species and ecosystems in many places that have been inhabited by hunter-gatherers. On the other hand, agriculture based primarily on annual grasses (also known as grains) necessitates clearing fields, cutting down forests, draining rivers, and depleting topsoil. In place of killing individual animals, we destroy entire ecosystems and the multiple species of animals that inhabit them and depend on them. (Her case is much better argued than this.)

She similarly investigates the notion that if people in rich countries stopped eating meat and ate grain instead, we could end hunger worldwide. Among other problems with this idea: most parts of the world can only grow grain with huge water inputs, and there's not enough water; the topsoil wouldn't last very long; and, for various political and economic reasons that she explains convincingly, growing grain leads to poverty.

In the largest section of the book, she discusses the nutritional consequences of shunning or consuming animal products. Having been a vegan for 20 years, she testifies that the vegan diet did not work for her (to put it mildly). She goes on to tell the story of the misinformation campaign propounding the benefits of a low-fat vegetable-based diet; the confusion about the role of cholesterol in the body and its links to heart disease; the metabolic challenges of carbohydrate-based diets; and the elevation of soy protein from an industrial by-product to a "health food". Keith makes excellent arguments against eating soy, citing its damaging effects on digestion, mineral absorption, and the endocrine system. Although it doesn't prove anything, I found this tidbit fascinating:

The Chinese characters for barley, millet, rice, and wheat are pictures of the grains, because it's the edible parts that matter. The character for soy shows the roots, because it was grown as a cover crop, not a food. [quoting Kaayla Daniel, The Whole Soy Story, p. 9]

You may have some idea by now where she is leading us. Eat local, native food. Stop driving cars. Stop having children. And: there's no way that we can feed all the people on the earth. There's going to be a die-off, same as when deer overpopulate a forest and exceed its carrying capacity. The bonanza of fossil fuels has allowed us to postpone this die-off, but the day will come, probably sooner than most people think, and the more we continue with business-as-usual, the less prepared each of us will be for it.

Her perspective as a radical feminist activist suffuses the text, resulting in some interesting side-trips into the sexual politics of war, and the connections among vegetarianism, eating disorders, and the dominant culture. At the same time, the unfolding narrative of her personal journey from vegan to anti-grain runs throughout the chapters. She does a great job of integrating her personal story into the larger one.

Parts of the book, including the title itself, will challenge many readers. It is my hope that these readers will start reading and keep on reading, because Keith has put together so many important ideas in this book, so artfully. We owe it to ourselves to hear them, discuss them, and most importantly, act on them. The time is ripe. (Actually, the time was ripe 10,000 years ago.)

Yet Another Reason To Cook From Scratch

According to Associated Press:

A wide range of processed foods — including soups, snack foods, dips and dressings — is being recalled after salmonella was discovered in a flavor-enhancing ingredient.
Food and Drug Administration officials said Thursday that the ingredient, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, is used in thousands of food products, though it was unclear how many of them will be recalled.

And what, you may ask, is hydrolyzed vegetable protein? Hydrolyzed vegetable protein is a food flavor-enhancer whose active component is MSG. Hydrolyzed whey protein and hydrolyzed yeast protein are similar. Click here to see the names of some other food additives that do or may contain MSG.

Hydrolyzed vegetable protein is added to processed foods as a way of adding MSG without having to put MSG on the ingredient list.

So what's wrong with MSG? It might cause lesions on your hypothalamus and disrupt your endocrine system. (Lots more links.) Then again, it might not.

Are you feeling lucky?

And now, apparently, some batches of hydrolyzed vegetable protein contain salmonella.

The good news is that when you eat at home, you can avoid such problems. Read food labels at the store. If the ingredient list includes anything on this long list, or anything you don't understand, then know that you might be buying MSG. I should warn you that if you do this, you may find yourself eating less processed foods. A lot less.

When you go out to eat, it's trickier.

A few restaurants make their food completely from scratch; at these places, you can ask your server what's in your food, and they should know. Chances are these places don't use MSG or any of its relatives—but if they do, they'll be able to tell you.

By far the majority of restaurants buy buckets of goo of various types from foodservice companies like Sysco. This goo may be called sauce, soup, salad dressing, etc. The servers at these restaurants may be able to tell you if a given dish contains peanuts, eggs, or shellfish, but I doubt you'll get any useful answers about whether there's hydrolyzed yeast protein in the soup that's shipped to them in 55-gallon drums from Texas.

Kinda makes you not want to go to the food court, huh. (Good.)

Real Food Face-Off

And now for something completely different…

My friend Katie over at Kitchen Stewardship has been running a Tuesday series called Real Food Face-Off. Every week, she posts interviews with two real food bloggers. It's not so much a contest as it is a getting-to-know-you, and a way to find kindred spirits and other interesting food blogs.

Anyway, this week, I was interviewed!

Click here to see the interview.

I've been "faced off" with Raine from Agricultural Society, a wise and thoughtful woman who has turned to real food for healing, after getting sick repeatedly and becoming disillusioned with mainstream medicine. You can read her eye-opening story here. Raine, thanks for sharing your intense story.

Raw Milk Interviews: Winton Pitcoff of NOFA; Terri Lawton of Oake Knoll Ayrshires

If you're new to my blog, you might easily conclude that I'm interested in only kimchi and raw milk. Which I don't recommend combining.

I can see why you might come to this conclusion. It's not true, I assure you.

Nonetheless:

Here's an excellent interview with Winton Pitcoff, who heads the Raw Milk Network for the Massachusetts chapter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association:

http://localisbetter.org/2010/02/15/raw-milk-in-mass-part-1/

And one with Terri Lawton of Oake Knoll Ayrshires, the only remaining dairy of any kind in Norfolk County, Massachusetts:

http://localisbetter.org/2010/02/19/raw-milk-in-mass-part-2/

Terri offers a perspective on the strict regulation of the sale of raw milk in Massachusetts:

Do you think it’s unfair that raw milk can only be sold on the farm where it’s produced [in Massachusetts]?

I think it’s wild that a person can go to any store and buy cigarettes or alcohol. Certainly cigarettes are known to have no additive effect to anyone’s health. And whether or not raw milk does—and a lot of studies that say that it does—but regardless of whether it does, it’s certainly not as inherently harmful as smoking cigarettes or chewing tobacco. There’s no problem with selling any kind of tobacco at any kind of store. I think that’s pretty outrageous. If that’s allowed, there shouldn’t be any problem allowing raw milk.

She has a good point.