I didn’t even hardly take any pictures.

But guess what, we’re moving forward.

Today on the California Report they were talking about how the new healthcare legislation is going to affect Central Valley farmers. I am sympathetic to all independent farmers, organic or not, but the outcry about their new burden is the wrong outcry. It makes me sick that we, as a nation, stare at the prices on supermarket shelves, nodding approvingly when they go down, squealing like stuck pigs when they go up even fractionally, without a thought to the true cost of that food. The billions of lost tax revenue for government subsidy and environmental cleanup could go to our schools, our bridges, our arts and our sciences: we are getting screwed for Monsanto. We talk about farm laborers, legal or not, like a commodity. We spend millions on fucking dog toys and we can’t acknowledge, as a society, that these human beings are entitled to a living wage and access to health care.

But chicken parts are 79 cents a pound, so it’s ok.

Listening: Radio Paradise: listen, and give them some money!!

>U.S. Food Safety No Longer Improving

Holy crap, I’m amazed.

You can read Captain Obvious’s assessment yourself, but *my* favorite moment was when
>Dr. Tim Jones, state epidemiologist in Tennessee, said that many of the easy improvements in the nation’s food-safety system had been made.
>“You can only tell people so much to wash their cutting boards and wash their hands,” Dr. Jones said. “I think we’re running out of things to do to make dramatic improvements.”

As if **that’s** the problem. How about not processing 40% of anything in one place? So that way, when the company succumbs to profit over civic duty- with a healthy dose of help from the USDA- not everybody in the world has to stop eating pistachios (or peanuts or tomatoes or spinach)?

Listening: Depeche Mode “Personal Jesus” Violator
That’s how I roll.

I’m not a naturally positive person, but I try, and try hard to look for the good in things. And as much as I have never been a follower, it fills me with great joy and pride that America finally, again, has a leader.

Listening: Somewhat coincidentally: “Every Breath You Take” The Police Synchronicity

Basically, it’s a registry for livestock, where a RFID (radio frequency identification) device is placed on each animal, which can theoretically track diseases back to herds or even individual animals. Sounds good, right? **Wrong**. Here’s why:

First of all, the system won’t even work the way it’s ostensibly supposed to. The idea is that if there’s an *E Coli* outbreak or something, the lot numbers on the meat could trace back to the herd and those animals could be tested and either segregated or destroyed. That, of course, is assuming that that meat can be linked to living animals, which is very unlikely since **so much** of the meat in this country is frozen and processed into so much “food” whose shelf life rivals chia pets.

But let’s take a step back and see what this is **really** about. It’s about the USDA’s specialty: **the genocide of the family farm**. By developing standards for huge factory farms and then shoving them down the throats of respectable small farmers, huge agribusiness, er, um, I mean the USDA managed to kill about half of what was left through the 80s and 90s. This is one more tool in the executioner’s bag.

The next big, red flag is that the government is trying to collect information on a massive scale, not just about feedlots, not just about working farms, but all those hobby farmers out there with two horses, a pig, a cow or three or four chickens. People have even been registered without their knowledge under the false pretenses of a survey. It looks like Michael Johanns (former secretary of agriculture under our most recent moronic president) spent some time around the water cooler with Donald Rumsfeld.

Do I sound mad? I am.

Am I using hyperbolic language? I am.

You know why? **These effers are worsening our already dire food crisis**. We are walking on a wafer of ice that already has beef, tomato, spinach and peanut shaped cracks in it.

NAIS has been around since 2005, and I know it’s hard to believe, but no one in the senate called to tell me about the NAIS provision in the new ominbus spending bill (Barbara, where’s my love??). While we narrowly avoided having NAIS meat mandatory in school lunches (guaranteeing that school lunches would be made out of factory-farmed shit), there is still 14.5 million festering in the budget to fund this nonsense. The budget has passed, but it’s not too late to amend the NAIS funding OUT. I need you to write your congressmen and women to take that funding away. When we’re trying to balance a budget, why are we funding a program most of its industry is totally against?

I’m sending [Babs]( http://boxer.senate.gov/) and [Di]( http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/) an email looking something like this:

>Dear Senator,

>Thank you for all your hard work on the new omnibus spending budget. As your constituent and supporter, I appreciate that this was not easy. However, it’s not too late for you to make it even better.

>As you may not be aware, the budget still contains $14.5 million for funding the unnecessary and controversial National Animal Identification System, or NAIS. Large numbers of people within and without the cattle industry are against NAIS, as are the most of the congresspeople from the top cattle-producing states.

>An amendment is being introduced that would strip this funding, and I ask you to support it.

