Kurt Michael Friese

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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Summer in Iowa always brings the same delightful dilemma – what to do with all that basil.

Few herbs are as surrounded by mythology and folklore as basil. Its origins are debated, but most seem to think it came from India where besides its innumerable culinary uses, a devout Hindu has a leaf of basil placed on his breast when he dies, as a passport to paradise. It is famous in Christian history as well as the herb Salome used to cover the smell of decay from John the Baptists head. In Haitian Voodoo practice the herb is a powerful protector, and a Romanian man is engaged when he accepts a sprig of basil from a woman.

All this trivia is of little use though, when faced with bushels of the stuff that we all pull out of our gardens the afternoon before we expect the first heavy frost of autumn. Get a jump on that by beginning your “puttin' up” now. You can blanch and freeze it all with a quick dip in boiling, salted water followed by an instantaneous plunge into ice water – then drain, pat dry and freeze in Ziplocs, but that only postpones the inevitable pesto, and pesto is best with fresh leaves. A voluptuous pesto is of course a good way to reduce the volume quickly and have something everyone loves to show for your efforts.

Read the rest at Huffington Post.

Tags: Huffington Post, Iowa, cooking, food, food history, gardening, recipe by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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If you are looking for an easy way to impress your guests at you backyard grill, here’s a simple trick that’s sure to make your favorite salmon fans drool: wrap it in banana leaves.

A classic method in tropical climes for centuries, this method is still relatively unknown in the States, but we are familiar with some methods that operate on the same principle, which uses a grill’s high heat on an enveloped piece of meat, fish or poultry to steam it in its own juices.  Many use foil, or multiple sheets of wet newspaper, or cook sweet corn while it’s still in the husk (popular here in Iowa).

The advantage of the banana leaves is that you get the best of both worlds: the healthy, juicy speed of steam with the rich aroma and flavor of smoke from the grill.  Plus there’s no sticking to the grill, despite the lack of added fat.

Banana leaves are easy to find in just about any Asian grocery, and many Mexican bodegas carry them as well.  They usually come frozen, but they thaw very quickly just sitting on your counter, or overnight in the refrigerator, and I have re-frozen leftovers two or three times with no noticeable loss of quality. [Read more →]

Tags: Articles, Grilling, Iowa, Saveur, cooking, food, recipe 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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Here in Iowa we have an event called RAGBRAI – The Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa – the oldest, largest and longest non-competitive ride in the world. Simply put, roughly 15,000 of us dip our back tires in the Missouri River one July Sunday Morning, then pedaling past the cities, fields and farms we dip our front tires in the Mississippi River 6 days later, having ridden an average of 465 miles.

When the ride started 38 years ago, riders rolled past countless fields dotted with little lean-to style huts – shelters for the hogs that have been raised here since the European settlers came in the early 1800s. Since then, though, the huts have all but disappeared, replaced by long, narrow steel buildings with pairs of 6-foot exhaust fans on each end and large lagoons outside.

Now these are not lagoons like we used to see on Gilligan’s Island. These would be more properly referred to as cesspools. They are 1-acre and larger lakes of effluent from the Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, that have nearly taken over the entire livestock world. The methane and ammonia fumes are gagging at the best of times. When you’re pumping 70 miles on two wheels and need the extra oxygen, they can be asphyxiating.

This of course is a relatively minuscule side-effect of these industrial methods, and in his new book Animal Factory, author and investigative journalist David Kirby details the devastating impact these methods have had, and evidently will continue to have unless some drastic changes are made. Rightfully ranking with books like Upton Sinclair’s muckraking exposé of turn of the 19th century meatpackers, The Jungle, and Eric Schlosser’s more recent look at our Fast Food Nation, Animal Factory reads like a suspense thriller.

via Civil Eats » Blog Archive » Biography of a Pork Chop: David Kirby’s Animal Factory, and the Not-So-Hidden Costs of Cheap Food.

Tags: Animal Cruelty, CAFOs, CivilEats, Iowa, RAGBRAI, food, food politics by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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Those of you with a preference for beers measured in “drinkability,” an industry term that means (and I am not making this up) “like water,” need read no further. What follows is news for those of us who favor the big, ponderous, powerful and complex beers made by artisans with a passion for the craft.

A few weeks ago, you may remember that I reported here on the passage of legislation that changed the liquor laws in Iowa. Since that momentous day, the biggest change since the shuttering of the state stores in the mid-'80s, so-called high-alcohol beer could be imported directly by distributors rather than via the state. Previous to this action, because of an arcane twist in the law, beer with 12 percent alcohol had to be purchased through the state while wine with the same (or even higher) percentage could be obtained without disturbing the folks in Ankeny.

via Real beer makes its way here | press-citizen.com | Iowa City Press Citizen.

Tags: Iowa, Table Wine, beer, food politics by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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Causing no end of difficulties in our national discourse is the steadfast belief held by both the right and the left that everything is either right or left: bad or good, strong or weak, despotic or patriotic.  You’re either with us or you’re against us.  President Obama addressed this very effectively before both House Republicans and Senate Democrats in recent days.  It is media driven to a large extent because the media need controversy to sell papers, or bytes or views or whatever it is they’re selling these days.

