Not pissed off enough over how big business has taken over the means of production and distribution of food? Would you like (or do you need) the validation of your belief that the people who have taken charge of feeding the world are more interested in undermining your enslavement than they are in your nutrification?
Then you may want to whet your disaffection and anger with this trailer for the movie Food Inc.
Filed under: animal rights, Ethics, Food Safety, video | 5 Comments »
Embedded video from CNN Video
Filed under: animal rights, eating, Ethics, ethics politics, video | 2 Comments »
It may be only children and pedants who believe that once a word is coded into more than one dictionary its meaning becomes fixed and immutable. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Consider the “f-word” which can mean virtually anything depending upon the context in which it is used. The word “like” is equally adaptive and, in the mouth of a skilled user, can indicate a simile (as in “I’m like wasted.”), affinity or affection (“You like what?”) indecision (“I was like what?”) or nothing at all (“Like, you know.”).
Likewise, in the world of commercially produced food, there are many words and whose applied meaning have little to do with their formal definitions. Take the word artisan, for example, which normally indicates a person who is skilled in a trade and works largely with his hands and hand tools.
Nowadays, most supermarket bakeries sell artisan bread that is made in factories. The flour for the bread is ground in automated mills, sifted by mechanical sifters, mixed in dough mixers and baked in automated ovens. If it is hard to imagine a role for an artisan in the process of making thousands of loaves of bread a day, it’s only because you don’t know that the baking industry has expanded the definition of artisan to include a minimum-wage worker with only enough skill to cut and slash a loaf of bread in exactly the same way 10,000 times a day.
People who sell chickens and turkeys can label them as fresh even though their poultry has been frozen because they have a different understanding of definition of the meaning of the word frozen. According the National Turkey Federation
“evidence exists that (freezing) occurs somewhere between 0 and 10 degrees F, but the precise temperature eludes us.”
It doesn’t matter at all that meat is mostly water and that the public understands that water is widely defined as freezing at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (okay, the water in chicken contains solutes so it’s freeze point is probably around 28 degrees) because the poultry industry understands that language is mutable, and either assumes that the public understands that it knows which versions of the words fresh and frozen it is using or, to take a more cynical view, is too dumb to know that it’s being duped.
Forgetting for the moment that since the fundamental definition of the word natural means “present in or produced by nature” only foods that are still in their native habitat, or are not in anyway added to or reduced by human hands or their machines can truly be said to be natural, it is possible to see a broad range of natural food products that appear to be natural in ways that would give nature pause to wonder if it knew what it was about. Tyson and other chicken producers sell “100 percent Natural” chicken breasts that are injected with salt water and seaweed extract. Since salt water and seaweed are natural products, adding them to chicken does not, according to Tyson and the USDA, render the chicken unnatural anymore than smoking tobacco or injecting narcotics turns a natural born fool into a manufactured dope.
Even highly processed foods like ketchup and frozen fish sticks can be labeled natural as long as they don’t contain anything that was synthesized in a laboratory. According to the Code of Federal Regulations a natural additive is:
“the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice …”
Well, I suppose that enzymolysis is natural enough.
Of course, unless you believe that you are being harmed by eating fresh natural artisan chicken that is not fresh, not produced by an artisan and not natural, there is no reason to rise up in arms about the loosey-goosey ways that food companies are using your language. On the other hand, it is like (f-word) annoying when like, think you are being played for a like, dupe.
Filed under: Ethics, food facts, rants | 8 Comments »
“Last week, protesters from PETA showed up at a Hempstead [Long Island, New York]elementary school, unannounced and uninvited, to try to convince youngsters leaving at day’s end that circuses mistreat their animals. The protesters handed out coloring books with stickers that read, ‘Circuses are no fun for animals.'”
Filed under: animal rights, Ethics | 6 Comments »
What do bread bakers who work from starter, students who pay other people to take tests for them and professional athletes have in common?
Well, from my poll results (look left) it appears that most of them are not above doping their path to success. Of the 22 bakers who respond positively to the statement “I occasionally add commercial yeast to bread starter,” only 5 answered “Never.”
