Get out your virtual pens!!!

OK, I hope it’s not too late, but I need ALL of your help (all 3 of you). We haven’t really talked about NAIS on the blog yet, but believe me, it is BAD for you and BAD for your food. I want to get this out, so I’ll just briefly explain what it is, and we can cover it more later.

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!

Bogus Raw Milk Article In the LA Times

This [poorly researched article about raw milk](http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-nutrition2-2009mar02,0,4757880.story) appeared in the LA Times today. What balanced journalism, with hardly a mention that a viewpoint other than industry science even exists.

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.

UK Puts Money Where Mouth Is

[The Times of London](http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/gardens/article5761956.ece) reported today (to me via [Kitchen Gardeners International](http://www.kitchengardeners.org/2009/02/uk_allotment_gardens.html)) that the UK National Trust (sort of the like a sierra club meets meets historical society) is pushing a list of 40 sites that they want to turn into found agricultural allotments (and more on the horizon), plus they are officially seeking to have Gordon Brown plant a vegetable garden at 10 Downing St (just like we used to have at the White House).

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.

If it grows together…

Years ago, when I was a young and impressionable apprentice, I asked my chef whether there was a general rule for the pairing of wines, cheeses and foods. His answer was a complete surprise to me.

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