Every summer my grandmother planted a garden in the back yard, nestled between the brick garage and the apple and pear trees my great-grandfather planted when he built the house. The ten square feet of garden, surrounded by a wire fence for the beans to climb, produced an abundance of tomatoes, green peppers, snap beans, summer squash and other vegetables for her table.

When we came to dinner, if it were still summer,  I followed my mother and grandmother out into the backyard, through the entrance flanked by giant sunflowers to the garden, alive with buzzing insects on a hazy afternoon, where I “helped†them pick string beans from their climbing poles, putting some in my grandmother’s apron and the rest in a brown paper bag. We would take the long, slender beans back to the kitchen.

Sitting around the dinette table in the kitchen, we pulled the strings and snapped the ends from the beans tossing them into a cooking pot. I did my best to help, until, lacking patience for this kind of work, as most boys do, I got bored and wandered off looking for my father who was usually working on the family car or talking with my grandfather, leaving the two women to finish preparing our dinner.

Whether it was an ordinary week night or a holiday, we could usually expect her version of “hamburger,†which was more like pate, with bread for filler and held together with egg, served on a plate, slathered in thick, creamy gravy dotted with brown bits of bottom of the pan goodness. Served with mashed potatoes and the beans picked from the garden, we sat down at five o’clock sharp to dinner.

In the waning days of summer, she could be found in a kitchen filled with clouds of steam emanating from a strange looking pot on the stove, which I was told was for canning. Old fashioned looking Mason jars, their lids and rings stacked on a towel, waited for their turn in the hot water bath. This was canning day, when she put away the bounty of summer for cold winter days.

In later years, I would tag along when my parents took my grandmother to the supermarket, watching as she browsed the produce section, carefully checking the cantaloupes and grapefruits for ripeness.  It was customary for her to have fruit with her breakfast. Sometimes, my mother would see a shopper rush into the produce department, grab something without checking its freshness, and rush to the checkout line. She would say, with some exasperation, “people will buy anything today.†I could see those hurried customers had lost the knowledge my grandmother had, the knowledge she handed down to my mother, and to me, happening as people have steadily became more ignorant of food and cooking.

She had grown up working on local farms in Maryland, as an “orphan†of circumstance. She milked the cow each morning. Worked in the fields with a steam thresher. Although she carried scars of her hard life being farmed out, I can’t help but think it gave her an understanding of where food comes from that is utterly lost on most people today.

As a child, I would always check the refrigerator when coming over to grandma’s house for the Velveeta. There was always a can of Crisco somewhere to be found, substituting for lard when pork fat had gone out of fashion. She would make me lunch and once I had finished, she would give me permission to leave the kitchen and walk into the backyard to pick a pear for dessert, any pear I wanted, from one of the trees my great-grandfather planted. Although my grandmother grew up in the era when factory foods were introduced,  I was introduced to a food culture where processed foods were the exception rather than the rule, simply because they were expensive or superfluous. I can’t remember seeing a can of green beans in her kitchen.

It was through visits with my grandparents that I was exposed to the mysteries of the garden, the glories of fresh produce, the magic of cooking. I learned, from an early age, what it meant to pick vegetables from the kitchen garden and eat them for dinner the same evening. I watched my grandmother cook from “scratch†using elemental ingredients, meat, fish, vegetables and fruit, flour, water, salt, sugar, eggs.

I grew up watching Julia Child on television, at a time when Americans were becoming more interested in taste and sophistication in food and the term “foodie†eventually came to describe those passionate about food. I always struggled with the meaning of foodie. It seemed to me that a foodie was someone who took an interest in their food, not “reserved for an exclusive club of chefs and discriminating diners†who worry about tiny differences in taste. As I struggled with my identity, I wondered what I was, a foodie or something else? When I looked back on my childhood, I found the answer, my grandmother was a foodie.

I would like to believe everyone is a foodie. For a time, it was rumored, that the term “foodie†had been banished from the vocabulary of food writers for being too snobbish, but the term is slowly surfacing again, as more people take an interest in their food. The meaning of “foodie” is changing, from a description that was once exclusive and discriminating, to one that includes people from many walks of life, returning to the meaning I have always felt in my heart. This change comes with the democratization of interest in food. A recent Washington Post article (As Food Becomes a Cause, Meeting Puts Issues on the Table) takes note of the change. Although I find the it somewhat bizarre to hear the people taking part in this resurgence of interest in food as being “revolutionaries,†it is a hopeful sign. My grandmother, the foodie, would have laughed at the idea her gardening and cooking were revolutionary.

