Where Do Farm Subsidies Go?

From Mulch and the president of the Environmental Working Group:



How much pesticide does your peach have?

Wednesday! Chipotle!

First, a Washington Post article about Chipotle Mexican Grill's endeavor to buy local pork from uber-farmer Joel Salatin and supply its Charlottesville store:

"For so many people, it's still about price," says Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold. "If a fast-food vendor can get meat for seven cents a pound less, then they'll drop their supplier. For us, it's about building relationships and knowing we'll have a better product over the long run."

Also, another intereting link: Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.

White People Like It

Farmers Markets.

(HT: Dan)

More Collards: It's on, New York

Here comes the gauntlet, New York. You want to champion hip viands and flaunt a semi-patronizing embrace of Southern cuisine? Well, this is the litmus for cool kids: authenticity, also called the chitlins test. Anybody can add smoked turkey legs from a gourmet market in Greenwich, but who's going to use turkey necks? Why would anyone use turkey necks? For the same reason he eats collards grown in the yard--he's poor.


So I improvised on the recipe from last week. Out were the cheap chicken legs (no turkey in the first place), in were cheaper turkey necks from Kroger (sacrilege, I know, but the only reliable supplier of meat in town). I think I paid less than three bucks for two and half pounds. It was a flight, honestly. The smooth muscles posed under the gloss of taut packaging like creamy Olympian gods. Suddenly, I found myself saying, "Neck? Neck. Yeah, neck. That sounds delicious." I like a good neck on a woman, and I like necking; naturally, I was going to like turkey necks too.


And I do. Nonetheless, I learned in media res why you don't see a whole lot of recipes that call for turkey necks. Try to pull the meat from the bone. Yes, there is some kind of bone. And as far as I can tell, it's shaped like a double helix. That is to say, it refuses clean cuts and wants to break into spiky fragments that jab under your fingernails like some kind of low-rent Vietnamese instrument of torture. Or, it's like trying to wrestle a rat snake sopped in vaseline. You'd better have fingers like Hercules.

All in all, it was worth it. The Lord blesses the bold, and experimentation is the spice of life.

How To Eat Dandelions

Beats the hell out of me, but it can be done. It seems like it would take a week to collect a sufficient mess.

Let's watch chef and pythoness Alice Waters instead:

Gormandizer

I'm not a good cook...yet. I'm trying, but I tend to be impatient, letting good ideas devolve into goulash. Too many ingredients, too little understanding of taste. So it pleases me immensely to announce I finally prepared a dish that other people have found halfway palatable. There's a lesson here about recipes versus inspiration.

I found this recipe for collard greens in the January 14 issue of New York magazine. It belongs to Charles Gabriel of Charles' Southern Style Kitchen. I never would have considered it had I not already possessed chicken drumsticks in the freezer (substituted here for smoked turkey) and some vibrant collards spinning their folate-filled leaves in the garden.

Ingredients:
 1 pound of smoked turkey wings or drumsticks (chickens works just fine too).
 8 cups of water.
 3 bunches (about 4 pounds) of collards.
 4 ounces of butter (this is a lot more butter than I realized).
 1 medium onion, chopped.
 1 tablespoon salt.
 1 tablespoon black pepper.
 2 tablespoons sugar.

Directions:

Put the meat in the pot with 8 cups of water. Bring to a boil over high heat. Turn heat down and cook for 90 minutes. Meanwhile, clean the collards. 1. Stem the leaves. 2. Roll up a few leaves at a time and cut them crosswise into ½-inch strips. Remove the meat from the pot, pull the meat away from the bones, and carefully strain the stock of any errant bones. Discard the bones and tear the meat into small pieces and stir it back into the pot. Add butter, chopped onion, and all the seasoning into the pot. 3. Add the collards a few handfuls at a time, stirring them until all the greens are in the pot. Simmer over low heat for 1 hour. Remove collards from pot with slotted spoon. Serves 4 to 6, depending on their size.

www.wholefoodsmarket.com

I also diced four red potatoes and added them to the pot with the meat. Don't forget to put the stems in your compost pile. And, if you're collards are fresh, don't worry about imperfections or bugs. Finally, I feel I should mention one particular collard plant that has been growing in my backyard for going on seven or eight months now. It's been with me so long, I'm thinking about it naming it.

