Fast Food America

I'm getting really disgusted with fast food chains. The food is so cheap and convenient, and that makes it hard to resist. Which is exactly what they want. They engineer the smells and tastes to lure you in and hook you. Really...a scientist created the delicious double cheeseburger. Fast food chains study Americans to target us to buy their products. And we give in every time.

It's hard to resist the dollar menu. I wish they'd make it harder for us the eat so poorly. And remember that it's only so cheap because most of the ingredients are corn-based. And corn is dirt cheap because we swindle the farmers. So we take advantage of the farmers, manufacture disgusting foods, and sell it cheap to keep Americans interested. I think even Subway is gross. They use processed meats containing nitrates, veggies swimming in pesticides, and "fresh baked breads" that are probably full of high fructose corn syrup. I appreciate their efforts, but it's brainwashing. It's a better alternative to a burger and fries, but can't we just cook a meal at home? When did making food from scratch become such a foreign topic?

This really drives me bonkers...not only are we too lazy to cook, we're too lazy to get out of our cars. The other week I was on my way home and there were 7 cars in the drive thru line at Burger King. Really?? If there was one car in line, I'd skip the fast food meal. I think it is a whole other problem that is related. We're getting less and less personal. If you're going to eat fast food at least turn off your car, save the emissions, go inside, and say hello to the workers.

It's hard to avoid fast food. But we very rarely eat fast food meals--and we both work full-time. If we're going to eat out, we try to support local restaurants. Our favorite in Huntington is the Brick House Grill (www.brickhousegrill.com) in downtown. It can't say it supports sustainable living, but we know the owners and I'd rather fill their wallets with our cash. But my preferred choice if I don't make food from scratch is to pay someone else to make my meal from scratch! Kenapocomocha in N. Manchester sells "take and bake" frozen meals. I can buy a turkey pot pie and when I don't have time to come home and make something, I pop in my frozen meal. I've found several places to buy these style meals. They "cost" more than fast food, but it's better for our bodies. The long-term benefits outweigh the initial cost. It just costs more for someone to use their hands to make a crust from scratch rather than a robot in a factory. And I'm ok with that. In fact, I prefer it.

I think this article relates to the topic. The American diet needs to change.

http://www.wholefoodfarmacy.com/2005/aboutus2.asp

Over the past century, we've seen enormous advances in medical technology. We have more doctors, more pharmaceutical medicines, and more hospitals than ever before. We also have the sickliest generation of Americans in history. The number one culprit: THE AMERICAN DIET.
The processed food and fast food industries are serving it up, Americans are gulping it down, and wide spread obesity and chronic disease is the result. From there, the masses are driven into the "waiting hands" of the highly profitable pharmaceutical industry. We're offered pills that alleviate our symptoms while the simple underlying causes are ignored. What incentive does the pharmaceutical industry have to focus on prevention? If disease rates decreased, so would their profits.
The ingredients to health, happiness, vitality, and longevity are no secret. Every major non-profit health organization in the world has been offering the same advice for many years. Eat more fruits and veggies, drink more water, exercise on a daily basis, lose weight if you need to, don't smoke, avoid toxins, & reduce stress.

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan Part 2: Corn takes a trip the factory farm

On Michael Pollan's (MP) journey to follow the industrial food chain, he decides to purchase a calf. The calf is raised to one day become a beef patty. This, of course, is so MP can follow the corn from the crop to the feedlot (and eventually to the dinner table). Remember that most corn ends up on factory farms.

The calf is raised on a pasture until it is 6 months old and then it is taken to a feedlot to get plumped up. The feedlot is Poky Feeders in Kansas. I found Poky online. http://www.cattlefeeding.com/ This is their "mission" statement, "POKY Feeders provides custom finishing for cattle producers and investors. We convert feeder cattle into finished beef cattle that satisfy the demands of any meat packer. To do this profitably, the cattle must have a fast, consistent rate of gain." When I hear the work poky (or pokey), I think of slowpoke. Someone moving slowly...certainly not a "fast, consistent rate" that they refer to! I think that's interesting. Perhaps it's a family name...or maybe just a reverse-psychology marketing ploy!

