Category: Food and Drink

News about eating and drinking

Eating Raw Chicken

Seth Anderson0 comment

Chickens Being Grilled
Chickens Being Grilled

In all honesty, while I am a fairly adventurous eater, eating raw chicken sounds disgusting to me. I’m not even as concerned with the disease aspect, but the texture of uncooked chicken breast is very unappealing.

Elizabeth Gunnison gave it a shot…

Spend a lot of time around restaurant cooks and there’s a good chance you’ll turn into a whiskey drinker with an above-average swearing vocabulary. You’ll also be exposed to the kind of late-night banter that reveals the city’s best taco stand or revolutionizes the way you scramble eggs. Earlier this year I overheard some chefs talking about certain little-known yakitori joints that will, by request, cook their chicken skewers to a mouthwatering medium-rare. That’s one you don’t hear every day: chicken served pink.

Chicken breast is boring. It has the charisma of Tim Pawlenty and the texture of an old tennis ball. It tastes like you’re being punished for something. Which is a shame, because chicken breast is such a practical sort of meat, being that it’s lean, affordable, and widely available.

…

First up was a sliver of raw breast. It was slippery, limp, bloodless, room temperature, and for all those reasons, not recommended. The best turned out to be the one cooked medium-well, about 150 degrees. It was what we’d classify as “pink” when you cut into it, but the distinguishing feature wasn’t the color of the flesh so much as its sheen and a hint of translucency. The well-done meat we’re used to is a firm fist of hot, parched, matte-hued muscle. By contrast, medium-well chicken is supple, glossy, warm, and explosively juicy. Riskier to eat than well-done? Maybe. But worth it. Plus: one less thing to worry about.

 

(click here to continue reading Eating Raw Chicken – How to Eat Raw Chicken – Esquire.)

If you ever try some, let me know what you thought…

Sazerac Cocktail

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sazerac Cocktail

Sazerac Cocktail

Here’s how I made this.

  1. Ran cold water over a martini glass and put it in the freezer.
  2. Took an ice cube out of the freezer. I use ginormous ice cubes, in general, so they make drinks cold quicker, without diluting the spirits. You might need to use three normal ice cubes instead.
  3. Spoonful of sugar1 placed in tall glass.
  4. Add Peychaud’s Bitters2, and mash with a muddler. Toss in a few ounces of Rye Whiskey, and continue muddling. Add ice cube, and stir vigorously.
  5. Take martini glass out of the freezer, and add a drop of Absinthe to it. Swirl the Absinthe around the glass, and discard the rest.
  6. Decant the whiskey mixture into the martini glass.
  7. Slice a bit of lemon skin, express the juice of it on the edge of the glass, and drop it in the mixture.
  8. Drink, enjoy.

If I made this again, I would serve it in an old fashioned glass with ice – this would help dilute the whiskey a bit more. As it was, the whiskey had a bit of a bite still. Quite delicious, especially if you have a taste for rye whiskey.

Footnotes:
  1. I couldn’t find my sugar cubes, so estimated [↩]
  2. about 5 dashes, adjust for taste [↩]

Congress to Face Angry Farmers

Seth Anderson0 comment

A Little Sigh
A Little Sigh

What a surprise! The anti-American GOP Congress has decided farmers are not a core constituency, or at least are not as important as defense contractors. Since the GOP doesn’t believe in climate change, the drought is just god’s will, and farmers should pray for rain, avoid asking for government assistance. 

When Congress returns to business this week, it will be met not by the Code Pink antiwar protesters or the Tea Party supporters who often gathered near the Capitol last year. Instead, farmers will be out in force, rallying for a bill that lawmakers failed to pass before they recessed five weeks ago.

That unfinished bit of business threatens to cut off aid to farmers across the nation. But lawmakers, fresh off their parties’ conventions, appear to favor action on other bills that emphasize their political agendas over actual lawmaking.

When the Senate reconvenes on Monday, it will move to begin debate on a jobs bill for veterans that is championed by President Obama. The Democratic leadership is also considering yet another vote on Representative Paul D. Ryan’s budget, for no other apparent reason than to embarrass Republicans facing tough re-election battles.

In the House, Republicans will vote on a bill that seeks to phase out the Energy Department’s loan guarantee program that financed Solyndra, the bankrupt maker of solar power equipment. They also want Senate Democrats to come up with a measure like one already passed by the House that would replace the large-scale budget cuts for the Pentagon that are scheduled to take effect with other trims on Dec. 31. The military cuts were set in motion by an agreement to raise the debt ceiling last summer, and they became automatic when a special select committee failed to come up with at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years.

…

Over the summer, the Senate passed a bipartisan five-year farm bill that the House declined to take up. House leaders also refused to consider their own Agriculture Committee’s sweeping farm measure, instead pushing through a short-term $383 million package of loans and grants for livestock producers and a limited number of farmers. Senate leaders declined to take action on that measure because they said it was too limited, a view shared by many farmers.

Mr. Boehner lacks enough votes to pass a bill because Democrats dislike the $16 billion in cuts to nutrition programs, including food stamps, in the House committee’s bill. And many conservative Republicans would like to see more cuts over all in the measure.

 

(click here to continue reading Congress to Face Angry Farmers – NYTimes.com.)

