What annoys me about the coverage of the current egg recall is that it almost always says, “traced to an Iowa farm.” But, proud as I am of my home state, it’s not misguided regionalism that makes me take offense at this statement. It’s the use of the word “farm.”

Wright County Egg and the rest of serial offender Austin “Jack” DeCoster’s operations are not farms, but factories. They’re the textbook example of everything that’s unhealthy and unsustainable about the industrial model that has hijacked American agriculture.

via Nourish Network Eggs Got You Scared? Here’s the Scoop.

Tags: Animal Cruelty, Iowa, Nourish Network, capitalism, cooking, food, food politics, food security, health by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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We shake our heads in astonishment at the level of the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. We want to help, but don’t know how. Seems no one has the answers, least of all BP, who continues to whitewash the beaches in advance of the arrival of Anderson Cooper or President Obama.

Ironically the New Orleans Oyster Festival, postponed from its original 2006 premier by Katrina and Rita, had its inaugural – and likely final – run last week. No one has anything optimistic to tell us about the future of the Louisiana oyster beds. More bad news comes when you talk to shrimpers, longline fishers, trawlers, and on and on.

Soon-to-be-outgoing BP CEO Tony Hayward is saying that it will “pay all legitimate claims” made by the people whose lives their carelessness ruined, but looking at the Exxon Valdez spill for precedent, Exxon tied them up in court for 2 decades and eventually paid a mere 10% of the total claims. So no, I don’t think anyone believes Mr. Hayward.

And so it comes down, as it always does, to the strength, goodwill and generosity of the American people to try and help the victims of still more corporate carelessness.

The first of what I am sure will be many opportunities arrives this week. Jimmy Galle, owner of bay Area seafood supplier Gulfish, has organized Dineout for the Gulf Coast, a 3-day benefit at many of the best restaurants around the country. The short-term goal of The Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund, administered by the Greater New Orleans Foundation, is to make emergency grants to nonprofit organizations helping the victims of the oil spill. The long-term goal of the fund is to address the long-term economic, environmental, cultural effects of the disaster, and strengthen coastal communities against future environmental catastrophes by investing in solutions.

Maybe you can’t afford to send thousands of dollars. Maybe you can’t afford the time it would take to go down there and lend a hand. Most of us want to help in those ways, and most of us simply cannot. This is a small way you can help – go to dinner, eat some good food for a good cause.

Let the profiteers and politicians haggle over the blame game. We’ll keep taking small steps toward recovery. Only a fool fights in a burning house – it’s time to help the people.

via Kurt Friese: Dine Out for the Gulf Coast.

Tags: Animal Cruelty, Gulf Coast, Huffington Post, Oil Spill, Slow Food, capitalism, food, food cost, food history, food politics, food security, wild food by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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My First Hate Mail - I'm so proud

Boy, you really know you’ve arrived in the writing biz when you start drawing the whacko element out of the woodwork.  I got my first hate mail! So exciting. This unstable fellow sent this note from the QC, according to the postmark, with no name or return address. How did he know I was French-Dutch? (Especially when I’m not?). It’s all in response to this OpEd I wrote in our local paper a couple weeks back.

Just for fun, I thought I might address the guy as if I took him seriously, so…

Dear Sir,

I am in receipt of your letter postmarked 19 April, and while I agree that cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, sweet corn, watermelons, popcorn, corn and soy beans are all food, the sad fact is that most of those on your list are no longer grown in Iowa.  Cattle and hogs are, but almost entirely in CAFOs (though some good farmers are going back to grass and pasture here and there).  Corn and soy of course are, but that’s not food, that’s feed and fuel.  The rest on your list aren’t grown in Iowa outside gardens and hobby farms.

As to the rest of your points, I am not “French-Dutch,” but rather was born in Chicago to American parent with Scots and Austrian ancestry, and raised in the Heartland, and have lived in Iowa for 23 years.  Not sure what made you think this was not the case.

And I did not tell you how to farm, I stated what I believe would produce better food and a healthier community, as well as turn our farmers back into farmers (rather than sharecroppers, as Big Ag has forced them to become).

You failed to list any of your perceived “Misstatements  in [my] opinion,” and so I am unable to address any of those.

I have not bought a farm because I do not have the money, and because the farming world today is the only business where you buy at retail, sell at wholesale and pay freight both ways.  Just one of a thousand reasons why the current system is wholly unsustainable, and why I wrote the opinion I did.

And yes, I am so damn smart.

Kind Regards,

Mr. Friese

Tags: Cedar Rapids Gazette, Iowa, Op-Ed, capitalism, food politics, food security by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was playing chess?That’s the sort of feeling I get often when I watch many of the recent spate of food documentaries to be released. Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system, and on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it, the folks who are doing things badly simply change their tactics, but not their strategy.

It happened again while watching the British documentary film Pig Business. I watched this film in several ten-minute segments via YouTube because it hasn’t been released in the US, primarily due to legal pressure brought upon the producer Tracy Worcester by the film’s main “villain,” Smithfield Foods the world’s largest pork producer. Despite four letters threatening litigation, the UK’s Channel 4 played the film last summer. But since no US insurer would back the film’s release here in the States due to concerns over threatened lawsuits from Smithfield, it has become essentially a black market film. Thus as Americans have fought censorship by our government for more than 200 years, corporate censorship continues unabated.

