“Once tomatoes were being bred for shipment, everything changed,†Mr. Ibsen said. Farmers benefited most by selecting varieties with thick skins and tough walls. “But now that shipping is so expensive, I think everything is going to change again,†he predicted. “You’re going to see a lot more local tomatoes everywhere.†according to a NY Times article The Return of a Lost Jersey Tomato.

I agree with the sentiment expressed by agricultural extension agent Jack Rabin that “The hybrids that were developed for taste, not for shipping, can hold up to any heirloom out there.” I was originally troubled by the disappearance of the hybrids my grandmother grew or we would find at the typical farm stand in the 1970s. These were beefsteak tomatoes or varities like Big Boy, not the exotic heirlooms with strange colors and textures. What drove me to look for local tomatoes was not a search for heirlooms but a search for the ordinary tomato common when I was growing up, the one I my parents brought home from farm stands or that grew in my grandmother’s backyard, which became increasingly hard to find as I became an adult.

We are far enough along now that the tomatoes my grandmother grew were not heirlooms, but like the Ramapo. Even now, I tend to make the mistake of associating a nondescript, round, red tomato with the supermarket tomato. This is partly due to the influence of growers associations and the demands of the fast food industry, always searching for a perfectly round, perfectly red, tomato capable of uniformity required for slicing onto burgers and taking the bumps and knocks of transport. The older hybrids were never that perfect. Out of every bushel I used to pick through, there were a few recessive individuals with nearly bursting lobes making for a tomato shaped more like overlapping lily pads than a sphere. They were always flavorful without the need to wear zebra stripes or be perfectly round. I for one, would be happy to see the return of the hybrid tomato selected for taste.

A sign that locally grown produce is becoming fashionable and mainstream is the phenomena of “cow pooling” or sharing a cow and made-to-order garden services that plant what the client wants and maintain the garden so their customers can have locally grown food without effort and time of growing a garden.
It is interesting that “locally grown produce to be the second-hottest American food trend, just behind bite-size desserts…”

Read about it yourself in A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss

It seems inevitable that services delivering fresh, local food to customers would spring up since many farm stands are in out of the way locations (although getting there is often much of the fun), farmer’s markets operate at inconvenient hours (often too early for city dwellers) and gardens require a plot and more effort than driving to the supermarket.
Deliveries could be more efficient in their use of energy, if a single truck made rounds to customers like the milk truck did in the mid-20th century, than the hordes of SUVs showing up every weekend on the farm to pick their own.

Tonight, Sunday 20 July 2008, we will be upgrading the site. The site may be unavailable for a half hour, but could be longer if the upgrade runs into trouble and the site must be restored from backup.

We expect the upgrade to start

8:00pm EST

One of the arguments made in In Defense of Food is that the nutritional quality of food varies with where and how it is raised or grown. Wild game may have a different nutritional profile than farm raised varieties. One of the possible reasons that people living near the arctic circle who eat very little vegetable matter but subsist off of reindeer meat are healthy is the differences in type and amount of fat in the meat. Differences in diet between factory farm beef raised on grains and grass fed beef create differences in nutritional profile.

Recent news bolsters this argument. Tilapia, a fish, has become popular in recent years. A study shows that factory farm raised tilapia have low levels of healthy omega-3 fatty acids and high levels of unhealthy omega-6 fatty acids. Higher levels of omega-6 than bacon. It should not be surprising to learn this, given that modern agriculture is based on the idea of feeding plants or animals according to “inputs” and not the kind of food they would eat in nature. It also shows that we are what our food animals eat (as Omnivore’s Dilemma explores).
US News has a good article on the problems of factory farm-raised fish, such as tilapia and catfish Popular Tilapia Might Not Help Heart

This review was published in  the Summer 2008 issue of WISE TRADITIONS, the quarterly  journal  of the Weston A. Price Foundation (www.westonaprice.org) Visit Ellen and Harvey Ussery’s website:  www.themodernhomestead.us

Review of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, by Michael Pollan

Ellen Ussery

May 20, 2008

Copyright Ellen Ussery May 20, 2008

Michael Pollan is an elegant and engaging writer. He can take a complex subject and weave its many threads into a seamless narrative that is both highly informative amd eminently readable. With his best sellingThe Omnivore’s Dilemma, he opened the eyes of the masses to the ecological and ethical dimensions of our food choices. No wonder so many people concerned with the future of agriculture and our food supply began to think of him as Saint Michael.