French Cows Drinking Wine

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Wine Mug
Greek Wine Mug, with horns

Sure, why not? Animals drink various kinds of naturally occurring alcohol anyway…

The French are known to like their beef, and they also like their wine. In the southern village of Lunel-Viel, in the Hérault department in southern France, some farmers have taken the next step and are feeding wine to their beef cattle on the principle that if French beef tastes good now, it can only improve with a bottle of Saint-Geniès des Mourgues.

This was what a local farmer Claude Chaballier fed three animals last year – in a trial run that he’s preparing to repeat next month. He says the resulting beef was “lean, marbled and tasty”.

Two Angus and one Camargue were given a mix of leftover grapes, barley and hay before about two litres of wine were integrated into their diet.

Mr Chaballier says next month’s experiment will again use a regional wine and should help to develop the practice, although he insists that “it’s something that will have to remain local and small scale”.

(click here to continue reading The Mooo-ton Rothschild for madame? Cows have a tipple to beef up flavour – News – Food & Drink – The Independent.)

Mrs O'Leary's Butter Cow
Mrs O’Leary’s Butter Cow

Zion IL sounds like Hell On Earth

Seth Anderson0 comment

Whisky versus Whiskey
Whisky versus Whiskey

Zion Illinois, a Christian theocracy, sounds like hell on earth, at least to me. Why would anyone want to live there? Maybe there’s more to Zion than just the repression and hypocrisy, but I’d never want to find out.

As in other Chicago suburbs, Zion leaders struggle to provide services with less money, dealing with shrinking budgets, employee layoffs and declining tax revenue. But officials also remain beholden in some ways to the city’s colorful, religion-centric past.

Called “Mayberry-esque” by one business investor, Zion is home to residents who can still recall praying twice daily when a bell tolled. They live on streets named after biblical figures and landmarks, such as Gabriel, Hebron and Ezekiel avenues.

And in trying to balance a community’s history with modern economic development, perhaps no issue is more fraught with controversy than alcohol sales. In Zion, liquor has been sold under strict parameters since voters ended the local prohibition in 2004.

Zion was among the last suburban holdouts as a dry community. Even Wheaton — college alma mater of evangelist Billy Graham — overturned its prohibition on alcohol in 1985 after much controversy.…

Yet ever since the 1998 closing of Zion’s nuclear power plant — once dubbed the “golden goose” by Harrison — officials have tried to replace the millions in lost revenue. They have enjoyed mixed success, aided by the addition of alcohol sales that opened the door to chain restaurants and a hotel that caters to Zion’s largest employer, the Cancer Treatment Centers of America at Midwestern Regional Medical Center.

(click here to continue reading Zion officials struggle with brewery proposal – chicagotribune.com.)

Jesus Hoards
Jesus Hoards

a small bit of history:

JOHN ALEXANDER DOWIE was born in Edinboro’ Scotland on May 25, 1847 and received his religious conviction — while singing a hymn from a street pulpit in that city — at age seven. His family emigrated to Australia when he was thirteen; there he attended seminary and held a number of pastoral positions in the Congregational Church before resigning the last to become a full-time non-denominational evangelist in 1878.

As a young man he experienced a healing from chronic indigestion which he attributed to divine intervention; this led to his growing activity as a faith healer and ultimately to the foundation of his International Divine Healing Association. He left for the United States in 1888, and after two years on the Pacific coast moved to Evanston, Illinois. During the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 he led healing services in a large tabernacle across the way from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

 …Following a decade of legal wrangling with the Chicago authorities, between 1899 and 1901 Dowie secretly bought ten square miles of lakefront land 40 miles to the north and founded a true American theocracy: Zion, Illinois. Here people could — and would — live sinless lives in conditions approximating (as nearly as possible) those obtaining after the Millennium. Whether the New Jerusalem’s citizens will, in fact, be summoned to worship by steam whistle remains to be seen; but they were in Zion.

…Dowie owned everything personally, although settlers were offered 1,100-year leases (i.e., 100 years to usher in the Kingdom and 1,000 for Christ’s millennial reign — after that, seemingly, you were on your own). The leases specifically forbade gambling, dancing, swearing, spitting, theaters, circuses, the manufacture and sale of alcohol or tobacco, pork, oysters, doctors, politicians — and tan-colored shoes. The city police carried a billy club on one hip and a Bible on the other; their helmets were adorned with a dove and the word “PATIENCE.” At the height of his power and influence, Dowie was worth several million dollars and claimed 50,000 followers, 6,000 of whom lived in Zion City.

  In 1901 Dowie proclaimed himself “Elijah the Restorer” and began to wear High-Priestly robes. This caused many disciples to fall away; the subsequent decrease in income combined with the expenses of building Zion marked the beginning of Dowie’s slide into bankruptcy. It was at this time that rumors of his polygamous teaching and activities, use of alcohol, and extravagant lifestyle began to gain currency, not only in the world, but also within the Church

(click here to continue reading John Alexander Dowie | Evangelist – Biography | Zion City, Illinois.)

Valpolicella Classico 2007 finito
Valpolicella Classico 2007 finito

…and since business decisions are secondary to interpretations of Christian doctrine, Zion is not a home of the free…

Finally, the businessmen were referred to the Planning and Zoning Board, which would review their original request to rent space within the former lace factory. The 385,000-square-foot brick building was one of the first businesses Dowie opened in Zion, which was incorporated in 1902.

