Boycott Forbes Magazine

Fact is stranger than fiction. I couldn't have made this up. Forbes Magazine just named Monsanto "Company of the Year" for 2009:

http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto_today/2010/company_of_the_year.asp

The award came in the same issue as this extraordinarily shallow article, which reads like a press release:

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0118/americas-best-company-10-gmos-dupont-planet-versus-monsanto.html

(Is that journalism?)

In my opinion, Monsanto poses the greatest risk to our food supply of any corporate or governmental entity on the planet. Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, edited by Vandana Shiva, is an excellent collection of essays that explores some of the issues quite eloquently, and from a few different perspectives. Or, for those who prefer a video format, I offer The World According to Monsanto:



If you don't have time for the book or the video, you can search the Internet for monsanto is evil and see what you get.

I'm already boycotting Monsanto to the best of my ability, so it's time to boycott Forbes.

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Or perhaps it's long past time to boycott Forbes. Here's the opening paragraph of this article written by Forbes editor Michael Noer in their 8/22/2006 issue:

Guys: a word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career.

It doesn't even matter to me what the rest of the article says, or what the context is. Opening like this is utterly beyond the pale, even though it was no doubt intended to be "controversial" or "provocative". For the magazine to have published it says quite a bit about their attitude. And for them not to have acknowledged their mistake, but instead to have dignified it with a "counterpoint" written by a woman, says even more.

Please cancel my subscription to your magazine. And I will no longer be advertising with you. Thank you very much.

Boston Food In Winter, ADDENDA

Someone let me know about a Natick Winter Market, Saturdays 9:30-1. So please add that to your list!

Just to make things simpler, here's a link to all of the winter markets near Boston. (Or most of them.)

I also forgot to point out another upcoming event, for New Hampshirers and other folks able to drive and spend money on a conference (student discount applies):

• 1-29, 1-30, 1-31 Fourfold Path to Healing Conference
  Sally Fallon, Tom Cowan, Jaimen McMillan, and others bring us a weekend conference built around their research and the research of Weston A. Price and Rudolf Steiner. I went last year, and it was inspiring. Check my blog from last year. In Nashua, NH.

Boston Food In Winter (UPDATED 1/11)

Winter does not have to be a time of deprivation in northern climes.

Here are some winter farmers' markets:

• Saturdays 9:30AM-1PM: Natick Winter Market
• Saturdays 10AM-1PM: Wayland/Winter Farmers' Market
  
• Saturdays 11AM-2PM: Pawtucket/Wintertime Farmers' Market
  
• Sundays 12PM-4PM: North Attleborough Winter Farm's and Artisan Producers Market

And here are just a very few upcoming food-related events in and around Boston:

• 1-11: Somerville Farm Share Fair + screening of The Power of Community
  Want to find a CSA for next year? Now is the time to start thinking about it. Many of them sell out by March. While you're at it, see an awesome movie about how Cuba fed itself after its industrial ag system failed, as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union. Hint: They did not use GMOs. It's an inspiring story, and it brings with it an important lesson for post-oil ag.
  
  
• 1-24: Hands-On Kimchi Workshop
  Learn to make kimchi! I'm leading a hands-on workshop at the Theodore Parker UU Church in West Roxbury.
  

• 1-29, 1-30, 1-31 Fourfold Path to Healing Conference
  Sally Fallon, Tom Cowan, Jaimen McMillan, and others bring us a weekend conference built around their research and the research of Weston A. Price and Rudolf Steiner. I went last year, and it was inspiring. Check my blog from last year. In Nashua, NH.
  
  
• 1-31: Souper Bowl II
  Who wants to watch football when you can have delicious, homemade soup? At Haley House.
  
  
• 2-09: Preserving and Pickling Class I
  2-16: Preserving and Pickling Class II
  A two-part, hands-on, in-depth class going deep into food preserving, with an emphasis on fermentation. Also covers how to prepare dishes using your preserved foods. Click the link for more details. At the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts.
  
  
• 3-21: Greater Boston Kimchi Festival
  So you think your kimchi is pretty good, huh? Enter it in a competition, and find out! Or maybe you just want to come check out some kimchi. A kimchi festival complete with celebrity judges, live musical entertainment, and kimchi-making demos. At the Theodore Parker Church.
  

Here are a few Boston food-related sites to keep an eye on for more events:

• http://bostonlocalvores.org/
• http://www.cakeandcommerce.com/
• http://www.cuisineenlocale.com/
• http://thewinebottega.com/events/

Some Ammonia With Your Beef?

For reason number 173 to eat Meat Of Known Origin, take a look at this article from yesterday's New York Times.

Summary:

Contamination, particularly with E. coli O157:H7 and salmonella, has been a persistent problem with mainstream ground beef. Eight years ago, someone started a company called Beef Products, Inc., based on the idea of treating questionable bits of meat with ammonia to kill the pathogens. Changing and inconsistently-observed treatment standards within the company, combined with ineffective oversight by federal agencies, has resulted in meat reaching the public whose safety and palatability is questionable, either because it is tainted with pathogens or because it smells like ammonia. State prison officials in Georgia rejected some of the meat, deeming it unfit for consumption by their inmates, even while the same meat was being served in national fast food chains, whose standards are apparently lower. Click here for the whole article.

Thoughts For A New Year: Meat Of Known Origin, Revisited

One of my New Year's resolutions last year was to eat only Meat Of Known Origin.

I stuck to this resolution pretty well. But I did make some exceptions—for example, when I found myself at someone's house for dinner, I ate what was put in front of me, rather than explaining why I wouldn't eat it.

Why did I make this exception? Was it out of consideration for my hosts? If I had made my explanation to my hosts, for them to go on eating their Meat Of Unknown Origin would have been like admitting that they didn't care about suffering as much as I did, or didn't care about food as much as I did, or weren't as clever or resourceful as I was, or even that they couldn't afford to pay for MOKO.

Perhaps I made the other-peoples-houses exception not for their sake but for my own, so that I could avoid a conversation that might be uncomfortable for me. (I don't enjoy delicate conversations, although I am better at them than I used to be.)

It's pretty easy for me to eat Meat Of Known Origin while at home, surrounded by my familiar food supply chain and restaurants; eating MOKO on the road is generally much more difficult. So I made another exception when I traveled internationally, because language and cultural barriers made it harder for me to know where my meat was coming from, and because factory farming is somewhat less prevalent outside the US. Then I started making exceptions when I traveled within the US, for reasons of convenience as much as anything else.

Then I thought I was getting a cold, and I decided that what I needed was some of the delicious Vietnamese beef-noodle soup called phở. So I went to a Vietnamese restaurant and had some. (More about phở here.)

One of my resolutions for 2010: I will do better.

I just finished reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Saffran Foer. I recommend this book highly to anyone who eats meat, and to anyone who does not. In it, you will find such apparent contradictions as the vegetarian rancher, and the vegan who builds slaughterhouses. Foer explores the ethics and alliances of the world of meat in a nuanced way. Rather than simply presenting the facts, like a journalist, he provides useful moral and cultural frameworks, and invites us to explore for ourselves how everything fits together. He goes beyond previous writers on the subject of "sustainable" meat. Reading his book helped remind me that I could do better than I have done before—and that in fact I must. And perhaps even that I could eat less meat than I have before.

I would invite everyone to think about where their food is coming from, particularly their meat. If you do eat meat, have you explored sources outside the factory system?