It feels a bit like blasphemy, then, to take issue with his current offering,In Defense of Food. It has much to recommend it, especially when he delineates how we came to the current sorry state of affairs in which human beings-who have been eating for millions of years-suddenly find themselves in need of expert guidance for this most basic activity. He gives us a history of the confluence of well intentioned government policy, flawed science, industrial profiteering, and regulatory idiocy. As a result, food itself now needs to be defended against the Nutritional Industrial Complex, which conspires to disassemble and then reconfigure it in beguiling new forms, in response to ever changing nutritional ideology.

The concept of “Nutritionism” is one of the catchy hooks upon which he hangs his story. It is the central theme for his powerful case against our modern food culture. Essentially, nutritionism is the widely shared but unexamined assumption that the key to understanding food lies in its individual nutrients. Because these are abstract and invisible, we need scientists and journalists to explain them to us. We then begin to think of food only in terms of bodily health, and lose sight of its pleasurable and social aspects. Food becomes nothing more than a nutrient delivery system, and the distinction between whole and processed foods is lost.

Nutritionism is complex and reductionist, Pollan says. His antidote to the resulting confusion is this simple admonition:Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.Clever. And it works. But only up to a point. At the end of the book, as he fleshes out these simple phrases, he offers invaluable guidelines to help reprogram the victims of nutritionism: Accept as food only things that your great-grandmother would have recognized as such. Buy a good portion of it from local farmers who raise “well-grown food from healthy soils;” or better still, grow some of it yourself, if only a pot of herbs. Take time to prepare meals yourself, and sit down at the table with family and friends to enjoy it together in a leisurely way.

His goal is to help us reclaim our health and happiness as eaters by opting out of the Western Diet. But we may not get there from here using his directions, because there is a fundamental disconnect between his excellent analysis and some of his recommendations-often obscured by his enormous skill as a writer.

He tells us to eat less meat and that just about any old traditional diet will do. He tells us to eat more plants, but never more saturated fat. Indeed, he continually refers to saturated fat as something to be avoided. It is hard to understand how he comes to such conclusions when they contradict what he has said elsewhere in the book.

We will come back to these points later, but first let us look at what he has to say about the rise of nutritionism. As he tells it, the crucial moment was in 1977, when the McGovern Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs formulated their Dietary Goals for the United States. Because they embraced the “lipid hypothesis”-which held that the consumption of fat and dietary cholesterol was responsible for the rapidly rising rates of heart disease during the twentieth century-they initially advised to “reduce consumption of meat and dairy products.” In the face of pressure from the powerful meat and dairy industries, however, the wording was changed to “choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake.” According to Pollan, the implication of this apparently simple change was profound: The focus was now on individual nutrients rather than on actual foods.

This shift of focus supplied the “ultimate justification for processing food by implying that with a judicious application of food science, fake foods can be made even more nutritious than the real thing.” What followed was thirty years in which we replaced fats with carbohydrates, and have become less healthy and considerably fatter.

But now, Pollan tells us, scientists have come to see that the whole low-fat campaign was bogus. He quotes prominent scientists as saying that “it is now increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended consequences.” An example of flawed evidence and logic cited by Pollan is the ignoring by advocates of the lipid hypothesis that “during the decades of the twentieth century when rates of heart disease were rising in America, Americans were actually reducing their intake of animal fats (in the form of lard and tallow). In place of those fats, they consumed substantially more vegetable oils.” He devotes an entire chapter to this logical sleight of hand, “The Melting of the Lipid Hypothesis.”