“How many of you have ever killed a chicken?†asks farmer and filmmaker, Tom Davenport. Hardly anyone in the audience raises their hand. Here and there a few older people sit with hands raised. Each time he asks this question of an audience, there are fewer and fewer raised hands.

This scene was repeated many times in the 1980s and early 90s when Davenport was an active filmmaker who was often invited to show films and make presentations at film festivals and museums of his fairy tale adaptations. The old fairy tales were sometimes grim and he wanted to remind the audience the tales were produced by a different time and culture. The question might prompt his audience to recognize the direct connection to agriculture that was once the rule, was by the end of the 20th century, an exception.

In 1995, Davenport took over Hollin Farms from his aged father. Hollin Farms had a grazing operation with cattle. Living for some time in the country, and on the farm, it struck Tom that we (America and most of the industrial world) were experiencing an unprecedented “disconnect” from agriculture–a huge cultural shift that went mostly unnoticed by anyone but farmers.

Tom realized few people knew anything about the animals that they eat or use to sustain their lives. People only knew about pets. He thought it was a very unusual happening. For the first time in history, people in industrialized societies were isolated, cut off from, the plants and animals that feed them. Most people know nothing about their relationship to plants and animals. The closest a person gets to food animals is the supermarket. For most people, cows are nearly as exotic an animal as a wild antelope or tiger. Surprisingly, children may know more about wild animals than they do about domestic animals because most nature programs focus on wildlife.

William Cronon, an environmental historian, observed that people living in industrial societies are dependent on incredibly complex interrelationships. But these relationships are disguised or hidden from the modern consumer. The consumer has little or no consciousness of how and at what sacrifice the food that he or she buys in neat and ready to cook packages got to the supermarket.

At the time, Tom thought of making a film, which he hoped would help reestablish the connection between people and agriculture. The film would be about cows. Of course, operating a beef producing farm lent itself nicely to a film about cows, but why not a series on the important domestic animals like the cow, pig, goat, sheep and horse—the animal pillars on which human civilization was built? The film never did get made, but years later, while working on his folklore films project, folkstreams.net, Tom decided to include a film called This is Our Slaughter House in the collection. The film was by the son of an Ohio farmer who also ran a small custom slaughter house. A trailer for the film is available on YouTube.

People come to the YouTube video expecting to see horrible, cruel people slaughtering animals and become angry when they find an ordinary family. “i hope you rot in hell for your killing of animals…How can you even think of finding it amusing to do that as a job???? Chickens have feelings you know…I guess you dont care you rather make money and be damn red necks!†are some of the comments left in response to the film.

Before the middle of the 20th century, hunting was still a significant contributor to our food supply. And before the big agriculture shakeout of the 1970s and 1980s, many small farms were still operating, feeding farm families as well as the nation. Because of this, a significant part of our population grew up in direct contact with subsistence hunting and agriculture. Both practices put food on the plate for hungry poor families and sustained farm families through tough times, as well as enhancing the diet of many others.

Unlike now, with the recent popularity of local food studies, the complete ignorance of where our food comes from and the dependencies we have on a vast agricultural, processing, packaging and transport system was an unstated reality of industrial life. Until authors like Michael Pollan began to explore the meaning of eating in Omnivore’s Dilemma, the Hollywood, kindergarten view of our relationship to nature prevailed uncontested.

Tom believes his beef customers appreciate picking up their beef from the people who killed it. Like Pollan, he believes that his customers have in this way taken on part of the responsibility. They have paid attention. In everything we eat, in nature, something dies to sustain life. As Tom observes, at communion the priest says “take this in remembrance of me” and we eat.

– Steve Knoblock & Tom Davenport

The New York Times has an article on the Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World.  It is strange to learn “Italy has become the world’s leading supplier of New Zealand’s national fruit.” In a world turned upside down, at least in the food world, it makes economic sense to “carry coals to Newcastle,” due to the cheap transportation made possible by an efficient, global transportation infrastructure that operates on fossil fuels. It costs less to ship cargo around the world today than it did in the 1600s.

It reminds me that one of the less well known consequences of universal abundance made possible by fossil fuels and cheap transportation of food around the world regardless of season is the confusion it causes within cuisines. Sometimes shipping food around the world can be helpful to nutrition, as when fresh fruit is shipped to a cold, damp climate like Britain with a short growing season and fruit unfriendly climate. The availability of fruit has measurably raised the health of people living in Western Europe since the middle ages, helping to eliminate nutritional diseases. One of the problems caused by introducing alien foods is the disruption to cuisine.

