Weakening organic standards

The USDA has an organic advisory board which is being packed with representatives from large industrial agribusiness concerns. The board is in a position to define what the word "organic" means, as far as what practices are observed to eliminate pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, antibiotics, and other chemicals and poisons from the food we eat. Read about the current state of the board here in the article by Megan Tady of the New Standard.

Presumably, this article also functions as a good indicator of the state of the USDA during the Bush regime. In other words, the USDA functions to represents big business rather than to keep food supplies safe, and agriculture renewable and sustainable.

I don't know why it is but since we've had that psychopathic moron Bush in office, there has been this idea stated over and over again that these huge businesses that control so many things can be trusted with our food supply, our economy, our infrastructure. It was bad enough under Clinton, there was NAFTA, and a lot of creepy pro-megabusiness things going on. But now, given the evidence of so much greed and corruption (Haliburton comes to mind- read up on the scandals surrounding its stake in the Iraq boondoggle), it is particularly unwise and devastating to continue to allow foxes to guard our henhouses.

The Organic Consumers Association is grass roots non-profit that works, among other healty, vital things, to keep the meaning of the word organic from changing into something the mega-corporations can throw around in an attempt at short term gain and smashing competition from smaller farms.

If huge corporations had their way, our entire food supply would be nothing but tasteless poison. You can easily taste the difference between vegetables and meat grown in corporate conditions versus those grown in a truly natural setting. Places like McDonalds have to infuse their food with flavor agents to make it even taste like food. Read Fast Food Nation for a chilling, well researched and packed-with evidence report on routine agribusiness practices. I heard the movie was not that good- but the book showed the journalistic talent of the San Francisco Chronicle reporter, Eric Schlosser, who wrote it. I have not spent a dime at McDonald's or the like since, except for the time I saw a movie with a coworker who needed to have coffee and cookies after.

Organic farmers have an eye toward a healthy end product, without the wake of environmental and economic destruction left by mega-agribusiness. Tune in and think. Read up. And think what happens when our food supply consists of frankencrops and animals not even given the dignity due to living things. We parish, that's what. We can't survive eating poison and shit, and that's what the mega-corporations like Con Agra and the like feed us- it's well-documented, and with the money these folks are making (that's right, at the heart of all this nasty stuff is people, not some robot like corporate entity, but people, very very rich people) it is best for them to invest some in changing their ways of doing business so that our one-and-only planet, and our one-and-only community are sustained in a healthy manner.

real bread

I knew there was something missing from Wonder Bread. Always have. I grew up on whole wheat, black bread, pumpernickel. When I was young we drank beer like Schlitz and Coors, but always respected zesty beer with body, like Molson Ale. Then when the microbrew revolution hit, we knew for sure beer had kind of lost its life-force through being brewed in the same old usual way w/ boring and lackluster varieties of hops and grains, as the microbreweries zipped up the taste and body of beer with fancy old fashioned hops and grains and yeast.

This story in the San Francisco Chronicle details grain as it used to be vs. grain as it is now. It reminds me of the beer Anchor Steam used to brew, based on a recipe found on Sumerian tablets from thousands of years ago.

A story of wild wheat seeds that began 10,000 years ago with Neolithic hunter-gatherers who harvested them on the shores of the Mediterranean sea is continuing today in California, a tale that underscores the new era of modern genomics.

The Stone Age people used wild wheat seed to bake their bread long, long ago, and now the seeds from current generations of wild wheat growing in Israel have yielded the gene that scientists at UC Davis are crossbreeding into modern wheat plants to increase their nutrients for an undernourished world.

Through many centuries of domestication by farmers and plant breeders, the wheat found in today's breads lost some of the vital protein and minerals, such as iron and zinc, that the genes in the ancient wild seeds carried. After cloning the major gene for those nutrients from current wild wheat, the UC Davis scientists have bred them back into new wheat strains without the need for more controversial genetic engineering.

For more information about gardening as it used to be, see the Native Seeds Search website. Native Seed Search has, among all kinds of other cool stuff, a seedbank where you can buy actual, not cloned, ancient varieties of chilis, beans, peas, melons, gourds, corn, even tobacco.

Skeptical? Try what is known as an heirloom tomato. Compare it to a regular tomato you buy at Safeway or Alberston's.

The same thing keeps happening again and again. "Am I losing my taste or does this bacon have no flavor?" my 80-something mom said when we were cooking Thanksgiving dinner. "The bacon has no flavor Mom," I said, crunching into a strip of the tasteless pseudo-meat. Try the organic stuff, i.e. bacon from farm where they don't dose their animals on poison, let them have some sun and fresh air. Similarly, in the book Fast Food Nation, you see the story of how McDonalds and the like have to douse their food w/ chemical flavor agents, so that their product smells and tastes like food rather than the lifeless industrial end-product filler that it is.

tacos tacos tacos

My friend Missy Bit has been talking about tacos up Oakland way. Just wanted to post a picture of Chuck7's Tucson/California style tacos of late.

"The kind of taco you don't look up from"

I've always liked the idea of a journey where you make your way from point to point doing something you love. The journey is defined and mapped out by activity at its stops, like Burt Lancaster swimming his way pool by pool across the county in The Swimmer, or the journey through Dublin in James Joyce's Uylsses, or a downtown Tucson pub-crawl, on foot, pub to pub, (with a cab ride home after). One day I am going to spend a day in L.A. shooting photos, making a vector across the city, and organizing the work to reflect that journey.

In this article by Cindy Price of the New York times, the journey is a strech of the California coast and the purpose is tacos. I happen to make great (usually vegetarian) tacos almost every day, and I love California, so I can relate. Price and her boyfriend start in an obscure L.A. neighborhood, and munch their way north along the coastal highway all the way to San Franciso's Mission district. Nice article, nice journey.

For more on the taco experience, see Bandini's excellent Tacohunt blog.