So far so good. But round about here he opines that it is hard for him “to imagine the low fat/high carb craze taking off as it did or our collective health deteriorating to the extent that it has if the Committee’s original food based recommendations had stood:Eat less meat and dairy products.” Actually, I seriously doubt that the original wording by the McGovern Committee would have prevented the increasing presence of ersatz carbohydrate foods in the American diet. As Pollan has explained so well, both here and in his many other writings, the forces of agriculture and the food industry were perfectly poised to take advantage of any opportunity by which they could increase the sale of corn and soy, using all the food engineering, marketing, and regulatory influence that money could buy. The taboo against the eating of traditional fats itself was all the opening they needed to push such an agenda.

More crucially, Pollan makes a compelling case that the lipid hypothesis on which the McGovern Dietary Goals were based, whatever the choice of words, was seriously flawed. By what logic does Pollan demolish the foundational hypothesis itself, but then accept with approval the major recommendation it engendered? Pollan doesn’t say, and that is one of the puzzles of this book.

Such contradictions continue to crop up, as for example: “But eaters worried about their health needn’t wait for science to settle this question [what it is about a meat-heavy diet that causes higher rates of coronary disease and cancer] before deciding that it might be wise to eat more plants and less meat. This of course is precisely what the McGovern committee was trying to tell us.”

Pollan’s frequent refrain that we should “eat less meat” seems to assume that the unhealthful consequence of eating a lot of meat is settled science. It is not-he makes it seem so by slight of hand. He slips in references to research on the matter without giving it the kind of scrutiny he himself applies to nutritional studies in other parts of the book. For example, is it known what kind of meat the subjects in these studies were eating? Was it grain-fed or grass-fed? Pollan makes it abundantly clear that the two are completely different foods, and advocates eating only the pastured variety. Studies with conclusions about meat tell us nothing unless this distinction is made.

He cites The China Study, by Colin Campbell as particular authority for the conclusion we should limit meat. This was an epidemiological study, subject to a myriad of misinterpretations-as Pollan demonstrates when he explores the pitfalls and limitations of modern nutritional studies in the chapter “Bad Science.” He closes that section with this quotation from a noted epidemiologist: “I don’t believe anything I read in nutritional epidemiology anymore.” But inexplicably, Pollan evidences no qualms about the China Study.

Finally, in suggesting that we needn’t wait for science to settle exactly what it is about eating meat that supposedly causes coronary disease and cancer, Pollan ignores his previous implication that our present national dietary disaster was created when the McGovern Committee acted in a similarly precipitous manner.

Here is another puzzle: Why does he disregard major portions of the work of Dr. Price in preference for others? He gives us a lengthy discussion of the findings of Dr. Weston A. Price, some of which are slightly misrepresented-just enough so to support the anti-meat stance Pollan seems bent on taking. For example, he says that Price found populations who “thrived on diets in which fruits, vegetables and grain predominated.” This is not accurate, since it gives the impression that animal foods were not fundamental among the populations Price studied; and is contradicted when he himself says, “Price found groups that ate diets of wild animal flesh to be generally healthier than the agriculturists who relied on cereals and other plant foods. . .,” with “the healthiest of all the populations” Price studied being “. . .tribes that subsisted on milk, meat, and blood from pastured cattle as well as animal food from the Nile River.”

He reports that Price found these diets to be “on average ten times higher in Vitamins A and D than modern diets.” Pollan implies that the discrepency had to do with the stripping of nutrients from grains in modern processing, but in so doing ignores the essential point that these vitamins are only found in animal fats. However, later on he does observe that organ meats with their high levels of fat soluble vitamins were particularly prized. He notes as well the degree to which the health of pastoral populations was a reflection of the quality of the pasture on which their animals grazed, and the resulting levels of A and D in their butter.

But it is only the connection between the soil and the health of the eaters-the ecological aspects of Price’s work-that Pollan focuses on when making his recommendations. He is content to leave behind all of Price’s conclusions on the value of animal fats, and take away only the partial truth that “the human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.”

