Corduroy Orange

From a 4-paragraph brief on page A-10 of yesterday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

ConAgra Foods Inc. has extended its recall of all peanut butter produced at a plant in Georgia by more than a year, back to October 2004, the Food and Drug Administration said Friday.

The recall covers all Peter Pan peanut butter and all Great Value peanut butter beginning with product code 2111, including peanut butter toppings

Food borne illnesses are messy things and often difficult to trace back to their origins; usually outbreaks tend to be traced back to things that are more apt to display a risk: oysters, ground beef, and improperly handled chicken. Peanut butter normally does not rank high on the list.

That the peanut butter has been implicated and that the recall extends back more than two years leaves me wondering, what were the conditions at the plant that produced this peanut butter? Why is it that the equipment wasn’t cleaned and sanitized more recently than 2004? Any establishment preparing food for widespread public consumption should have better control over the cleanliness of their equipment in order to reduce the likelihood of cross contamination.

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What do you get for someone who has everything? How about assistance for people who don’t? I just found out about Changing the Present, a new website that offers you the chance to target your charitable dollars toward specific projects aimed at improving social justice around the world. Many of these are related to issues of agriculture.

The Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) has a variety of programs listed on Changing the Present, ranging in amount from $10 (helping banana farmers organize) to $300 (enrolling a student in agricultural school for a year). The International Medical Corps has options that include providing seeds and tools for one woman to grow a garden ($25), training one woman to make a highly nutritional supplement ($25), and providing clean water to a family ($50). Action Against Hunger has a variety of options ranging up to $1,000 to dig a well that will provide water for $300 people. Each group listed on Changing the Present has a link to their own website so you can find out mroe about what they do.

We who have an abundance of food can do much to help those who don’t—especially because (as in the case of the banana farmers), it is sometimes through their efforts that our food comes to us.

If you’ve never heard of ATTRA, you’re not alone (I hadn’t heard of it until today)—but you’re probably also not a farmer seeking to grow food via environmentally sustainable means. ATTRA is the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Center and, as this post from Gristmill explains, is both an indespensible resource for small-scale farmers and on the Congressional budget chopping block. Even if this is the first you’ve heard of the program, the prospect of its loss is something about which you should be concerned.

The value of ATTRA as a resource became apparent to me very quickly upon visiting the site. Each link that I clicked on provided me with a wealth of information about topics that I’ve wondered about even at one of the smallest scales of farming imaginable: the fifteen square foot patch of soil in which I try to grow vegetables in my backyard. Particularly helpful (because it’s a topic that I struggle with and eventually throw my hands in the air in exasparation and surrender over) was the essay on sustainable weed management, which explains the root cause of weeds:

When a piece of land is left fallow, it is soon covered over by annual weeds. If the field is left undisturbed for a second year, briars and brush start to grow. As the fallow period continues, the weed community shifts increasingly toward perennial vegetation. By the fifth year, the field will host large numbers of young trees in a forest region, or perennial grasses in a prairie region. This natural progression of different plant and animal species over time is a cycle known as succession. This weed invasion, in all its stages, can be viewed as nature’s means of restoring stability by protecting bare soils and increasing biodiversity.

The article then goes on to explain in great detail how interspersing a variety of crops will help naturally control weeds’ ability to propogate. Many of the tips are geared toward farmers (not backyard gardeners), but some of the information provided could help even the most lackadaisical gardener (such as the potential benefits of including sunflowers among your other crops). And that’s just the information in one article! The breadth and depth of information available from ATTRA is astounding.

ATTRA would require $2.5 million to continue its work. To put this in context, the USDA’s R & D budget as a whole is $2.4 billion (one thousand times the amount that would go into researching sustainable means of production). It would be a shame if a program that provides this extent of quality information about a topic that’s essential to our long-term agricultural success were to be axed from the budget when the investment required to sustain it is so comparably small.

If you agree, contact your senator and ask them to sign onto Congressman Boozman (R-AR)’s letter asking USDA to restore full 2007 funding to the ATTRA sustainable agriculture information service.

I’ve been keeping up with my commitment to make my bread instead of buying it. Since Christmas, that has involved making sourdough. I’d never really understood how sourdough works until my mom showed up for her Christmas visit with a plastic tub containing sourdough starter. Since then, I’ve come to embrace the joys of sourdough: its chewy texture, its unique flavor (which, according to everything I’ve read will develop over time based on the natural bacteria that live in your home), and—best of all—its elimination of purchased yeast. Not because I have anything against yeast per se, but if I can make delicious bread without spending those few extra pennies, why bother spending those few extra pennies?

Once a week, at minimum, I have to pull it out and feed it some water and some flour so that it has a continual source of food. When I do, I pull some of the starter out and make a sponge by adding even more flour and water to that portion; then, I let the sponge sit overnight and turn it into dough the next morning by adding flour and salt, but no more water. After that, it just needs to rise and bake, same as any other dough.

There is an added time component to making this bread, and a need to plan ahead, though if you want to speed the time frame up, you can make a bread using sourdough starter and a little bit of commercial yeast to get things moving more quickly. The extra time spent—and the fact that the process is easily performed entirely by hand—helps give you a better sense of the bread making process and how little changes affect the outcome.