The most common form this takes is the old build’em-up-then-tear’em-down routine.  Perhaps the only thing many Americans enjoy more than the uplifting emotion of a success story is the schadenfreude of watching that success come tumbling down.  So when an idea comes to the fore, the critics ooze from the woodwork and their primary tactic is divide and conquer.  Label it, frame the debate, and the fight is won or lost before the story is even told.

For a long time in the circles I travel in this was not a problem because the ideas embodied in what some have come to call SOLE food (Sustainable, Organic, Local, & Ethical) were not perceived as a threat to the established paradigm.  Recent successes such as Michael Pollan’s work have, however, shined a very bright spotlight on advocates of real food.  As a result, people who have been toiling at these ideas for decades are becoming targets of powerful interests in the Big Food lobby.  Such is the case this week at WeeklyStandard.com, where Missouri Farm Bureau vice president Blake Hurst has found his most recent audience.

Mr. Hurst was among the earliest vocal detractors of Mr. Pollan’s work, as well as that of anyone who might find flaw in agroindustrial model.  His essay last summer, titled The Omnivore’s Delusion, did an excellent job of exploiting Pollan’s success to rally the big corporate agriculture interests against the perceived threat of critics both in the media and in the field.  It’s natural: he felt attacked and he responded, and has now done so again.  Unfortunately Mr. Hurst’s vitriol, then as now, only serves to fan the flames of a fire that needn’t be burning.  Individuals on neither side of the debate are inherently evil, in fact both want the same thing: healthy food for all.  Since our ideas for how to accomplish this differ, we are immediately cast into the right and left corners and told to come out fighting when the bell rings.

Read the whole essay @ Civil Eats

Tags: Articles, Barack Obama, Blake Hurst, CivilEats, Iowa, Michael Pollan, President Obama, Slow Food, capitalism, food, food cost, food politics by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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All across the country this past Labor Day, folks gathered for picnics. That’s no surprise, of course. After all, it was a holiday, and the weather was grand across nearly the whole continent. But there was something unique about one group of picnics; 307 of them to be exact, in all 50 states. They were dubbed “Eat-Ins” (modeled on the sit-ins of the ‘60s), and they were a call to action by Slow Food USA

At those picnics, including one right here in Iowa City, more than 20,000 people gathered around tables in parks and farms and school grounds to tell Congress to fix the School Lunch Program. Most of the discussions at these events and in the press afterwards centered on improving the food itself through increased Federal spending and local food initiatives. But there was another topic directly relevant to Labor Day: the call to create green jobs with a “School Lunch Corps.”

via Nationwide “eat-ins” show way to a revived National School Lunch Program | Grist.

Tags: Articles, Events, Grist.org, Health Reform, Iowa, School Lunch, Slow Food, food, food politics, recipe, time for lunch by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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Consider the egg

Iowa is the number-one producer of eggs in the country, with more than twice the number of laying hens than Ohio, the number two state. There are nearly 20 times as many hens here than there are people, producing a shade over 14 billion eggs a year. As one might expect, their living conditions are less than ideal.

A cursory glance at the website of the Iowa Egg Council does not reveal any of the images of the way the laying hens are treated, but rather concerns itself with recipes, coloring books for the kids, and “Eggbert’s” somewhat rosy history of egg production in Iowa. A search of their site for the term “battery cage” yields a goose egg. But battery cages are one of the major reasons why Iowa out-produces everyone else – we have lots of them.

Across the US there are about 280 million hens in battery cages at any given time, cages that so severely restrict their movements that they cannot even spread their wings. They can’t nest, bathe in the dust, perch or forage, all instinctive chicken behaviors. Completely depleted of calcium in a few short weeks, their bones break and they are shipped off, dead and dying, to soup plants and pet food factories.

via The cruelty of industrial egg-riculture—plus a tasty recipe for your local pastured eggs | Grist.

Tags: Animal Cruelty, Articles, Grist.org, Iowa, food, food politics, recipe by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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Who knew this Twitter thing would get as wildly popular as it has? Call it what you will: Revolution, fad, curiosity, or simply blogging for the ADHD set, Twitter is everywhere these days online and in the MSM. Yours truly is also both victim and perpetrator in the Twitter conspiracy, having first learned of it through a CNN report a couple years ago of a man who used it to inform his friends he’s been picked up by Egyptian police (the State Dept. had him out in a couple days). I have a few accounts under my nimble little thumbs where you can follow me:

@KurtMFriese – This is my main account, where just about anything I have to share (or scream into the Twitter abyss) will be posted, from my postings on this and other sites to tidbits on food politics, even family news and stuff I find funny on the interwebs.

@Winetwit – Exclusive to my wine writing, mostly for the Iowa City Press-Citizen

@Devotay – Here you’ll find all things Devotay, my downtown Iowa City restaurant. Hopefully soon we’ll have the kinks worked out so we can post our features every day, along with news and upcoming events that are already there. We also promote local food issues/events here.

@EdibleIA – The official Twitter site of Edible Iowa River Valley, Iowa’s go-to resource for all things local/sustainable/delicious. We’ll “tweet” the roll outs of new issues, offer previews, and upload photos of great food finds.

@SlowFoodIC – This is the official account of Slow Food Iowa City. Follow along as we Preserve and Revitalize the Flavors of the Heartland. Event announcements, etc. flow through here.

Tags: Articles, Devotay, Edible Iowa River Valley, Iowa, Slow Food by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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