MP said Poky had 37,000 cows, but the website currently says 64,000. (The book was published in 2006.) MP paid $1.60 a day to keep his calf there. This is his description of Poky Feeders, "The pens line a network of unpaved roads that loop around vast waste (A.K.A. manure) lagoons on their way to the feedyard's thunderously beating heart and dominating landmark: a rhythmically chugging feed mill that rises, soaring and silvery in the early morning light, like an industrial cathedral in the midst of the teeming metropolis of meat."

In the last post, I passed along the info that most animals (even fish!) are fed corn on the feedlot. I never really thought about a cow eating corn as a bad thing. (My husband would be horrified that I used the term "cow" to refer to all types of cows. A cow is really only the female animal that has birthed a calf. I know the differences between bulls, cows, and heifers but it's a lot easier to type cows and you know what I'm talking about.) Corn is a plant and plants are good to eat. Not for cattle. Cattle have four stomachs and regurgitate food from one of the sub-stomachs (the rumen) and re-chew it to break down the food (cud) even more. The pH of the rumen in neutral and uses bacteria to break down food. Eaten in large quantities, corn renders it acidic and a cow can develop acidosis from the high acid content. Also, it can cause abscesses in the liver and bloat (which occurs when the rumen inflates and presses the lungs until suffocation occurs.) MP says, "This is why I decided to follow the trail of industrial corn through a single steer rather than say, a chicken or pig, which can get by just fine on a diet of grain."

Why would we do this? Because corn is the cheapest calorie available. And the cheaper we can fatten them up, the more profit we can make. MP says, "The economic logic of gathering so many animals together to feed them cheap corn in CAFOs is hard to compete with; it has made meat, which used to be a special occasion in most American homes, so cheap and abundant that many of us now eat it three times a day." CAFOs are so "efficient" that they have driven the animals off of the small farms, which leaves more acreage to grow corn. Great...just what we need...more corn. We also use corn because it fattens up our future hamburgers faster than a pasture full of grass. In the 1950s, cows were 2 or 3 years old when they were slaughtered and now they reach slaughtering weight at 14-16 months of age.

Calves are weened onto this feedlot lifestyle as soon as they are weened from their mothers. Before calves leave the ranch and head for the feedlot, they are confined to a pen, taught to eat from a trough, and are fed small amounts of corn. On the long ride to the feedlot, cows don't eat. When they arrive at the feedlot they are fed hay for a few days to restart their rumens. From then on, they are fed a 75% corn diet. It's the other 25% of their diet that is really disturbing. You can read it right on the Poky website. Liquefied fat (from slaughterhouses), protein supplements (such as molasses and synthetic nitrogen), liquid vitamins, synthetic estrogen, alfalfa hay, silage, and antibiotics (Rumensin and Tylosin) make up the rest of a cow's diet. That is what we eat every time we munch on factory farmed meat.

The cathedral-like feed mill that MP described electronically mixes the corn and other ingredients with a computer system. Semi-trucks deliver 50 tons of corn every hour to the mill. The mill runs 12 hours a day 7 days a week. The farm will distributes a million pounds of feed a day to 8 1/2 miles of trough. Each cow will eat 32 pounds of feed per day.

Now remember that the little cow bellies can't handle this much corn without getting sick. So those antibiotics are feed to the cows every day. Most antibiotics sold in the US end up in animal feed. Rumensin buffers acidity in the rumen to prevent bloat and acidosis. The Tylosin antibiotic lower liver infection. By feeding healthy cows antibiotics daily, it reduces the effectiveness. So then the antibiotics don't work as well in the sick cows and acidity and liver issues continue. E. coli made a resurgence because it became acid-resistant. Rumens used to have a neutral pH and the microbes would die in our human, acidic stomachs. Now that corn turns the rumen acidic, the E. coli microbes can survive in our acidic stomachs. It was discovered that switching cattle back to a grass/pasture diet before slaughtering reduced E. coli in the animals by as much as 80%. The vet at Poky is quoted in OD saying, "Hell, if you gave them lots of grass and space, I wouldn't have a job."

Speaking of the vet, Poky Farms has one vet on staff. Eight cowboys check for sick animals twice a day. There are three animal hospitals on site. Those stats just don't seem to add up considering the 64,000 animals. One vet...three hospitals. One vet...64,000 animals. Three hospitals...64,000 animals. One hospital...21,333 animals. 8 watchdog cowboys...64,000 animals. 1 cowboy...8,000 animals. Maybe that's the norm on farms, but that seems like really high ratios of animals to staff.