Dowie’s early designs for the city are woven throughout Zion’s fabric, and they have continued to court controversy over the years.

“He would roll over in his grave because of the liquor. Other than that, I think he’d be fairly impressed,” said Commissioner Jim Taylor, citing the city’s attempts to preserve buildings such as Dowie’s original home, the Shiloh House.

By 1903, Dowie had attracted newcomers to his Christian utopia from Southern states and elsewhere around the world, with many hoping that he could heal them of disease. He had gained notoriety for his faith healing during Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and found an international audience with a publication, “Leaves of Healing.”

He opened a wood-frame hotel where new residents lived until their houses were built. The hotel is long gone, but a gold dome was salvaged and is about to be repainted by a local business, Coral Chemical Co.

In 1990, city leaders were forced to drop the Zion corporate seal, which included a cross, a dove and a crown, after a federal court found it to be an unconstitutional endorsement of Christianity.

Well-known atheist Rob Sherman took the city back to court over the seal last fall, after city Commissioner Shantal Taylor resurrected it in an ad for a community event.

Taylor promised Judge James Zagel she wouldn’t use the seal again. She continues, though, to frame her personal vision for Zion within a Christian context.

“I really believe that great things are going to happen in Zion again,” said Taylor, opposed to the brewery. “If we go by a saying, ‘History repeats itself,’ then Zion is in for one heck of a repeat because this city was created to bring the God of gods glory.”

(click here to continue reading Zion officials struggle with brewery proposal – chicagotribune.com.)

We Only Think We Know the Truth About Salt

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Morton Salt
Morton Salt

Amazingly, a public health initiative is based on shaky research. Shocking, I know…

And yet, this eat-less-salt argument has been surprisingly controversial — and difficult to defend. Not because the food industry opposes it, but because the actual evidence to support it has always been so weak.

When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.

“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”

While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we’d be harming rather than helping ourselves.

WHY have we been told that salt is so deadly? Well, the advice has always sounded reasonable. It has what nutritionists like to call “biological plausibility.” Eat more salt and your body retains water to maintain a stable concentration of sodium in your blood. This is why eating salty food tends to make us thirsty: we drink more; we retain water. The result can be a temporary increase in blood pressure, which will persist until our kidneys eliminate both salt and water.

The scientific question is whether this temporary phenomenon translates to chronic problems: if we eat too much salt for years, does it raise our blood pressure, cause hypertension, then strokes, and then kill us prematurely? It makes sense, but it’s only a hypothesis. The reason scientists do experiments is to find out if hypotheses are true.

In 1972, when the National Institutes of Health introduced the National High Blood Pressure Education Program to help prevent hypertension, no meaningful experiments had yet been done. The best evidence on the connection between salt and hypertension came from two pieces of research. One was the observation that populations that ate little salt had virtually no hypertension. But those populations didn’t eat a lot of things — sugar, for instance — and any one of those could have been the causal factor. The second was a strain of “salt-sensitive” rats that reliably developed hypertension on a high-salt diet. The catch was that “high salt” to these rats was 60 times more than what the average American consumes.

Still, the program was founded to help prevent hypertension, and prevention programs require preventive measures to recommend. Eating less salt seemed to be the only available option at the time, short of losing weight. Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data were “inconclusive and contradictory” or “inconsistent and contradictory” — two quotes from the cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler, a leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981 — publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from hypothesis to fact.

In the years since, the N.I.H. has spent enormous sums of money on studies to test the hypothesis, and those studies have singularly failed to make the evidence any more conclusive. Instead, the organizations advocating salt restriction today — the U.S.D.A., the Institute of Medicine, the C.D.C. and the N.I.H. — all essentially rely on the results from a 30-day trial of salt, the 2001 DASH-Sodium study. It suggested that eating significantly less salt would modestly lower blood pressure; it said nothing about whether this would reduce hypertension, prevent heart disease or lengthen life.

(click here to continue reading We Only Think We Know the Truth About Salt – NYTimes.com.)

As a personal note, probably based on my mother’s attitude, I’ve always been skeptical about removing salt, and butter, and eggs, and whatever else the demon food of the moment is, from my diet. I cannot say I am in optimal health, but my preference is to eat fresh foods, and eat a variety of them. I try to stay away from deep fried foods, especially from crappy chain restaurants, and I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, and so I don’t consume much sugar, but otherwise, I don’t really have restrictions, besides personal taste preferences. Which is why Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-soda crusade seems a bit ridiculous…

Bloomberg as The Nanny
Bloomberg as The Nanny

Full page ad in Saturday’s NYT (not all shown)

QR code at the bottom led here:

“Center for Consumer Freedom”  

 

((Shot with my Hipstamatic for iPhone / Lens: Watts / Film: Kodot XGrizzled))

 

Red Wine as a Probiotic Delivery System

Seth Anderson0 comment

El Coto Rioja 2006
El Coto Rioja 2006

Hmmm, sounds like a reason to have a lil’ bit…

In studies on animals, for example, scientists have found that components of red wine seem to improve intestinal health, promoting the growth of beneficial bacteria. Research on human subjects is limited. But one recent study that examined the claim was published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

In it, a small number of healthy adults were instructed to avoid all alcohol for two weeks — a so-called washout period.

