Lately I have reading and thinking about and cooking meat. I am re-reading Bill Buford's HEAT, an amazingly engaging and thoughtful book about food, cooking, and, well, meat. Just before that I whizzed through a small memoir by a chef who cooks for Italian billionaires on their $8M yacht for a summer. Both these books have strong connections with Italy so I am thinking about food and farming through something of an Italian lens.
It's common that I become reflective about meat in the Spring because that is when lambs are born, and most of those lambs are destined for the freezer. It is the time of year when people stop by the farm and light up at the sight of babies frolicking, only to drop their eyes and murmur some question about the sadness of it all.
It is the time of year when I contemplate what it means to eat and what it means to eat honorably.
Here is what I think is sad: I think it's sad that we've come to - actually been in for a quite a while - a time in our culture when it's rare we even think to purchase animals as the sum of their parts to use as food. Most of us rarely even roast a whole chicken. For us, in North America, our recipes call for ridiculous collections of breasts and thighs. We're used to it - it's how we cook, how we shop. "6-8 skinless, boneless thighs" the magazine says. "2 breasts, bone-in, skin removed."
What happened to buying a chicken, flattening it against your cutting board, and using all of its parts to make dinner? Did folks develop specific preferences for thighs and breasts and then supermarkets began supplying our dinners that way? Or did processors and groceries predict that they could make more money from "specialty cuts" priced as such and these specialty cuts evolved into the way we thought about chicken?
I don't know. But, a while back I volunteered in my son's Humanities class to help replicate the mummification process used by the Egyptians. My son's teacher is a gleefully creative man who looks forward to this process of decay each Spring. It helps to have a few grown-up types around to make sure the teams of 6th graders don't out-gross each other too much.
But, the first day revealed something surprising to me. We had a straightforward task: take a packaged supermarket guinea hen out of its shrinkwrap, rinse it, then pour salt in and over it, and seal it in a ziplock bag. Nothing to it.
Except these kids - these country kids, who live or have been on a farm of some type - were absolutely beside themselves at the thought of touching a raw supermarket hen. I mean, this is about as sanitized a piece of meat you're ever going to come in contact with, and keeping the squeals of both girls and boys down to a dull roar was by far the toughest part of the day.
These are 11 and 12 year olds. What do they think they've been eating? And where have they been while mom or dad has been frying up dinner? How can kids out here on this island of groovy little farms be so totally disconnected from the food they eat?
It's a little discouraging. There may be a food revolution out there, with micro farms like ours popping up across the land and an explosion in the vendors at farmers markets...but most kids still think their hamburger arrives in its bun essentially by magic.
This year, we expanded our non-supermarket food acquisition by purchasing both a quarter-side of beef and an entire pig with a couple other families. The challenge? Well, you have to cook a lot of different things - not just steaks and chops, because cows and pigs are not composed of steaks and chops. And when that delicious bacon is all used up, it's time to make sausage out of the ground.
But, this cow and this pig were raised by hand, in the open air, on pasture. They didn't get sick, because they didn't stand around in what we'll euphemistically call "muck," and they died quickly and well.
And all who went in on this deal agree: The best tasting beef and pork - ever. Ever. Somehow, too, it does feel more...honest. That our meat is all of one animal, rather than the choicest cuts of many combined. It somehow says, this is what nourishes us, all of you, we thank you. We do not pick the chops and turn the rest into dog food. Outside of North America, with the exception of Great Britain and Down Under, this is still the way many people approach their dinner. It is most definitely the way Italians and French, although the results are quite different, buy and cook just about everything. Buy or grow it whole, break it down, treat each piece with respect, and enjoy it.
Small food counts when its fresh green and luscious tomatoes. Definitely. But I think it counts - in every way you can imagine - even more if you eat meat.
Buono gusto.
Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times spent 2 recent columns synthesizing US and European research regarding an alarming increase in the presence of MRSA (the sometimes-fatal strain of staph infection) in pigs and even retail pork products. A Dutch study found that hog farmers were 760 times more likely to test positive for staph than the general public. An even more recent American study suggests that between 25 and 39 percent of American hogs carry staph.