If that doesn't convince you that cows shouldn't eat this much corn, perhaps this will. (Some people have a hard time feeling compassionate about animals. But everyone cares about themselves!) Corn-fed beef marbles very well. Marbleizing is intramuscular fat. So, corn-fed beef contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than grass-fed meat. MP writes, "A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef. (Modern-day hunter-gatherers who subsist on wild meat don't have our rates of heart disease.) In the same way ruminants are ill adapted to eating corn, human in turn may be poorly adapted to eating ruminants that eat corn."

MP ends the chapter by discussing why $1.60 seems like a cheap price for room and board considering that he didn't have to factor in the costs of antibiotic resistance or food poisoning research or government subsidies paid to farmers for the corn. It seems that all of these topics are interconnected, but the factory farm just reaps the profits. Multiply $1.60 times the 64,000 animals and you get over $100,000 per day. Oh, right, they have to pay their 8 cowboys...where was my head? I'm sure those cowboys are making millionaire salaries.

All of this info in this post came from 20 pages of the book. If you've liked my posts from OD, perhaps you should read the book. Just reserve a few weeks of you life to do it!

Background Information

I did promise a post about corn taking a trip to the factory farm, but I put hours of research into my blogs and it's just not quite ready. I had one quick thought for the day though as I re-read my other posts.

I started this blog to talk about sustainable living (and mostly sustainable food choices). I got off on a bit of tangent in my first post and focused on factory farming only. But that is where my own journey began. When I started reading more about factory farms/the industrial food chain, I discovered there are many more topics that interested me within the sustainable living realm. For instance, organic food, environmental impact of our choices, and nutritional benefits really peak my interest too. (I would like to note that I am generalizing a lot about the industrial food chain. Perhaps not all factory farms treat animals unfairly and maybe some small scale farms aren't so stellar. I acknowledge that that is a possibility.)

I hope to learn more by talking to people and reading information, and use this blog to develop my own thoughts. Because that's what a blog is-- an individual's commentary. I'm not insisting that I am the absolute truth. I am voicing my voice. And my voice likes the sustainable food movement.

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan Part I: Corn, corn, and more corn

I'm going to start off by referencing The Omnivore's Dilemma (OD). It's due back to the library next week and I've already checked it out twice in a row, so that means I'll actually have to return it this time. I've learned so much from this book! Michael Pollan (MP) is a thorough man. After flying through Skinny Bitch like it was the latest issue of a magazine, reading OD is like picking up a text book. You need to be ready to learn and absorb. MP wants to make sure you have every detail about every topic he mentions. His opening lines are, "What should we have for dinner? This book is a long and fairly involved answer to this seemingly simple question." It's true! And I really doubt that any person with half an interest in sustainable living would read this book because it is so detailed. So this is my attempt at pointing out the details that shouldn't be missed. (I'm getting all of this info from the first 100 pages of OD and I'll try my best to quote it as accurately as possible.)

The whole book is tracking the human food chains from plant to dinner table to show you where your food comes from. It starts with the industrial food chain and that's where I'm at in the book. (He'll go on to talk about organic and hunter-gatherer later in the book.) The industrial food chain is the biggest and the longest of the chains.

The industrial chain starts with corn. Are you ready to learn a whole lot about corn?? Honestly, I thought I knew corn. I grew up in rural Wisconsin and saw a lot of corn. I knew nothing. Corn is actually a tropical grass. (What??? Since when?) It's official, scientific name is Zea mays. Corn sex is an amazing thing. There is corn that people eat and corn that animals eat--two different crops. I apparently didn't even know the basics.

Corn is so important to the industrial food chain because it literally becomes the entire chain. On factory farms (and probably lots of smaller scale farms too), corn is fed to the cow, chicken, pig, turkey, lamb, any many fish! And from those animals we get meat, eggs, dairy products, etc. MP uses the chicken nugget as an example. We already know how the chicken meat is related to corn, but modified corn starch holds the nugget together. The batter is made of corn flour. And then we deep fry it in corn oil. Hmmm, chicken nuggest or corn nugget? You decide.