Then they went through three separate phases of 20 days each. In one, the subjects drank red wine, about a cup daily. In another, they drank the same amount of red wine daily, but this time with the alcohol removed. In the third, they drank up to 100 milliliters a day of gin each day.

What’s the best digestive aid? Join in the discussion below. In the end, the researchers found that both types of red wine produced improvements in the bacterial composition of the gut, lowered blood pressure and reduced levels of a protein associated with inflammation. Slight improvements in gut flora were seen among gin drinkers, but the effects in the wine drinkers were much more pronounced.

THE BOTTOM LINE

According to research, red wine may improve digestive health.

(click here to continue reading Really? Red Wine as a Probiotic Delivery System – NYTimes.com.)

Wine Jug
Wine Jug

and a few more details from the National Institute of Health (since I couldn’t find the specific study at the AJCN, due to a combination of their poor search feature and researcher1 incompetence)

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Few studies have investigated the effect of dietary polyphenols on the complex human gut microbiota, and they focused mainly on single polyphenol molecules and select bacterial populations.

OBJECTIVE: The objective was to evaluate the effect of a moderate intake of red wine polyphenols on select gut microbial groups implicated in host health benefits.

DESIGN: Ten healthy male volunteers underwent a randomized, crossover, controlled intervention study. After a washout period, all of the subjects received red wine, the equivalent amount of de-alcoholized red wine, or gin for 20 d each. Total fecal DNA was submitted to polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis and real-time quantitative PCR to monitor and quantify changes in fecal microbiota. Several biochemical markers were measured.

RESULTS: The dominant bacterial composition did not remain constant over the different intake periods. Compared with baseline, the daily consumption of red wine polyphenol for 4 wk significantly increased the number of Enterococcus, Prevotella, Bacteroides, Bifidobacterium, Bacteroides uniformis, Eggerthella lenta, and Blautia coccoides-Eubacterium rectale groups (P < 0.05). In parallel, systolic and diastolic blood pressures and triglyceride, total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, and C-reactive protein concentrations decreased significantly (P < 0.05). Moreover, changes in cholesterol and C-reactive protein concentrations were linked to changes in the bifidobacteria number.

Conclusion: This study showed that red wine consumption can significantly modulate the growth of select gut microbiota in humans, which suggests possible prebiotic benefits associated with the inclusion of red wine polyphenols in the diet. This trial was registered at controlled-trials.com as ISRCTN88720134.

(click here to continue reading Influence of red wine polyphenols and ethanol… [Am J Clin Nutr. 2012] – PubMed – NCBI.)

Footnotes:
  1. me [↩]

Dog and Duck Pub

Seth Anderson0 comment

The Dog and Duck
The Dog and Duck, London

I saw this place in London, and wondered if it was related to one of my favorite Austin drinking establishments. Apparently so…

Dog and Duck might have opened as a British Pub, but it has evolved into something more. We have 42 beer taps, of various Texas, American, and International Brews. A Kitchen which has recently been voted Austin’s Best Pub Grub, and has everything from fish ‘n’ chips to Falafel, and almost anything else you could want. We even have some food that is healthy.

…

It would be nice to tell you that Dog and Duck is a long established Austin business that people have been going to for generations, but truthfully, it’s not even old enough to drink. Dog and Duck opened up in May of 1990 in it’s current location, it’s well known tin ceilings, slanted wood floor, and fireplace already there. The Building had been around for a long time, and was a restaurant called Mrs. Robinson’s in the 1970’s. In 1991, Dog and Duck sistered with one of The Dog and Duck pubs in London.

(click here to continue reading Dog and Duck Pub.)

Only took me 2 years to check.

City Winery Chicago Moving to Randolph

Seth Anderson0 comment

West Loop at Night number 0142
West Loop at Night number 0142, approximately the 1000 block of West Randolph

Another new neighbor:

CHICAGO-Summit Design + Build LLC is underway on construction on City Winery Chicago, a fully operational urban winery and tasting room, restaurant with outdoor wine garden, concert hall and private event space at 1200 W. Randolph St. in the West Loop. The building is a former refrigerated food distribution warehouse built in the early part of the 20th century, is being renovated into a 33,000-square-foot contemporary winery and hospitality facility. Opening is scheduled for August.

(click here to continue reading GlobeSt.com – Duke Signs Leases for Three Industrial Tenants – Daily News Article.)

Starbucks promises to eventually stop using dye made from crushed insects

Seth Anderson0 comment

Man on the Street interview
Man on the Street interview

Gross. Another reason to avoid Starbucks whenever possible.

Starbucks will cease using cochineal extract –a dye derived from crushed insects — to color select beverages and baked goods, according to a company blog post Thursday.

The company came under fire late last month when news that it was using the surprising ingredient lit up the Internet.

“As our customers you expect and deserve better — and we promise to do better,” Starbucks U.S. President Cliff Burrows wrote in the post. “After a thorough, yet fastidious, evaluation, I am pleased to report that we are reformulating the affected products to assure the highest quality possible.”

Lycopene will serve as the chain’s new red dye, and Burrows said he expects the changes to be in place nationwide by the end of June.

(click here to continue reading Starbucks to stop using dye made from crushed insects – chicagotribune.com.)