No one's proven yet that any of the 18,000 fatal cases of MRSA each year were contracted from eating pork, but staph is clearly no longer confined to hospitals.
And why are staph and other "superbugs" showing up in numbers that are ringing alarm bells in doctors' offices across the country? Well, it might just have something to do with the fact that factory meat lives its whole life on antibiotics - something your family doctor would lecture you at great length about if you suggested such a preventative approach at home.
I know I can be pedantic about local food. But, I just can't say it enough: Meet your meat. Know your spinach. Make sure there's a farmer in your life - even if they just drop off that box of delicious fruits and veggies once a week. This isn't just a food issue - it's a serious public health issue. We are allowing industrial food producers to not only sell us inadequate, sometimes dangerous, food - we are paying them to destroy one of the most powerful human health advances in history: the miracle of antibiotics. Let me be clear: We are losing the ability to treat infections with antibiotics.
But, Mr. Kristof says this all much more eloquently and powerfully than I can. Here is the 2nd of the 2 articles:
Pathogens in Our Pork
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 14, 2009
We don’t add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get fewer ear infections. That’s because we understand that the overuse of antibiotics is already creating “superbugs” resistant to medication.
Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.
These dangerous pathogens are now even in our food supply. Five out of 90 samples of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive for MRSA — an antibiotic-resistant staph infection — according to a peer-reviewed study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology last year. And a recent study of retail meats in the Washington, D.C., area found MRSA in one pork sample, out of 300, according to Jianghong Meng, the University of Maryland scholar who conducted the study.
Regardless of whether the bacteria came from the pigs or from humans who handled the meat, the results should sound an alarm bell, for MRSA already kills more than 18,000 Americans annually, more than AIDS does.
MRSA (pronounced “mersa”) stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. People often get it from hospitals, but as I wrote in my last column, a new strain called ST398 is emerging and seems to find a reservoir in modern hog farms. Research by Peter Davies of the University of Minnesota suggests that 25 percent to 39 percent of American hogs carry MRSA.
Public health experts worry that pigs could pass on the infection by direct contact with their handlers, through their wastes leaking into ground water (one study has already found antibiotic-resistant bacteria entering ground water from hog farms), or through their meat, though there has been no proven case of someone getting it from eating pork. Thorough cooking will kill the bacteria, but people often use the same knife to cut raw meat and then to chop vegetables. Or they plop a pork chop on a plate, cook it and then contaminate it by putting it back on the original plate.
Yet the central problem here isn’t pigs, it’s humans. Unlike Europe and even South Korea, the United States still bows to agribusiness interests by permitting the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed. That’s unconscionable.
The peer-reviewed Medical Clinics of North America concluded last year that antibiotics in livestock feed were “a major component” in the rise in antibiotic resistance. The article said that more antibiotics were fed to animals in North Carolina alone than were administered to the nation’s entire human population.
“We don’t give antibiotics to healthy humans,” said Robert Martin, who led a Pew Commission on industrial farming that examined antibiotic use. “So why give them to healthy animals just so we can keep them in crowded and unsanitary conditions?”
The answer is simple: politics.
Legislation to ban the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in agriculture has always been blocked by agribusiness interests. Louise Slaughter of New York, who is the sole microbiologist in the House of Representatives, said she planned to reintroduce the legislation this coming week.
“We’re losing the ability to treat humans,” she said. “We have misused one of the best scientific products we’ve had.”
That’s an almost universal view in the public health world. The Infectious Diseases Society of America has declared antibiotic resistance a “public health crisis” and recounts the story of Rebecca Lohsen, a 17-year-old New Jersey girl who died from MRSA in 2006. She came down with what she thought was a sore throat, endured months in the hospital, and finally died because the microbes were stronger than the drugs.
This will be an important test for President Obama and his agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack. Traditionally, the Agriculture Department has functioned mostly as a protector of agribusiness interests, but Mr. Obama and Mr. Vilsack have both said all the right things about looking after eaters as well as producers.
So Mr. Obama and Mr. Vilsack, will you line up to curb the use of antibiotics in raising American livestock? That is evidence of an industrial farming system that is broken: for the sake of faster-growing hogs, we’re empowering microbes that endanger our food supply and threaten our lives.