Leave the meat behind and discover corn in our fabulous, processed food. Every soda on the shelf (except the new "throwback" Pepsi that uses real sugar) has high fructose CORN syrup. I was disgusted to find HFCS in my 100% whole wheat bread. I switched brands. I was also sad to discover my good friend Bud Light is corn-laden too. The alcohol is fermented from glucose that is refined from corn. MP lists the many other ingredients that are just complicated names for corn, but the point of it all is to tell you that 1/4 of the products in the grocery store contain corn. I found that fascinating! It's just one tropical grass that has its molecules rearranged to become a powerful revenue producer.

Corn is the preferred crop because it is very efficient. During photosynthesis, it creates compounds with four carbon atoms (instead of three like most plants). This is what makes it so spectacular. Most other plants need an equal amounts of water and air to grow. Corn only uses 3% from the ground and 97% from the air, so it can survive in almost any environment. Even though it is quite superior to most plants, corn needs humans. It cannot reproduce itself (but it can self-fertilize and pollinate.) Because the seeds are tucked inside the husk, it needs the husk removed, the seeds separated, and planted. It can do the rest, but it would disappear from the planet if no one planted it.

I was really shocked to discover how detailed corn sex is! I think you might be intrigued too! The female-looking tassels at the top of the plant are the male organs and the male-looking cob is the female part. Each kernel is pollinated separately. And to get the pollen grains into the husk, the kernels put out their "silk." The silk emerges the same day that the tassels release the pollen. I think that is amazing in itself. Each silk with catch one grain of pollen. The pollen will then split into twins. One twin will tunnel his way down the center of the silk until it reaches the egg. Then the other twin will slide its way down the tunnel to fuse with the egg. The first twin then creates the endosperm. Each kernel does this on every ear of corn!

This is where we get a little sleazy. Since our corn can give us an endless supply of seeds and then pollinate itself, it doesn't leave much room for seed suppliers to make a profit. The suppliers figured out how to "patent" the corn by inbreeding it. The first crop has great yields, but the following years produce less and less corn per bushel. The farmers then have to re-buy the seeds to get the same great yields. How sad...we even have inbred corn just so someone can make some cash.

I found this next fact hard to believe. I don't personally know a farmer to ask, but I'm going to find one. Until then I'll take MP's word for it. We produce so much corn that it isn't worth very much money to the farmers. MP says that the corn is so underpriced that a bushel of corn is priced $1 less than the cost to grow it. So farmers try to grow more corn to make up the difference, which drives down the price even more. The government subsidizes the corn to keep farmers in business. Could that really be true? Well, it is because I Googled it and Google is the absolute truth :) http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/farmbill2008?navid=FARMBILL2008 The government subsidizes $0.28 per bushel of corn (and other crops too.) The government spends up to $5 billion a year subsidizing just corn.

Fast facts about corn:

3 out of 5 kernels ends up on a factory farm

Each acre can produce 10,000 pounds of corn

It takes 50 gallons of oil to grow one acre of corn

America has 81.6 million acres of corn planted (do the math...lots of oil)

America is responsible for half of the world's production of corn

Corn is 25% of all crops planted in America.

Shelled cobs were used back in the day as a form of TP, hence the term "corn hole." Hehe.

I had to end on a light note! But I'm beginning to look at corn fields a little differently now.

My next post will be about what happens to that corn once it arrives at the factory farms. I'm sure you can barely handle the anticipation :)

The name says it all.

I thought for a long time about what I should title my blog. That's probably the reason I didn't launch it earlier this week. I wanted something that was somewhat witty, but said what it was all about. I filled my brainstorming paper with lots of one liners that I thought would work. Back when I first discovered www.sustainabletable.org, I posted it on my Facebook profile and said, "I'm convinced this can change the world." I re-read that and it spoke to me. I thought it was a good fit for the purpose of the blog.

I decided to do a Google search tonight to see if anyone else was trying to change the world one meal at a time. There are! http://www.gustorganics.com/change.php It's the first and only organic certified restaurant in New York. It also has an organic bar--and the only one on the planet! "Passion and truth are in every ingredient." How fabulous of a statement is that? I honestly want to take a trip there just to eat at this restaurant. Have you ever seen a restaurant list its values on their website? It's so refreshing. That's why I love the sustainable food movement. It's about the mindset almost as much as the food. You care. There's a purpose. You do things for the greater good. Now imagine if more people thought like this...do you see the world changing yet?