>Respectfully yours,

>Joe Fish, Long Beach CA

You can find YOUR senators and reps at [senate.gov]( http://senate.gov/) and [house.gov]( http://house.gov/), respectively. LET THEM KNOW.

If you’re still not sold, or would like further reading, check this stuff out. Strange bedfellows, I know, the Rural Heritage Journal and a liberal queer from the Republic of California, but it’s crazy times.

[NoNAIS.org]( http://nonais.org/)

[General Information from a small farm perspective](http://www.ruralheritage.com/stop_nais/index.htm)

[Creepy story about Big Brother sniffing around your stuff]( http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53913)

[The Liberty Ark Coalition]( http://libertyark.org/), anti-NAIS advocacy group

[Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance](http://farmandranchfreedom.org/content/), small farm advocate

Last but not least, is the wonderfully unapologetic though controversial [Weston Price Foundation]( http://www.westonaprice.org/splash_2.htm).

Oh, and lest I forget, the organization that reminded me to do this, the [Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund]( http://www.ftcldf.org/), a hero of an organization who helped the raw milk movement in CA, among many, many other things. Get your [“The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized”]( https://www.farmtoconsumer.net/AdultRevolutionNew.asp) T Shirt today!

And no, I’m not including the USDA’s NAIS page, which you can find yourself easily enough. The last time I read it I had the heebeegeebees for a week. Just like in the Grinch when CindyLou Hoo asks “Santa” where he’s going with the tree. **Shudder**.

What I want to be listening to: “Jones’s Ale” sung by Alan Lomax on the Smithsonian Folkways American Folk boxed set. Grrr!

Here’s my response:

To whom it may concern (I guess Elena Conis and her editors),

Your article on raw milk today is severely lacking in a number of things, including facts. Frankly, it reads like an advertisement for a huge dairy company.

Pasteurization is necessary to keep fresh milk products for inordinately long periods of time, ostensibly for our safety, but mainly to monetize it as a commodity for large, sometimes international, dairy companies. The safe handling of unpasteurized milk can only be done on a local level, with a short supply chain. Local farming with short supply chains doesn’t include profits for ADM or Albertsons, only for the farmer and whomever sells his milk.

People have been eating raw milk for thousands of years. While boiling fresh milk for the benefit of infants is a practice known since antiquity, ubiquitous pasteurization became a crutch for huge, unsustainable and unsanitary dairies. In today’s world, with what we now know about bacteria and animal husbandry, raw milk can be produced safely and easily monitored- just in case- for children and adults with normal immune systems. More people are sickened each year by eating expired Bisquick than by raw milk.

Raw milk is not for everyone, and not practical in every situation, but it is immoral to take away someone’s right to eat something that they want to eat, especially something known to be good and wholesome for them. As for your specious indictment of the “European body of research” in support of raw milk, I would remind you that Europe is, in fact, part of the industrialzed world, and their research into food and medicine has time and time again bested US research which is so often funded by the industries supposedly being regulated.

You close your article with Lloyd Metzger, a food scientist, saying that for beneficial bacteria we should eat yogurt. Does he, and do you, really believe that yogurt- much of which is made from powdered milk- is the same as something that came directly from a living animal, something that we have been eating since before we invented the wheel? Next time you might want to consider the viewpoint of the millions-strong movement for safe, local and sustainable agriculture before you run to industry-funded science to prove the position you clearly had before setting pen to paper.

Thank you.

Joe Fish, Long Beach CA

Effing people.

DILF Brit TV gardener Monty Don is on board, saying politicos should have compulsory vegetable gardens “and if they don’t keep it up properly they should lose their jobs and I promise you the country would be better run…. Allotments connect ordinary people to the beauty and richness of growing things. In an age of deceit and spin and collapse there is absolute integrity in growing food.”

Here here.

And if you haven’t seen [This Lawn Is Your Lawn](http://www.kitchengardeners.org/2008/07/this_lawn_is_your_lawn_video.html), check it out, then go check out [Eat the View](http://www.eattheview.org/) and get involved.

Listening: “This Land Is Your Land” sung by Woody Guthrie (from the video) and “Peggy O” sung by [Hardy & Massengill](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehn2AY0zdEk), both great songs of the American experience, sung by three heroes of real American folk music.

First of all there was one.

I was sure I had asked one of those questions that, by the nature of the question, oversimplifies the whole subject and would, in turn, solicit rebuke, at which I was expert. He looked at me and said, “If it grows together, it goes together.” It makes sense: Chianti and Cacio, Echezeaux and Escargots, Peanut Butter and Jelly.