As a whole, the meal was easy, odorous, and delicious. My only complaint is that you weren't there to share it.

Parade Magazine & Antibiotics in the Meat

Singer Sheryl Crow: “You Have To Be Fearless.” OMG, illiterate kitties of the world are captivated. What's Oprah up to in Primetime? Hack, retch, retch—hairball. Parade is the worst kind of pap. Duh. Normally, I (gloating mandarin, artistic type) would never refer to it, but I'm hoping this particular “article” is evidence of saturation. From the Parade Intelligence Report, March 2:

Studies have linked animal use to increased antibiotic resistance in humans. In response to these concerns, McDonald's has told its direct poultry suppliers to refrain from using antibiotics for growth that also are used in people. Tyson Foods, the nation's largest meat processor, now is marketing chicken that has a label saying it was raised without human antibiotics. In addition, all meat bearing the green “USDA organic” seal has been verified by federally certified inspectors to come from animals that were never fed antibiotics.

Now how much of that do you have confidence in? The USDA? Totally, absolutely credible. What about parsing this semi-clause: has told direct poultry suppliers to refrain from using antibiotics for growth that also are used in people? Told; direct; for growth? Meow, meow, meow.

From Next Nature.

Folks To Know:
Animal Health Institute—pro liberal antibiotic use in livestock.
Keep Antibiotics Working Coalition—not so much.

Ash

I'm indulging in one of my favorite avocations today: the intellectual crush. Currently, it's Timothy Garton Ash, the Oxford history don upon whom I stumbled on Charlie Rose the other night. When Rose wasn't interrupting in the interest of showing off a knack for repetition, Ash spoke with the kind of cogent, invigorating genius that makes all of England sparkle.

By luck, Ash is something of a Deutsch-phile, and he reviewed Nobel Prize-winner Gunter Grass's impressive memoir, Peeling the Onion, in an August 2007 edition of The New York Review of Books. What follows is a mishmash of liberal quotation, hopefully the most captivating and self-contained stuff:

The account of his tank unit's desperate action in April 1945, almost surrounded by advancing Russian troops, is one of the most vivid descriptions of the experience of war that I have read: Tolstoy crossed with Vonnegut. He hides under a tank from the rockets of one of the Red Army's so-called "Stalin organs" and wets his pants from fear. In the silence after the rockets stop, he distinctly hears beside him a loud, sustained chattering of teeth. The chattering teeth, he discovers when he crawls out from under the tank, belong to a senior officer of the Waffen-SS. The young enthusiast's image of the Teutonic hero begins to crumble. On the ground around them, "body parts were to be found."

He gets lost behind Russian lines. Wandering in the woods, exhausted, hungry, and afraid, he hears someone nearby. Friend or foe? Nervously he intones the beginning of a German folk song about little Hans wandering out "into the wide world" alone, "Hänschen klein ging allein...." To his immeasurable relief the hidden stranger responds with the rest of the line, "...in die weite Welt hinein." Had the other man been a Russian, we would probably have no Tin Drum. Instead, he's an avuncular German corporal, who advises the now seventeen-year-old Grass to take off his Waffen-SS jacket. If he is captured, the Russians won't take kindly to those double runes.