 (Tribune cited this blog post without providing the URL)

Treyf
Treyf

and all snakiness aside, you probably consume more cochineal extract than you realize: 

Today, it is used as a fabric and cosmetics dye and as a natural food colouring. In artist’s paints, it has been replaced by synthetic reds and is largely unavailable for purchase due to poor lightfastness. When used as a food additive the dye must be included on packaging labels. Sometimes carmine is labelled as E120. A small number of people have been found to have allergies to carmine, ranging from mild cases of hives to atrial fibrillation and anaphylactic shock, with 32 cases documented to date.  Carmine has been found to cause asthma in some people.  

Cochineal is one of the colours that the Hyperactive Children’s Support Group recommends be eliminated from the diet of hyperactive children. Natural carmine dye used in food and cosmetics can render the product unacceptable to vegetarian or vegan consumers. Many Muslims consider carmine-containing food forbidden (haraam) because the dye is extracted from insects, and Jews also avoid food containing this additive (even though it is not treif and some authorities allow its use because the insect is dried and reduced to powder).

Cochineal is one of the few water-soluble colourants that resist degradation with time. It is one of the most light- and heat-stable and oxidation-resistant of all the natural organic colourants and is even more stable than many synthetic food colours.  The water-soluble form is used in alcoholic drinks with calcium carmine; the insoluble form is used in a wide variety of products. Together with ammonium carmine, they can be found in meat, sausages, processed poultry products (meat products cannot be coloured in the United States unless they are labeled as such), surimi, marinades, alcoholic drinks, bakery products and toppings, cookies, desserts, icings, pie fillings, jams, preserves, gelatin desserts, juice beverages, varieties of cheddar cheese and other dairy products, sauces, and sweets.  Carmine is considered safe enough for use in eye cosmetics.  A significant proportion of the insoluble carmine pigment produced is used in the cosmetics industry for hair- and skin-care products, lipsticks, face powders, rouges, and blushes. A bright red dye and the stain carmine used in microbiology is often made from the carmine extract, too.The pharmaceutical industry uses cochineal to colour pills and ointments.

(click here to continue reading Cochineal – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)

How the NYT Got It Wrong on the FDA’s New Antibiotics Rules

Seth Anderson4 Comments

Wherever I Lay My Head
Wherever I Lay My Head

Not the first time, sadly.

A casual reader taking in my account and the New York Times’ account of yesterday’s big FDA antibiotics announcement might have thought we were reacting to different events. Here’s the Times lead:

Farmers and ranchers will for the first time need a prescription from a veterinarian before using antibiotics in farm animals, in hopes that more judicious use of the drugs will reduce the tens of thousands of human deaths that result each year from the drugs’ overuse.

In the Times’ reading, the FDA placed significant restrictions on antibiotics use. My take was more critical: “The plan contains a bull-size loophole—and is purely voluntary, to boot.”

What gives? In short, the Times delivered a skim-level, FDA-friendly account of the new plan. Let’s start with the loophole. Here’s the Times:

Michael Taylor, the F.D.A.’s deputy commissioner for food, predicted that the new restrictions would save lives because farmers would have to convince a veterinarian that their animals were either sick or at risk of getting a specific illness. [Emphasis added.]

The bolded part is the key. As I reported yesterday, the FDA plan intends to phase out the use of antibiotics as growth promoters, but allows them to continue to be used to “prevent” disease. That’s a major loophole—it means that farmers can continue stuffing animals together in filthy conditions and dosing them with antibiotics to keep them alive. Margaret Mellon, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a longtime watchdog of the meat industry’s antibiotic-gorging ways, put it like this in a Wednesday press release:

The outlined process appears to give the companies the opportunity to relabel drugs currently slated for growth promotion for disease prevention instead. Such relabeling could allow them to sell the exact same drugs in the very same amounts

None of this comes out in the Times story.

(click here to continue reading How the NY Times Got It Wrong on the FDA’s New Antibiotics Rules | Mother Jones.)

Critical Mass Griller
Critical Mass Griller

Margaret Mellon responds, angrily:

FDA to Establish Voluntary, Largely Secret Program to Reduce Antibiotic Overuse in Agriculture Statement by Margaret Mellon, Senior Scientist

WASHINGTON (April 11, 2012)—The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today released three documents that constitute its long-awaited response to the problem of antibiotic overuse in agriculture. There is wide recognition among scientists that such antibiotic use is driving up the rate of antibiotic-resistant diseases, which are becoming increasingly severe and more costly to treat. While the documents establish a new, completely voluntary approach to reducing antibiotic use in agriculture, the Union of Concerned Scientists cautioned that the program’s shortfalls are likely to imperil its success.

Below is a statement by Margaret Mellon, senior scientist at UCS.

“The approach announced represents a bold, well-intentioned attempt by the FDA to persuade an entire industry to voluntarily abandon claims that allow them to sell a large number of lucrative products. The agency should be congratulated for finally taking action on a serious and long-neglected public health issue, but we’re deeply skeptical that the approach will work.

“We have no reason to believe that the veterinary pharmaceutical industry—which, to date, has rarely even acknowledged that antibiotic resistance is a serious public health issue—will cooperate with the agency on a plan that could reduce its profits.