He did not see that animal fats are the key to reversing the damage done by industrializing our food supply-and indeed, many of the worst aspects of nutritionism. Animal fats are what is missing in Pollan’s attempt to restore us to our proper relationship to food. In this endeavor he notes five different changes that have taken place since we have industrialized our food supply. We have gone: from whole foods to refined, from complexity to simplicity, from quality to quantity, from leaves to seeds, and from food culture to food science.

In explaining these transformations Pollan finds that he must borrow from nutritionism’s reductive vocabulary to delve into the implications of a change that he feels is the most egregious of all-that from leaves to seeds. He almost apologizes for doing so. But he needn’t. The fact is: You can’t unopen Pandora’s box. You can’t navigate the modern food world by ignoring nutritonism as part of the landscape. You need to understand what it is and be able to know it when you see it or you will soon find yourself on the road to nowhere. This is what is so valuable about Pollan’s work: It fills in the map with all the new side roads and subdivisions. But your journey to the land of optimal health and happiness will be impeded by an uncrossable desert if you ignore guidance from earlier explorers who actually got there.

Price did. And he was unambiguous about the need for animal fats.

We cannot transform the relationship of humans to the soil, as Pollan advocates, without adding back the missing link, that most miraculous of food processors: the grazing animal-a creature who takes leaves from the soil, disassembles and reconfigures them, producing foods that contain the optimal balance of an unimaginable variety of nutrients, many of which science hasn’t even identified. All packaged in their own appetizing and satisfying nutrient delivery systems: meat, milk, and fat.

This is a food system based on plants. And that is exactly what Pollan says we need in order to redress the harm that has been done in the shift from leaves to seeds. But he is in the land of wishful thinking if be believes we can do this by eating more plants, only a tiny bit of meat, and ignoring animal fats. If we follow his directions we will find ourselves still in the grips of nutritionism, but this time with the Nutritional Industrial Complex busily providing us with things like high Omega 3 asparagus. We may not be fat, but you can bet we will be very hungry.

We should be grateful that, even though he misses the major import of Dr. Price’s work, he does introduce it to a wider audience; and he does show that the lipid hypothesis was a flim-flam.

We should also be grateful that his next book will be about orchids.

It appears that since we upgraded to a new version of user management package the forgotten password tool may not have been working. After refreshing files on the server it appears to be working fine. I went through a complete password reset and change cycle. So if you were trying to reset your password and it was refusing to recognize your email address, please try again.

Steve Knoblock

Ian Walthew was a big fan of farmers’ blogs, but became frustrated at spending too much time trying to find good ones and then forgetting to bookmark them, so he started a blog to keep track of them. The site is farmblogs.blogspot.com
I encourage farmfoody.org members to recommend their favorite farm blogs and bloggers to Ian so he can include them in his site. Just go to his website and contact him.

The Washington Post recently published an article about buying a whole steer I Can’t Believe I Bought the Whole Thing direct from the farm. One of confusing thing for consumers is how freezer beef like this is priced and how to compare it with store prices.

The “hanging” or pre-cut weight  is the weight of the fresh carcass after slaughter.  The head, hooves, guts, and hide have been removed and the carcass is split down the backbone into two sides.  Most farms that sell quarters, sides, or whole beefs, sell based on this hanging or pre cut weight, because it is an easier figure for them to calculate from.

The  “cut” weight is the weight after the hanging carcass has dry aged and been trimmed of bone and fat, and has been packaged and frozen. “Cut” weight is the weigh of the beef the consumer takes home.

Typically a hanging carcass loses between 5%  of its weight during dry aging (it dehydrates) and and another 20% to 25% when the bones and fat are removed.   So for example,  a farm selling a 250 pound side of beef at $4.50 a pound for a pre-cut or hanging carcass would cost about $1125. The beef you would take home would actually only be 191 pounds (250 less 25%) So you beef would cost $5.89 per pound for the cut weight. This is the price to compare with store prices.

If you need help knowing what to do with your mass quantities of beef, look to Fergus Henderson’s books on “nose to tail eating.” A good start is the American edition The Whole Beast.