Smithfield does, in one sense, have cause for concern: this film certainly does not show their company in the most favorable light. Right off the bat the viewer is struck with some rather gruesome images of pigs being brutally mistreated, apparently at the hands of workers in Smithfield-run facilities. We hear from farmers and neighbors complaining of health problems that they tie to the fumes and water contamination from Smithfield hoglots. When this large corporation and their methods of competition had pushed the owner of a small family farm in Poland out of business, he said, “I don’t know whether I should retire, hang myself, or emigrate.”

[Read more →]

Tags: Animal Cruelty, CivilEats, Food on Film, capitalism, food, food cost, food politics, food security by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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In Sunday’s New York Times, Damon Darlin has now weighed into a debate which I am suddenly making a career of noticing, that of publicly lambasting locavores. Normally a tech writer (and perhaps better suited to it), Darlin has wheeled out some of the same tired points that others have recently, making them officially clichéd.

It takes only 12 words before he drops Michael Pollan’s name, whose best-selling books argue eloquently for a better food system, and in the next paragraph he mentions Michelle Obama’s organic garden at the White House, though he makes no mention of her new “Let’s Move!” campaign against childhood obesity, for which this garden is a tool.

I was going to dismiss Mr. Darlin’s piece as not worthy of notice despite its prominent placement in the Paper of Record and thus avoid writing my third column lamenting this misplaced disrespect for eaters who care what they eat (I swear I do have better, more enjoyable things to write about), but then he said this:

Some of these so-called locavores may think they are part of a national movement that will replace corporate food factories with small family farms. But as much of the East Coast lies blanketed beneath a foot or more of snow, it’s as good a time as any to raise a few questions about the trend’s viability.

via Read the whole story in the Huffington Post.

Tags: Animal Cruelty, Damon Darlin, New York Times, Slow Food, food cost, food politics, food security by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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Tags: Fast Food, Video, food, food cost, food politics, food security by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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In the latest edition of The Atlantic magazine, Caitlin Flanagan has written a surprisingly harsh critique of the popular and growing movement to include gardens in our public schools. In a nutshell, she states that pursuing this activity over and above the three R’s will turn our children into illiterate sharecroppers. Right from the start, though, she gets it wrong.

She has the reader picture the son of undocumented migrant workers entering his first day at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, home of the well-known Edible Schoolyard project, “where he stoops under the hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.”  Her callous disrespect for labor only begins there, but the real problem with her argument lies in her stubborn refusal to accept that a good idea may have sprouted from an ideology other than her own.  She goes so far as to describe it as:

…A vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt)

Ms. Flanagan has chosen to ignore the core purposes of these gardens, only one of which happens to be cultivating a respect for hard work, and only one other of which is a healthy respect for real food.  While she notes that the work of the garden has migrated into each of the classrooms, she ignores the obvious point that this demonstrates: There is nothing taught in schools that cannot be learned in a garden.  Math and science to be sure, but also history, civics, logic, art, literature, music, and the birds and the bees both literally and figuratively.  Beyond that though, in a garden a student learns responsibility, teamwork, citizenship, sustainability, and respect for nature, for others, and for themselves.

Read the whole post @ CivilEats.com

Tags: Articles, CivilEats, Health Reform, food politics, food security, hunger, school gardens by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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Episode 1: Heritage Turkeys

Download: Edible Radio, Episode 1, 11/18/09, Heritage Turkeys.
Read more…

Tags: Animal Cruelty, Edible Iowa River Valley, Edible Radio, Foundation for Biodiversity, Tracey Ryder, food, food politics, food security by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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There has been a cultural revolution in this country over the last 50 to 75 years, a sort of intellectual cleansing that has removed from most people’s minds any understanding of food, of cooking, of the pleasures of the kitchen and table, and replaced it with the language of the drive-thru, the shopping mall, and the convenience store. Michael Pollan recently addressed this problem well.

Nowhere is this more evident than in our schools, where our kids are not taught about food and cooking, not even the “Home Economics” of my high school years. No, instead the Iowa City Community School District (ICCSD) teaches something called “Family and Consumer Science.” There you have it—we are not raising citizens, we are raising consumers. Our children are being taught one way of surviving in this modern, fast-paced world: the way of conspicuous consumption.

via Let’s (re)do school lunch | Grist.

Tags: Articles, Grist.org, School Lunch, Slow Food, conviviality, food, food cost, food politics, food security, time for lunch by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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In 1946, when President Truman signed the School Lunch Act, he said, “In the long view, no nation is healthier than its children, or more prosperous than its farmers.” If that was a statement of purpose rather than merely a rhetorical flourish, then the School Lunch Act has failed.

Today in America we have steadily rising rates of childhood obesity, and if you were born after 2000, you have a startling one-in-three chance of developing early-onset diabetes. Meanwhile America now has more prisoners than farmers, and among those few remaining farmers the average age is 57.1 and rising. The equation becomes quite simple to understand: No farmers equals no food.

In an effort to raise awareness and rally support behind changes to the upcoming reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, Slow Food USA has created the Time for Lunch campaign. This campaign is calling on Congress to provide the resources schools need to serve real food for lunch. Those involved in making the day-to-day dietary decisions for our children do not have the adequate resources to provide healthy, nutritious, and yes, tasty food for our kids. This must change. It’s time to invest in children’s health, protect against food that puts children at risk and teach children healthy habits that will last through life.

Read the whole post at Civil Eats

Tags: Articles, Health Reform, School Lunch, Slow Food, food politics, food security, hunger by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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