It’s easy to forget sometimes that a hundred years ago, just about everyone (who could afford food at all) was really enjoying food in a way that seems luxurious or even out of reach now. It was a simple thing to catch a trout in a stream and fry it in a pan with some butter, and maybe a handful of watercress you shoved in your pocket while you were fishing. There wasn’t any mercury in the stream, and the banks had yet to be paved. PCBs hadn’t even been invented yet. And the apples in your area made great cider, or the grapes, wine. And over the course of time, people made wines that went better with the foods they had.

Look at the Loire Valley, or Brittany, or Normandy, with all those cows. If the first wine they made in Brittany didn’t go very well with fish, they probably didn’t make it again. If the first ciders of Normandy upset the stomach with dairy, you can bet that recipe got axed. People ate and made wine in these places for a thousand years before anyone even noticed that the neighbors were doing something different. And by then, who gave a shit? *Zees ees ow wee make zee wine een Burgundy. Scrouw zose guys een Bordeaux.*

One could even argue that since all of these things were fed from the same land, they had comparable or complementary mineral contents. (Though that might be a stretch.)

We don’t really have that tradition here. Did concord grape wine really go all that well with corn? Probably not. But Europeans who came here were used to making wine, and if concord grapes were all they had, then god damn it, they were making some concord grape wine. Travel and shipping were well-established before Gallo had planted a vine. By the time they had vinifera grapes (other than zinfandel [nee primitivo]) in California, they had trains, too.

But you know what? I’ve noticed a new tradition forming: people are making wines that suit the local harvest, even though they don’t have to.

Look at Oregon pinot noirs. I don’t know that there’s a better red wine suited to salmon than a young Argyle or Beaux Freres. As the world of charcuterie has blown up in the Pacific Northwest, so too have characterful dry reds. Moving away from California’s fruity hegemony, L’Ecole No 41 and Columbia have released Cab Francs and blends that remind me of Bougueil. Plus the value brands seem more food friendly than ever: Duck Pond, Cloudline, Domaine Ste Michelle.

Maybe vintners are doing this on purpose, bringing their wines home. Maybe they’re sick (like the rest of us) of mimicking everything that scores well with Robert Parker. Or maybe good food and good wine just go well together.

Listening: Tortoise “In Sarah, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Women and Men” TNT

It opens with the spurious notion that nine years before the spinach and peanut scares, the food industry was working their worry dolls over the health of the public. I remember way further back than nine years ago, the debate of irradiation had started- it was in food magazines as early as 1992. The basic issues raised then, though, still remain unchanged, and I don’t think the answers are in dispute:

- What is irradiation really doing to our food? (We don’t actually know)
- What’s to keep food processing plants from using it as a crutch to avoid maintaining the sanitation of its plants and the health of its workers? (Nothing)
- How will people react to a pork chop that can last a month? (Poorly)

Of course, the article asserts right up front that “the federal government says that it is safe,” which of course we can believe, right? Because all the studies were done with government dollars by independent labs that were in no way beholden to the food industry, right? While we have some idea about what irradiation does to food (including destroy nutrients), just like PCBs, styrofoam and margarine seemed safe at one time, we have absolutely no real idea about what eating irradiated foods does to our bodies. The studies are light, the timeframe is short and the funding is biased.

As for the responsibility of these companies, let’s not forget that- since the USDA gets about $7 a year for inspection funding and that their advisors come largely from agribusiness- the more or less self-policing that goes on in the food industry has already led us to salmonella, e coli and botulism scares all over the country. I think RD from Boston, commenting on the NY Times site, said it best:

>It would be akin to using “febreeze” to clean a room while ignoring the underlying cause (i.e. rotting garbage you should have taken out a week ago)

If you honestly believe that widespread irradiation will not lead to degradation of sanitation in American food processing, you really don’t understand how this works. Let’s not forget we could have predicted [the peanut scare]( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27peanuts.html
).

As for people reacting poorly to irradiated food, it can only help. Whether it’s hard science or heebee-geebees, I don’t really care. Keep that shit away from me.

The thing that made the article so unbelievably incomplete, however, was an utter lack of mention of the problem that has led us to the issue of irradiation: our wholly unsustainable food supply.

In our effort to get lettuce from California and grapes from Chile out to us in the hinterlands, we burn up oil in transport and plastics for packaging; we have to process much of it to keep it from spoiling on its long journey (and to monetize it as much as possible); and finally we have to put untold money and effort into government agencies that have to inspect this very long supply chain to make sure that we’re not poisoning ourselves, which of course we are.

This system, however, is a fly swatter wielded against the rhinoceros of the food industry. If we actually paid enough inspectors to go out and inspect the packing and processing facilities that output the majority of the food in this country, our food would cost as much as it does *everywhere else in the world*. This is what I mean when I say we don’t pay enough for our food. We don’t factor in the environmental costs of pesticides, the economic cost to our farmers, but most frighteningly of all, *we don’t factor in the simple, unadulterated fact that none of the food produced in this system is truly safe*. **The health of our food supply cannot be guaranteed in the current model; that cannot be disputed.** A dangerous food supply is an unsustainable food supply.