“The outlined process appears to give the companies the opportunity to relabel drugs currently slated for growth promotion for disease prevention instead. Such relabeling could allow them to sell the exact same drugs in the very same amounts. The process also allows companies to avoid risk assessments for new drug approvals.

“Unfortunately, the process will also be secret. Companies will have three months to submit voluntary plans and three years to implement them. During this entire time, the public will be kept in the dark. It could be three to four years before anyone knows how well the program is working.

“Ultimately, if antibiotic use is reduced only marginally or not at all much time and taxpayer dollars will have been wasted.

“The agency doesn’t need to embark on this novel but very risky experiment in relying on companies to police their own products. It has – and should have relied upon – its  authority under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to cancel unsafe uses of drugs.”

(click here to continue reading FDA to Establish Voluntary, Largely Secret Program to Reduce Antibiotic Overuse in Agriculture | Union of Concerned Scientists.)

The Worst Farm Bill Ever

Seth Anderson0 comment

Summer Squash
Summer Squash

The so-called Farm Bill is a five year plan for American agriculture policy, and as usual, rewards food corporations instead of consumers, and is adverse to encouraging sustainable food production.

For decades, groups like Fred Hoefner’s [National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition] have worked hard to create a set of programs designed to at least partially offset US farm policy’s tendency to bolster Big Ag. The programs, which the Obama Administration in 2009 grouped under the banner of Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, include initiatives designed to assist new farmers to get loans help communities roll out farmers markets, and reduce  costs for farms to transition to organic.

Taken as a whole, Hoefner says, the programs amount to about $175 million per year—less than 1 percent of the non-food stamps portion of the farm bill. “These programs make up an extremely modest portion of the farm bill’s budget, but they’ve had a large impact on communities nationwide,” Hoefner said. Hoefner pointed to a wide-ranging recent USDA study documenting positive impact of the programs.

Corn and Cornier
Corn and Cornier

and of course having lots of money to hire lobbyists always pays off for food corporations:

Big Ag continues to get support for monster corn and soy crops. Large commodity growers will take a nominal hit in the next farm bill. For years, farmers in a few chosen crops—corn, soy, cotton, etc.—have received $5 billion per year in so-called “direct payments” based on the acreage under production. In order to receive direct payments, farmers had to sign so called “conservation-compliance” agreements, which obligated them to create conservation plans for highly erodible land and agree not to drain wetlands for planting. The conservation-compliance agreements were far from perfect, Hoefner says, but they did help slow soil erosion in the Corn Belt for years.

In the next farm bill, direct payments will almost certainly be scrapped, Hoefner says, and replaced by a revenue-insurance scheme that is projected to cost $3.5 billion per year, saving taxpayers $1.5 billion per year. Sounds like a step forward, right? Wrong. First of all, in current negotiations, there is no conservation-compliance requirement for revenue insurance—meaning that farmers will have incentive to drain wetlands to grow crops, as well as expand crops onto erosion-prone land. Moreover, the new scheme will likely insure prices at high levels—meaning that relatively small price dips could cost taxpayers serious money, potentially wiping out that promised $1.5 billion in savings.

The switch to revenue insurance, Hoefner says, will “further reduce the risk of putting the pedal to the metal on commodity production, [with] no incentive whatsoever to diversify crops or leave any ground unplanted.” All of that, of course, is manna to the companies that supply inputs to industrial-scale farmers: seed and pesticide companies like Monsanto and Syngenta; and to the companies that buy corn and soy and transform them into a range of low-quality, profitable foods.

(click here to continue reading The Worst Farm Bill Ever? | Mother Jones.)

Some of my bounty from FreshPicks.com
Some of my bounty from FreshPicks.com

Lobbyists won’t like this suggestion:

The federal government could save about $1 billion a year by reducing the subsidies it pays to large farmers to cover much of the cost of their crop insurance, according to a report by Congressional auditors due to be released on Thursday.

The report raised the prospect of the government’s capping the amount that farmers receive at $40,000 a year, much as the government caps payments in other farm programs. Any move to limit the subsidy, however, is likely to be opposed by rural lawmakers, who say the program provides a safety net for agriculture.

The report, by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, was requested by Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, as part of his efforts to cut government spending.

Under the federal crop insurance program, farmers can buy insurance policies that cover poor yields, declines in prices or both. The insurance is obtained through private companies, but the federal government pays about 62 percent of the premiums, plus administrative expenses.

The crop insurance subsidy, according to the G.A.O. report, ballooned to $7.3 billion last year from $951 million in 2000, or about $1.2 billion adjusted for inflation. A Congressional Budget Office study cited in the report estimates that the premium subsidy will cost $39 billion from 2012 to 2016, about $7.8 billion a year.

Unlike other farm programs that have income or payment limits, crop insurance payments have no such restrictions, so farmers can get millions in subsidies regardless of their income. The G.A.O. said a cap last year would have affected about 4 percent of farmers in the program, who accounted for about a third of the premium subsidies and were mostly associated with large farms.

(click here to continue reading Cap on Farm Insurance Subsidy Could Save Billions, Report Says – NYTimes.com.)

City Farm
City Farm

and we ignore climate change at our peril:

One of the biggest challenges facing this planet isn’t simply feeding a growing population — perhaps as many as 10 billion by the year 2100. The challenge is feeding all those people as the climate changes in ways we can barely project. A new report called “Achieving Food Security in the Face of Climate Change” (PDF) illustrates the complexity of the problem and makes clear that action must be taken soon to address it.