The Shelley reference here follows a selection from Auden's eulogy for Yeats:

Yet even here, let me attempt a rescue which goes beyond the realm of conscious intentions. What will be the effect of Grass's belated revelation? As he approaches the end of his life, as the memories of Nazism fade, as the activities of his SS-Frundsberg division become the object of weekend leisure war games in the United States, Grass suddenly demolishes his own statue—not as a writer of fiction, but as a moral authority on frank and timely facing up to the Nazi past—and leaves its ruins lying, like Shelley's Ozymandias, as a warning beside the roadside. Nothing he could say or write on this subject would be half so effective as the personal example that he has now left us. For sixty years even Günter Grass could not come clean about being a member of the Waffen-SS! Look, stranger, and tremble.

My goodness, the notes alone are worth the review:

2. Grass has a powerful imagination, but in his best fiction he draws from life. Take, for example, the fantastical performing dwarfs that appear in The Tin Drum. You might think they must have been invented. But in Peeling the Onion, Grass recalls how, on his way to join the Waffen-SS, he saw a group of dwarfs performing in the bomb shelter of a Berlin railway station.

8. Mailer, who indicated that this might be one of his last public appearances, also told the audience that the Grass story had prompted him to start "searching my own life," asking, "what have I held on to for a long, long time and never written about, and indeed...may never write about? And it seems to me that stabbing my wife, Adele, is probably what I will never write about."

(An audio recording of the event is available here.)

For some hint of Mailer's maniacal heyday, I refer you to an earlier post.

Meh

Before the unsettling revelation that the Democratic primary season will go on and on and on....the Washington Post ran this critique of American narcissism. A selection:

Consider this paradox: Things are becoming more instantaneous in an era when delays are rampant and increasing. There are faster flights and cars but more people in airplanes and on the roads.

What has happened, even though companies are improving service, is that "customer expectations are continuing to rise," says Roger Nunley, managing director of the Customer Care Institute in Atlanta. This can be attributed to "consumers doing business online, where they get instant gratification and quick turnarounds. That's quickly becoming the standard expectation."

Change in expectations is a generational thing, experts say. People who grew up during the Depression were happy to have a job and stuck with one for a lifetime. Many members of generations X and Y were raised in a different light. They expect a buffet of opportunities and are peeved when they don't materialize.

Narcissism and entitlement among college students have increased steadily since 1979, according to a study to be published this year in the Journal of Personality. Between that year and 2006, 16,000 college students were asked to pick between such paired statements as "I expect a great deal from other people" and "I like to do things for other people," and "I will never be satisfied until I get all that I deserve" and "I will take my satisfactions as they come."

The data are clear: The ascent of narcissism and entitlement is dramatic.
"What we really have is a culture that has increasingly emphasized feeling good about yourself and favoring the individual over the group," says the study's co-author, Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University. "And that has happened across the board, culturally, and it's showing no signs of slowing down."
To complement her research, Twenge offers evidence from the field: "I have a 14-month-old daughter, and the clothing available to her has 'little princess,' or 'I'm the boss,' or 'spoiled rotten' written on it. This is what we're dressing our babies in."

.....

All of this is tied to the feeling of not being satisfied, of thinking that some force is blocking the way to a goal we think we deserve.

(By the way, my two cents on Texas and Ohio: It's not a good time to be the Democratic frontrunner, unless you can withstand simultaneous broadsides from both your immediate opponent and your presumptive one.)

BBC & Food

Here's a miniature older essay on the future of global agriculture by Professor Les Firbank, head of the North Wyke Research Station at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research.

The themes of environmental/food advocates are echoed so frequently inside the community they can fail to make an impact. Professor Firbank doesn't say anything here different (or better) than what's been said elsewhere by the rest of the sustainable movement. But he does say it, and this is about proselytizing.

Agricultural land should be valued more highly by society, as should land that is needed to supply our rivers and reservoirs with the water we need and the land that will be required to deliver renewable energy.

It will become harder to balance the needs of everyone; perhaps we need a new land planning system that takes a more holistic view of our future needs than we have now.
These changes will not just happen by themselves; we need investment in industry, people and technologies.

Perhaps the biggest change is that we all need to see agriculture as one of our most important industries for the future.

There's an intriguing call for genetic modification in the comments thread.