Lest you think I have blinders on to the failures of local agriculture, I grant that things can go wrong on every level. However, it is much easier for a farmer to keep track of even a few hundred acres of production than it is for all the government in the world to keep track of millions. And what’s more- and this is what kept our society safe since time immemorial- is that if local agriculture were the rule (as it was until 1940) and the spinach produced in California were tainted with E Coli, then *only people in California would get sick*. Does this suck for people in California? Yes, but it is then a *local* health issue. It doesn’t cause a nation- or world-wide scare.

Discussing the pros and cons of irradiation until we are blue in the face does not relieve us of the onus the question: why do we need it? The New York Times, of all media, should be able to ask such a question.

>I’m thinking of joining a local CSA, but I have the luxury of living in Central California. You[r] essay got me wondering, though, about the relative difficulty of eating locally year-round if one lives in the Upper Midwest or other frozen climes.

Well, the long answer to your question is Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food. The short answer to your question is that there is not one state in the union (including Alaska) that does not have a year-round growing season.

There is, admittedly, no local citrus in Milwaukee, likewise local sugar or coffee, but that kind of limited-supply trading has gone on for thousands of years. There are, however, literally hundreds of crops which start in March and grow well into December, not to mention dozens more that will grow throughout the year.

It’s true: cabbage, kale, squash, chard, spinach, celery, radishes, leeks; all have hardy varieties that grow through full winter. In fact, there are squashes that won’t flower above freezing, frostberries (just like they sound) and black radishes which grow *only* in winter. And all this is without even mentioning that you can grow lettuce in a greenhouse just about anywhere, too.

In addition, there is something called “cold storage” which the older among us, or country types may recall as root cellars. This is a hybrid indoor-outdoor storage method where produce of various hardy kinds are harvested in the cooler months, then go into storage that protects them from the elements, but does not insulate them, usually partially dug into a hill or in the cellar of a barn. This is absolutely by no means the same thing as refrigeration, however. Refrigeration acts by condensing moisture out of the air, and therefore out of your vegetables. You counteract this in your refrigerator with plastic bags or crisper drawers. Those things, however, hasten mold growth and mess around with the vegetable or fruit’s natural moisture stasis, as anyone who’s put a potato in a plastic bag in the refrigerator for too long can tell you. The right kinds of things put into cold storage will last for months.

Every farmer in an appropriate climate has a root cellar, and this provides the farmer’s market (and hence you) with apples, pears, onions, garlic, potatoes and other goodies throughout the winter.

Will you see baby arugula in February? No. Asparagus? No. You’ll see new fire lettuce and black kettle radishes, and you should be happy to see them. A varied diet is the way to health, and getting all the nutrients we need. Iceberg lettuce from Chile and a vitamin don’t taste good, aren’t good for your health, aren’t good for the planet, nor are they good for your local economy. Go to [localharvest.org]( http://www.localharvest.org/) and see just what it is that your local farmer has in store for you.

For real.

Thinking back on it now, it doesn’t really come as a surprise to me. Americans have no idea where the food they eat comes from. I’m not talking about farm kids here; I’m talking about the majority of people in this country who live in the suburbs and are walking type-two-diabetes-time-bombs. This is not by accident, agribusiness has added this element of opacity to food production for a reason. I’m quite certain that they don’t believe people want their animals treated inhumanely, want their meat stuffed full of rBGH and antibiotics, want their food supply endangered by biologically modified plants or want every independent farmer in America driven off of their land. There is a chance that some of these things might bother people.

I can’t help but wonder if this distance from something so elemental to us as humans hasn’t contributed to the distance that’s between us and one another. Stay with me here. I don’t think people respect cooking as a social institution anymore. I’m not talking about going out to dinner in a restaurant, that’s not- by definition- cooking. That’s not making something for the people in your life. I once said to a friend that I was only capable of two emotions: rage and cooking. Perhaps that’s slightly overstated, but in a sense, cooking is, or at least was, a mode of affection. I can understand why people may have lost interest in cooking. As our attention to celebrity chefs and food porn has grown, the ingredients this mania espouses have become more expensive and largely lowered in quality. Maybe you can find heirloom tomatoes on supermarket shelves, but if they’re hard as rocks and it’s February, who cares? Moreover, if all you do is watch or read about David Burke making foie-gras-beluga-truffle-platinum dumplings, you may rightly wonder why anyone would want to come to your house for spaghetti.

I’m sure this is the beginning of a lifelong rant, but I will leave it here for now. Food for thought.