Commissioned by Cgiar — a research alliance financed by the United Nations and the World Bank — it recommends essential changes in the way we think about farming, food and equitable access to it, and the way these things affect climate change.

It is tempting to assume that expanding agricultural acreage and using new technology, like genetically engineered crops, will somehow save the day. The report says that efficiency and sustainability will also require fundamental changes in how we grow and consume food: reducing waste in production and distribution and finding ways to farm that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and other “negative environmental impacts of agriculture,” like soil loss and water pollution. The report also calls for better dietary habits in wealthy countries, which have a disproportionately and unsustainably high calorie intake, and targeted aid to populations whose farming is most at risk.

(click here to continue reading Sustainably Feeding a Changing World – NYTimes.com.)

From Bread Wine to Vodka

Seth Anderson0 comment

Vodka and food
Vodka and food, London

In her article about Russian food writer and historian, Maksim Syrnikov, Julia Ioffe recalls that the first time she met Syrnikov, he was preparing to make samogon—Russian moonshine—for a television broadcast. “I don’t like store-bought vodka,” Syrnikov said. Ioffe gives this brief history of vodka in the country:

Distilled liquor was initially tightly regulated in Russia. It is said that the first Moscow tavern allowed to serve it was exclusively reserved for the oprichniki, Ivan the Terrible’s secret police. But eventually it was made all over the country, in a process much like the one that Syrnikov was going to show the TV crew. For a long time, vodka was similar to whiskey: it tasted and smelled strongly of the grains used to make it, and was called “bread wine.” Until the twentieth century, only bread wine infused with herbs or berries was called vodka. The crystalline, nuanceless spirit that we now know as vodka emerged in the late nineteenth century, when the monarchy monopolized alcohol production and marketed the measure as a health initiative that removed the impurities in homemade bread wine.

Russia’s intense relationship with vodka was the subject of Victor Erofeyev’s 2002 Letter from Moscow, “The Russian God.” Erofeyev wrote that just mentioning the word “vodka” could cause unpredictable behaviors in Russians.

It seems to punch a hole directly into the subconscious, setting off a range of odd gestures and facial expressions. Some people wring their hands; some grin idiotically or snap their fingers; others sink into sullen silence. But no one, high or low, is left indifferent. More than by any political system, we are all held hostage by vodka.

Erofeyev argues that the daily ration of vodka given to Russian soldiers during the Second World War was “as important as Katyusha rocket launchers in the victory over Nazism.”

(click here to continue reading Back Issues: From Bread Wine to Vodka : The New Yorker.)

Imperia Russian vodka
Imperia Russian vodka

and from Wikipedia:

The Russian name for any home-made distilled alcoholic beverage is called samogon (ru: самого́н), literally translated as “self-run” or “self-distilled”. Historically, it was made from malted grain (and therefore similar to whisky), but this method is relatively rare nowadays, due to increased availability of more convenient base ingredients, such as table sugar. Modern samogon is most often made from sugar. Other common ingredients include beets, potatoes, bread, or various fruit.

Samogon of initial distillation is called pervach (ru: первач), literally translated as “the first one” – it is well known for its high quality (pure alcohol is lighter, so it evaporates in the beginning of the process but impurities don’t; over time more and more impurities evaporate, too, thus making the rest of the batch not that clean). The production of samogon is widespread in Russia. Its sale is subject to licensing. Unauthorized sale of samogon is prohibited, however, production for personal consumption has been legal since 1997 in most of the country.

Samogon often has a strong repulsive odor but, due to cheap and fast production and ability to personalize the flavor of the drink, it is of relative popularity. However, pervach is famous for having a little or no smell. Samogon is one the most popular alcoholic beverages in the country. It directly competes with vodka, which is more expensive (in part due to taxes on distilled alcohol), but contains fewer impurities. A 2002 study found that, among rural households in central Russia, samogon was the most common alcoholic beverage, its per capita consumption exceeding the consumption of vodka 4.8 to 1. The study estimated that, at the time, it was 4 to 5 times cheaper to manufacture homemade samogon from sugar than to buy an equivalent quantity of vodka.

Since then, the price of vodka has been rising above the rate of inflation. As of 2011, typical cost of production of homemade samogon is on the order of 30 rubles ($1) per liter, mainly determined by the price of sugar. The breakeven cost of “economy-class” vodka is 100 rubles/liter, but federal taxes raise retail prices almost threefold, to 280 rubles/liter. Possibly due to rising taxes, per capita consumption of vodka in Russia has been falling since 2004. It has been largely replaced with samogon among marginal classes. Some analysts forecast that the trend will result in increased adoption of samogon among the middle class, and, by 2014, samogon will overtake vodka as the most common alcoholic beverage nationwide

(click here to continue reading Moonshine by country – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)

Black Currant Tea Vodka - Russian Tea Time
Black Currant Tea Vodka – Russian Tea Time

Vodka is not my favorite spirit, but I always keep some around. I’ve also made some flavored vodkas of my own1, the best of which was adding a few tablespoons worth of black currant tea in a cheesecloth, soaking for a week or so, then straining. Quite tasty…

Footnotes:
  1. after first having some at the Russia Tea Time restaurant [↩]

Drinking in Colonial America

Seth Anderson0 comment

Whiskey Helmet - Koval's First Distillery
Whiskey Helmet – Koval’s First Distillery

In response to some complaining about the debauchery of St. Paddy’s Day in Chicago, I tweeted:

Undergraduate history class was a long time ago, so I started looking on the internet for some facts, and found this bit of fun:

Colonial Americans, at least many of them, believed alcohol could cure the sick, strengthen the weak, enliven the aged, and generally make the world a better place. They tippled, toasted, sipped, slurped, quaffed, and guzzled from dawn to dark.