Factory Farms

Has the world gotten shittier or is it just me? I’m convinced that factory farming is one of the leading causes of the shitty world syndrome. (Factory farming is the practice of raising farm animals in confinement at high stocking density, where a farm operates as a factory — a practice typical in industrial farming by agribusinesses. Thanks, Wikipedia!) Factory farms care about profit-- not about you or me or the animals or the environment or the future of America. But we all support factory farms with every food purchase we make. (Factory farmed meat, eggs, and dairy now account for 99 percent of all farmed animals raised in the United States. Virtually all seafood comes to us by way of industrial fishing or factory fish farms.)

Seriously, I viewed two websites and read 1 1/4 books and decided that was all it took to change my lifestyle forever. I do have a soft spot in my heart for animals (hence owning three dogs) and I already thought that high fructose corn syrup was the devil, so maybe I was more inclined to change.
Websites:
http://www.goveg.com/
http://www.sustainabletable.org/home.php
Books:
Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin
Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan (I'm only on page 94 of 411 and I've already wanted to highlight half the book, but it's the library's copy...)

Skinny Bitch changed my entire outlook on food in one HILARIOUS, fast, easy read. Even if you don't care about this topic, it's just a funny book. I like to describe it as delightfully crude. For example, "If you don't want to be fat, then stop eating all that shit." It's the only book that I've read in its entirety in years. That's sad...I know. I'm working on that. So, back to why I've changed my eating habits. Skinny Bitch took everything to the extreme. I didn't want to be a vegetarian or a vegan for that matter (which is what they preach) but it opened my eyes to what horribleness is in our diets. The chapter on slaughterhouses traumatized me, but in a good way. We should know what animals go through to provide us meat. It won't change most people's outlook on eating meat just by reading those words, so I suggest you read it. But for a day or two, your heart will be a little sadder that we kill so many animals. Skinny Bitch also touches on other foods such as soda, artificial sweeteners, dairy products, etc. They also included recipes and lots of other useful hints if you want to live their vegan lifestyle.
But I didn't want to be a vegan. I like meat; I think it completes most meals. Plus, the Zwiebels own a hobby beef farm and I think I would be shunned from the family if I became a vegetarian. (When I first met Adam's grandparents, I went to their house and got to know other family members by looking at their fridge full of photos. As Grandma Rusmisel went down the fridge talking about each member, she came to one person and said, "That's ____ and she doesn't eat ground beef." And that was it. That's how I will forever know that person. The person who doesn't eat ground beef. You get the picture.) From Skinny Bitch, I decided that I wanted to research food products. (Side note--The best part of this lifechanging book is that my mom bought it at a garage sale for 50 cents. She read it and passed it on to me. My yoga instructor is reading the book now and has been equally moved by it. I have another friend in line to borrow it after that. The power of two quarters continues to better America.)
That's when I researched on the web. I found http://www.goveg.com/ first. I made the mistake of watching the videos online about what happens on factory farms and in slaughter houses. http://www.goveg.com/factoryFarming.asp I cried like a baby. I don't cry...the last time I cried like this was during Marley & Me at the movie theater. (I think we're noticing a trend. I like animals.) I was horrified. Why did America turn away from these cruelties and just pretend that what we ate wasn't living a horrible life. I decided that factory farms were my new worst enemy. High Fructose Corn Syrup had its day...I was onto bigger and better topics! I came up with my own mission statement. I know there is no "good" way to die, but there is a good way to live. And factory farms are not the right way for animals to live.
So I sat at my computer googling "what to eat if you don't want to eat factory farmed animals and don't want to be vegetarian." Somehow out of that came http://www.sustainabletable.org/home.php. It is exactly what I wanted to do with my eating habits! I couldn't have told you what "sustainable" meant, but I loved what I was reading. I learned from Wikipedia that "Sustainability, in a broad sense, is the capacity to endure. For humans it is the potential for long-term maintenance of wellbeing, which in turn depends on the wellbeing of the natural world and the responsible use of natural resources." I wanted to support local farmers, nurture the environment, build the local economy, AND help the animals. Why would I ever buy factory farmed meats again?