I believe the contaminated tomato debacle unfolding over the last week has something to tell us about the factory food system, which supplies much of what we eat. It is fascinating how this came to be embodied in the shape of our tomatoes. A lot of people are asking the question, just what kind of tomatoes are safe to eat? One answer, we are told by news and government, is to suspect our round tomato friends of harboring salmonella. I had to stop and ask why is this? Why round tomatoes?

Although the description has caused confusion, my first thought was that by “round red tomato†they were talking about the class of nondescript tomato one finds commonly in the supermarket produce section, piled high in a bin. Typically, these are large, as nearly perfectly spherical as the tomato board can blandish producers into making them, bland looking orbs sold in the supermarkets and funneled by the ton into the fast food system to be slapped onto burgers. They are the perfect food to fit the machine.

A second later, it occurred to me that if I were to go to my local farmer’s market or farm stand looking for tomatoes and I found some decidedly out-of-round, oddly shaped heirloom tomatoes, that I could very likely be assured they were uncontaminated. They are too imperfect, too delicate for the factory food system, and very likely grown on a local farm or garden. Their shape was a key to identifying their probable origin in a distributed, local food system. By the shape of the tomato I could judge its origin and quality, since I knew that no sane commodity grower would grow such a tomato, unfit for the fast food joint, unfit for the average consumer (who has lost contact with farm and garden, with whole food) frightened by a few blemishes, odd colors or funky shapes.

I can’t promise you won’t get sick from locally grown tomatoes. The independent farm system creates something big agriculture lacks: firebreaks. The decentralized nature of independent farms and their localized customer base create firewalls capable of containing an outbreak. The factory food system grows enormous numbers of a single crop and distributes the harvest through a sprawling food processing system, which spreads and amplifies even a small outbreak in one field across the nation, into all sorts of processed foods, just as happened with contaminated lettuce. It is the nature of the system, which has only dominated for a handful of decades, that has changed our relation to food and presented this problem of “wildfires.â€

Although an individual tomato patch might become contaminated, the effects would be isolated to the one farm or local area. There is far less chance of cross contamination on the way to market. The farm down, in the other state, the road is unlikely to suffer the same contamination. A farm depends on its reputation. Any taint or question about its food and the farm will be devastated. Independent farms rely on their reputation to bring return business, unlike big agriculture.

Perhaps it is fitting the warning comes in the form of these alien orbs, signaling with their perfect roundness and flashing reds, the revenge of the round red tomatoes. Although at first glance, the oddly shaped heirloom at the farm stand might seem more alien, those are the fruits that piqued my curiosity when as a child my parents took me to visit farm stands. They were outstanding in the multi-lobed beauty, looking ready to burst. They were bursting with flavor, at least when we got them home and started the barbecue.

I thought this comment was particularly applicable to farmfoody.org as describing the conversation between farms and their customers we aim to foster:
“Shopping locally carries with it no guarantees that all food will be free from harmful bacteria. It does, however, afford you an opportunity to look the farmer who grew your food straight in the eye. You can see the pride of growing a healthful, safe product there. Also, there is less environmental impact because the food doesn’t have to be shipped so far. Finally, it tastes better, especially the tomatoes.”
(Comment to Washington Post article by Patti Reis | June 9, 2008)

We are featuring farms who we think have done a good job with their profile on farmfoody.org A good profile has a good description, a relevant set of tags, is using bulletins to communicate with their customers, are taking advantage of frequently asked questions and have added recipes.

That’s the key to using the site — getting foodys in your area to join and become a friend of your farm. Once a friend is established, you have an open line of communication to customers eager to hear about your products.

Quail Cove Farms

A family owned and operated organic farm and natural foods warehouse located on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. We grow organic sweet potatoes, organic peanuts, organic butternut squash and organic summer vegetables. Visit their farmfoody.org profile.

Homestead Farm

Located in Poolesville, Maryland, opens in late May when the strawberries are ripe and ready to be picked. We offer both Pick-Your-Own and already picked. The summer season brings thornless blackberries, peaches and a variety of summer vegetables including vine ripened tomatoes and sweet corn picked fresh every day. Visit their farmfoody.org profile.