So now it’s official people. The epidemic of cheating and dishonesty that has been plaguing our society and has corrupted and undermined the integrity everything from politics to banking, professional sports and academia, has begun to work it’s way through what is perhaps the last corner of virtuous endeavor: the subculture of bakers who eschew the use of unsustainable factory made yeast in favor of culturing yeast that is ambient in the atmosphere and the flour itself.
Who’s next?
Organic farmers who dope manure with Miracle Grow? Vegan chefs who fry their setan in bacon fat to get a leg over the neck of competitors who use hydrolzed vegetable protein to add umami? Do we now have to worry about raw milk dairy farmers spiking their milk with melamine?
Look, I occasionally add yeast to my bread starter. But I’m no hypocrite so don’t think that just because I do it, it’s okay for you to do it too.
Filed under: baking, bread, Ethics, satire | Leave a comment »
What do bread bakers who work from starter, students who pay other people to take tests for them and professional athletes have in common?
Well, from my poll results (look left) it appears that most of them are not above doping their path to success. Of the 22 bakers who respond positively to the statement “I occasionally add commercial yeast to bread starter,” only 5 answered “Never.”
So now it’s official people. The epidemic of cheating and dishonesty that has been plaguing our society and has corrupted and undermined the integrity everything from politics to banking, professional sports and academia, has begun to work it’s way through what is perhaps the last corner of virtuous endeavor: the subculture of bakers who eschew the use of unsustainable factory made yeast in favor of culturing yeast that is ambient in the atmosphere and the flour itself.
Who’s next?
Organic farmers who dope manure with Miracle Grow? Vegan chefs who fry their setan in bacon fat to get a leg over the neck of competitors who use hydrolzed vegetable protein to add umami? Do we now have to worry about raw milk dairy farmers spiking their milk with melamine?
Look, I occasionally add yeast to my bread starter. But I’m no hypocrite so don’t think that just because I do it, it’s okay for you to do it too.
Filed under: baking, bread, Ethics, satire | 3 Comments »
Wow, we studied this case almost to ad nauseam when I was pursing a BS in Environmental Science between 1976-80.
General Electric was accused of dumping large amounts of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals into the food chain. It was alleged that one of the conglomerate’s subsidiary businesses dumped an estimated 1.3 million pounds of PCB’s (polychlorinated biphenyls) into the Hudson River between 1947-77, consequentially ruining fisheries, countless lives many lives? When it became obvious that indeed, GE was responsible for poisoning the river and they were asked to clean it up, they dug in their heels, hid behind counsel, and waited until their accusers gave up. But they never did.
Now, after more than sixty years after they began dumping hazardous waste from a transformer plant in Hudson Falls into the Hudson River, a court in Washington ruled that they must clean it up.
Un-fraking-believable.
GE loses to EPA in ruling on river dredging
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“Higher heifer milk yields (≥ 200 liters) were found in herds where the stock manager thought it important to know every individual animal, although this was only a trend (p = 0.14). On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case (p < 0.001).”
IngentaConnect Exploring Stock Managers’ Perceptions of the HumanAnimal Relation
Filed under: Ethics, farming | 1 Comment »
And he claims to be proud of the results of his proclivity to gluttony. (I don’t believe him, being sick is nothing less than bull dung.)
Perhaps one of you will be able to explain why someone who breathes the same air as we do would eat so much, so often, that he contracts gout. In the interim, I’ll just be sad.
Disease: Food Blogger Proudly Contracts Gout
Filed under: eating, Ethics | 6 Comments »
And he claims to be proud of the results of his proclivity to gluttony. (I don’t believe him, being sick is nothing less than bull dung.)
Perhaps one of you will be able to explain why someone who breathes the same air as we do would eat so much, so often, that he contracts gout. In the interim, I’ll just be sad.
Disease: Food Blogger Proudly Contracts Gout
Filed under: eating, Ethics | 6 Comments »
A Hunger Aritist (Redux) 
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