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Chef Orange -

My roommate and I are having an ongoing debate of butter vs. margarine. She was raised on it, and believes it to be healthier than eating actual butter. I was raised believing that real butter is the only way to go, and argue that the artifical ingridents are actually worse for you. What is your take?

thanks -

All Buttered Up

ABU—

I’m going to have to side with you on this one. Margarine is made by hydrogenating vegetable oils and adding artificial butter flavor. Basically, that means that manufacturers of margarine take regular old corn oil, process it with nickel, and then expose it to hydrogen gas under heat and pressure. The unsaturated vegetable oil fat molecules change shape and take on hydrogen to become artificially saturated. This allows the margarine to mimic butter, as saturated fats solidify at higher temperatures than unsaturated fats (i.e., in the refrigerator, not the freezer), and hold their shape at room temperature. The nickel is then strained out, having fulfilled its purpose as a catalyst to the reaction.

While it is true that the hydrogenation process mimics the saturated fat content of butter, I’d prefer my fat to be presented to me in its natural format: oil when oil is called for; butter when butter is called for. That’s a personal choice. Somewhat more troubling to me are the potential side effects of exposure to large quantities of artificial butter flavoring: the potential of serious health problems due to one of its key ingredients, diacetyl.

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In 1729, Jonathan Swift (of Gulliver’s Travels fame) wrote “A Modest Proposal,” a great satiric essay on that very possibility, as a possibile alleviation of poverty for families who could not afford to feed all of their mouths. It is amazing how, nearly 300 years after the words were written, Swift’s essay is still quite easy to read and rife with black humor.

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So, I just got off the phone with someone named Larry Edwards from Maxwell House who wanted to touch base with me about the comment I submitted through the website. He wanted to know if I had any additional information I wanted to share for the sake of a report he was filling out to share within the coffee division at Kraft. He said that they always try to respond to comments quickly and that they try to be sensitive to issues that arise related to their business practices.

So, apparently my comment will be registered as a blip on the proper graph. It’s also possible that they do try to conduct their business responsibly. Of course, at this point, all they’ve done for certain is to file a report that my comment has been registered. Whether the WWF report has any impact on their supply chain remains to be seen.

Also, just wondering: has anyone else received a phone call letting them know their comment has been registered?

keyword coffee illicits nonapplicable response

I submitted a comment via Kraft’s website expressing my concerns about some of their coffee having been grown illegally in land set aside by the Indonesian government as a preserve for endangered species. Here’s the response I got back:

Thank you for visiting www.kraft.com/responsibility.

I appreciate your interest in our partnership with the Rainforest Alliance organization.

Kraft Foods Inc. announced a partnership on October 7th, 2003 with the recognized international conservation leader Rainforest Alliance, to support the development of sustainable coffee production in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Central America.

For a full report and updates of this alliance, I would encourage you to visit our corporate site at www.kraft.com. Select the search tab and search on Rainforest Alliance.

Again, thanks for contacting us, and I hope you’ll continue to enjoy our products.

Kim McMiller
Associate Director, Consumer Relations

I understand that Kraft is a multinational corporation (they actually identify themselves for corporate puposes as Kraft Global) that receives untold numbers of comments per day, and that their supply chain is necessarily immense to provide all of the ingredients required to support their innumerable brands.  All the same, it would be nice to feel as if my concern registered as a blip on the proper graph (concerns about coffee supply:Indonesia) instead of the one that tracks concerns about coffee supply in the New World rainforests.

It might be worth asking a few questions to find out. According to a recent press release from the World Wildlife Fund, there is a great deal of coffee being grown illegally in Indonesia’s Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park (BBS), reducing the amount of habitat available to endangered species such as tigers, elephants, and rhinos.

According to the WWF:

Bukit Barisan Selatan, a World Heritage Site on the southern tip of Sumatra Island, is one of the few protected areas where Sumatran tigers, elephants and rhinos coexist. It has already lost nearly 30 percent of its forest cover to illegal agriculture, most of which is for coffee production.

and

Illegally grown coffee from Indonesia is mixed with legally grown coffee beans and sold to such companies as Kraft Foods and Nestle among other major companies in the U.S. and abroad.

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It struck me as I was finishing up yesterday’s post on my recent bulk purchase of beef that somehow my post about being excited at getting a great deal on some fantastic, responsibly-raised beef somehow twisted itself into a lament about the paucity of meat-free dining choices at many eating establishments. Rather an odd conclusion, I thought, but that’s the direction my thought process took me.

I’m pretty sure that’s because I’ve been doing a lot of reading about our food choices and where our food comes from as of late, and I spent much of last summer making visits to small scale farms that do things properly. In case you’ve missed it, I’m opposed to the wholesale factory production of animals for slaughter, though I do enjoy eating meat in moderation. Therefore, I make every attempt to locate and purchase responsibly-raised meat and dairy options.

Because there is so much more meat (and dairy) produced in an irresponsible manner, the items I purchase sometimes cost more than the bulk of similar products on the market. I buy them for several reasons:

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