The ordinary person can now choose from a bewildering range of produce and foods relating to cuisines from around the world. We can make Chinese food today, make Mexican the next day, so what is our cuisine? What constitutes a local cuisine when people can choose food from any food way from around the world? In this way global food knowledge and produce is disruptive to not only local food sources but to food ways as well. There may be benefits eventually as the diverse food ways and produce fuse again into a new cuisine, but until that happens the choices can be overwhelming and confusing. This may be more important than just confusion over cuisine, but may affect health.

We really do not know what health benefits may accrue from eating locally and seasonally. A cuisine forms as a whole, a kind of package of food and food ways determined by the locally available foods, the seasons and way people traditionally prepare dishes from the available produce. Some health benefits may come from the way food is prepared. Or from the way people eat. The nutritionist method of eating is to pick those foods offering beneficial nutrients, at least those that have been identified and popularized. Another way of eating is to look for a traditional food culture where people have been healthy for a long time, then adopt their food ways, no matter if it means eating mostly reindeer meat and no vegetables or eating mostly vegetables and little or no meat as people in India do.

On the other hand, as troublesome to cuisines as a shipping food around the world cheaply may seem, there was a previous revolution in transportation infrastructure when European ships began to ply the world’s seas in search of trade. This global trade brought foods from the Americas, such as chili peppers and tomatoes to peoples around the world and introduced them into their food cultures. Many cuisines around the world that appear indigenous are based on New World plants, such as chilies, the tomato and potato. Was this process just slow enough that it did not disrupt food ways too much, or has the passage of time and the advance of technology obscured the ripples and fogged our memory?
– Steve Knoblock

What is the joke about airlines? What’s the quickest way to become a millionaire?  Become a billionaire and start your own airline. It sometimes seems like farming is much the same, so it easy to be skeptical of a headline that proclaims High Food Prices A Two-Edged Sword For Farmers.

If farming is the most promising path out of poverty, the growing number of independent farmers will need some kind of market making system like farmfoody.org to enable local marketing of produce.

How can farmers connect to the market? The farmers who are close to urban centers have the opportunity to connect to the market through farmer’s markets and direct sales. Although this might be looking ahead some time, the same processes operating in the United States that brought about the development of farmer’s markets, roadside stands and city people visiting farms and chefs prizing locally grown produce will operate in developing countries. There is already evidence of a wistful nostaligia developing among residents of Chinese cities for the delicious produce of the country village farms. As people left the farm for the big city, they carried with them a memory and appreciation of fresh, local food and they will one day wake up looking for the food they remember growing up in the village. They won’t find it in processed foods lining the shelves of the supermarket. They won’t find it in the supermarket produce section either. They will look to farmer’s markets and local farms, which gives the small farmer an advantage and is an opportunity for websites like farmfoody.org to be replicated in other countries, where the network can help create and facilitate local food markets.

As Marco Borgan observes (interviewed in the NPR article), farmers must become agricultural entrepreneurs. These are turbulent but exiciting times for farming. It is unlikely factory farming will ever be completely replaced by independent farms and kitchen gardens, and industrial agriculture has its place, but the future is hopeful. Indpendent farms may, through reinventing themselves, survive and thrive. They have already discovered and leveraged argitourism (corn mazes, pick your own, the farm as fascinating anacrhonism), local produce markets (farmer’s markets, roadside stands), community supported agriculture, made alliances with chefs, done everything possible to find ways of surviving. In doing so, they have created a new farming.

“People of our age want to get back into farming, and we wanted to get those stories out,” says Lara Sheets in a recent Washington Post article.

Sheets set out with two other Washington, D.C. area women a year ago on a three-month bicycle trip to Montreal with the idea of documenting the new community agriculture movement. Their trip resulted in a low-budget documentary “Garden Cycles Bike Tour” capturing the spirit of their unusual 2,000-mile journey and their exploration of the movement that inspired it. They setup a web site and blog http://womensgardencycles.wordpress.com.

The film is set to premiere at an environmental festival in Virgina this September. It raises questions about the energy dependence and carbon footprint of industrial agriculture–the factory farm. Like others in their generation, they see the industrial farm as unsustainable and see solutions in organic farming and the local foods movement represented by farmer’s markets, farm stands and community supported agriculture (CSAs), even gardening.

Read the whole story in the Washington Post article Pedaling the Local Food Movement

As an aside, Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University and author of the book “Food Politics,” said the local foods movement is “not organized and very spontaneous and grass-roots, and represents the best elements of American democracy.” We would like to think farmfoody.org facilitates this movement, helping to organize this grass-roots movement without imposing any kind of organization on it other than the one that our members build themselves. This is what a social network makes possible.

“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.

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.

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.