Strive for green

Living in Berkeley makes it incredibly easy to get access to locally grown and sustainably produced foods. With an abundance of farmer’s markets, and incredible stores like Berkeley Bowl, we’re pretty lucky here. The abundance of good food options has been shaped significantly by geography and a highly progressive population.

I was rather surprised then to read an article making the argument that good meals from quality ingredients should become a pinnacle of conservatism. The following is an excerpt from the article:

The proposal, put slightly differently, is that our attitudes toward food—which nourishes and sustains us, which binds us most fundamentally to place, family, market, and community—provide a measure of our respect for what Russell Kirk called the “Permanent Things.” We are not just what we eat but how we eat. The cultivation and consumption of our meals are activities as distinctively human as walking, talking, loving, and praying. Learning to regard the meal not merely as something that fills our bellies and helps us grow, but as the consummate exercise of beings carnal and earthbound yet upwardly and outwardly drawn, is a crucial step in the restoration of culture. The suggestion that the inculcation of such values might be an essential part of an adequate education ought to resonate beyond the confines of the doctrinaire Left.

Topps Meat Co., aka “The Hamburger People” may have to change their motto to the “We hope you don’t get E. coli O157:H7 from our factory farmed, inhumanely treated, crap infested cows!” According to CNN, Topps began the recall Tuesday with 330,000 pounds and increased it to a whopping total of 21.7 MILLION pounds!

If we guess that the average Topps cow that has been loaded with artificial growth hormones, antibiotics and fed parts of its relatives, produces about 1000 pounds of hamburger, then we’re talking about 22,000 cow’s worth of potentially tainted meat. What a waste! And all because the industrial farming system used to raise cattle is exceptionally disgusting.

Unfortunately the way we produce most of the beef in this country effectively guarantees recalls like this one. Cows evolved to eat grasses on rangeland (or if you are into creationsism/intelligent design, God created cows to eat grass and have open space). The majority of cows raised in this country are kept in tight confinement and fed corn, grain, and even other dead cows! Without massive injections of antibiotics and other medicines, cows forced to live this way would die fast. Next time you watch a zombie movie, imagine the zombies are cows and you’ll have a pretty good picture of what you’ll eat next time you go to Mc. Donald’s or Burger King!

How do you avoid the possibility of eating E. coli-inducing beef?
To start with, avoid the non-grass-fed stuff! Grass-fed beef are far healthier, and studies have shown that the concentration of E coli on grass fed beef is virtually nothing at slaughter time whereas the concentration on corn/grain-fed beef is often enormous. It might look virtually the same at the market, but when you get grass-fed beef you are effectively choosing a production method that is better for the environment, better for the cows and better for YOU!