Kurt Michael Friese

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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