Many started the day with a pick-me-up and ended it with a put-me-down. Between those liquid milestones, they also might enjoy a midmorning whistle wetter, a luncheon libation, an afternoon accompaniment, and a supper snort. If circumstances allowed, they could ease the day with several rounds at a tavern.

Alcohol lubricated such social events as christenings, weddings, funerals, trials, and election-day gatherings, where aspiring candidates tempted voters with free drinks. Craftsmen drank at work, as did hired hands in the fields, shoppers in stores, sailors at sea, and soldiers in camp. Then, as now, college students enjoyed malted beverages, which explains why Harvard had its own brewery. In 1639, when the school did not supply sufficient beer, President Nathaniel Eaton lost his job.

Like students and workers, the Founding Fathers enjoyed a glass or two. John Adams began his days with a draft of hard cider. Thomas Jefferson imported fine libations from France. At one time, Samuel Adams managed his father’s brewery. John Hancock was accused of smuggling wine. Patrick Henry worked as a bartender and, as Virginia’s wartime governor, served home brew to guests.

The age of the cocktail lay far in the future. Colonists, nevertheless, enjoyed alcoholic beverages with such names as Rattle-Skull, Stonewall, Bogus, Blackstrap, Bombo, Mimbo, Whistle Belly, Syllabub, Sling, Toddy, and Flip. If they indulged too much, then they had dozens of words to describe drunkenness. Benjamin Franklin collected more than 200 such terms, including addled, afflicted, biggy, boozy, busky, buzzey, cherubimical, cracked, and “halfway to Concord.”

(click here to continue reading Drinking in Colonial America: Rattle-Skull, Stonewall, Bogus, Blackstrap, Bombo, Mimbo, Whistle Belly, Syllabub, Sling, Toddy, and Flip : The Colonial Williamsburg Official History Site.)

Abstraction in Green
Abstraction in Green

Oh, and for the record, the website Paddy Not Patty amused and informed me. You do know that it is correctly called St. Paddy’s Day and never, ever called St. Patty’s Day, right?

Paddy is derived from the Irish, Pádraig, hence those mysterious, emerald double-Ds.

Patty is the diminutive of Patricia, or a burger, and just not something you call a fella.

There’s not a sinner in Ireland that would call a Patrick, “Patty”. It’s insulting. It’s really as simple as that.

Paul Carr: My Secret to Getting Sober

Seth Anderson0 comment

Palm Beach Special
Palm Beach Special

I’m self-aware enough to realize I drink more than some, yet I don’t consider myself an alcoholic. There are days when I don’t drink, there are days when I drink one beer with dinner and then stop, but there are also days I drink enough to blur the edges.

Paul Carr writes about his decision to stop drinking without resorting to the pieties of Alcoholics Anonymous:

For years I’d told myself I wasn’t an alcoholic. I never drank alone. I didn’t wake up with fierce cravings, and sometimes I went for one or two days without drinking. A need to drink all day, every day, was never my problem.
My problem was that once I had a drink—whether it was at 7 p.m. or 9 a.m.—I couldn’t stop until my body shut down and I passed out in a pile on the floor. I still had plenty of friends and still managed to hold down a job, but my relationship with alcohol was very obviously different from most people’s. I was an alcoholic.

…

For one thing, I didn’t go to Alcoholics Anonymous. Not a single meeting. I have several friends who attend AA and have found it to be a highly effective way to quit. I have plenty of other friends who attend AA meetings every morning and are blind drunk every night. I almost attended a meeting at the suggestion of a friend, but first I decided to read the organization’s Twelve Steps, the program that members must follow. The first step was enough to confirm that this form of sobriety wasn’t for me:
“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”

Please. You may be weak against alcohol, or seriously addicted to it, but powerless? No. If a drinker were truly powerless, then AA would be useless to him; nothing short of death could stop him from drinking.

(click here to continue reading My Secret to Getting Sober – WSJ.com.)

Truth Drug
Truth Drug

and I especially liked this caveat:

Recovery culture has set the bar for being an alcoholic very, very low. I happen to think that alcoholism is in the liver of the beholder. If you can have one or two drinks and then go back to your day, you’re almost certainly not an alcoholic. If you have a couple of beers and then switch to soft drinks, you’re almost certainly not an alcoholic. If none of your friends has ever taken you aside and suggested that your life would be hugely improved by quitting drinking, you’re probably not an alcoholic (unless all your friends are alcoholics, too).

Enjoying alcohol doesn’t make you an alcoholic any more than enjoying sex makes you a nymphomaniac. Getting drunk can be fun. If you can drink without ruining your life, don’t let me—or anyone else—stop you.