• Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 241 other subscribers

  • Noshing on

    raw blueberry pie with microwaveable filling and graham cracker crust

    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

  • Recent Posts

  • Contents

  • Archives

  • Now Reading

  • The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It

  • See also my Book Reviews

  • Copyright 2008-2024Slow Food Fast. All writing and images on this blog unless otherwise attributed or set in quotes are the sole property of Slow Food Fast. Please contact DebbieN via the comments form for permissions before reprinting or reproducing any of the material on this blog.

  • ADS AND AFFILIATE LINKS

  • I may post affiliate links to books and movies that I personally review and recommend. Currently I favor Alibris and Vroman's, our terrific and venerable (now past the century mark!) independent bookstore in Pasadena. Or go to your local library--and make sure to support them with actual donations, not just overdue fines (ahem!), because your state probably has cut their budget and hours. Again.

  • In keeping with the disclaimer below, I DO NOT endorse, profit from, or recommend any medications, health treatments, commercial diet plans, supplements or any other such products.

  • DISCLAIMER

  • SlowFoodFast sometimes addresses general public health topics related to nutrition, heart disease, blood pressure, and diabetes. Because this is a blog with a personal point of view, my health and food politics entries often include my opinions on the trends I see, and I try to be as blatant as possible about that. None of these articles should be construed as specific medical advice for an individual case. I do try to keep to findings from well-vetted research sources and large, well-controlled studies, and I try not to sensationalize the science (though if they actually come up with a real cure for Type I diabetes in the next couple of years, I'm gonna be dancing in the streets with a hat that would put Carmen Miranda to shame. Consider yourself warned).

Smart Choices Labeling Program Falls Apart

Posted on October 28, 2009 by DebbieN

The FDA’s recent and surprisingly bold scrutiny of the Smart Choices food labeling program, coupled with wide public indignation over the program’s obviously inappropriate awards of healthy food status to processed foods without much actual merit, has left the industry-led nutrition rating effort in shreds.  In a recent followup to his initial article in the New York Times, William Neumann reports that the Smart Choices program has been suspended only about two months after going live, and participants like PepsiCo have pulled out altogether.  Kellogg’s, on the other hand, is “phasing out” its green checkmarked cereal boxes and announced that global marketing officer Celeste Clark  is staying on in good standing after what has amounted to a PR fiasco over Froot Loops. Makes you think they were the ones with the highest investment in the program to begin with, or that perhaps they were the company least likely to admit how transparently flimsy the program’s nutrition criteria had become to the rest of the country.

It’s the first time in quite a while that the FDA has taken on a big household-name food industry target in public without a lot of hemming and hawing and backpedaling and dealmaking. It gives me hope that at least some of the federal government is shifting gears to start serving the public again.

The great surprise for me is how little real effort it took to shut down the food industry’s program. Three or four years ago it might well have prevailed, and the processed food industry might have been able to keep inserting its priorities into the debates over nutrition without any effective logical check. But at a time when the nation’s gotten sick of being lied to so brazenly for so long about so many things–many of them more serious–corporate food tampering and misrepresentation of food quality are becoming hair-trigger topics. Not least because food is the easiest  for ordinary people to judge and to protest safely in the streets.

We can’t organize effectively enough to protect ourselves against the invasive, petty and obscene wastefulness of the Patriot Act as it has actually been applied. We can’t organize effectively enough to demand and get a proper, timely accounting of Guantanamo and the government’s use of torture there and abroad.

But we can talk food and nutrition and sustainability and corporate manipulation until the cows come home.

How else to explain the cult status of Michael Pollan? The rise of Fast Food Nation and Food, Inc.? The fights over school cafeteria vending machines and chain restaurant nutritional stats? The Smart Choices checkmark for Froot Loops, which people buy specifically for the artificial colors and know perfectly well is not really food, touched the match to a very big pile of sawdust.

And now the FDA is also on its way to strengthened oversight powers from Congress, including mandatory food recalls, not just recommendations for recall, to go after contamination of the food supply, and with any luck some extra funding to cover the actual field investigations needed.

It’s long overdue, but somehow it seems to me the FDA is being tasked with something the USDA should have been doing all these years and hasn’t. The USDA has more tools and resources at its disposal for doing food safety checks at the agricultural and manufacturing levels but because part of its mission is to boost agriculture, it has often dismissed these checks as unnecessary and even obstructed them, as in the case of routine meat testing for BSE and other infections.

The FDA is still supposed to protect the nation against food and nutritional claims fraud, though some of its targets appear to be of diminishing significance in comparison with preventing widespread salmonella and E. coli in the food supply. Smart Choices is obviously a big and publicly important target, but on the other hand, it seems to have been exposed and skewered satisfactorily already by public reporting of the Froot Loops fiasco. The FDA can ride the crest and put the final, perhaps critical, touch on it, but the agency’s gotten a huge boost this time around from public opinion.

Maybe that’s saved the FDA and the public some time and taxpayer dollars that won’t have to be spent going to court over it. Maybe it’s given them the nerve to work on the public’s behalf more daringly, knowing that the public actually does give a damn about its own well-being? Maybe things are really going to be different enough that they’ll go after the big offenders even when the public isn’t way ahead of them? We can only hope.

But frankly, I still want to see the USDA fulfill its responsibilities to protect the public and the food supply, and not abandon or subvert them in service to big agriculture and processed food firms. The FDA shouldn’t have to pick up after them.

Filed under: Food Politics, nutrition | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Smart Choices Labeling Program Falls Apart

Ag School: the New Farming vs. Big Agro

Posted on October 14, 2009 by DebbieN

The LA Times reports today that the chairman of the Harris Ranch Beef Co. has successfully pressured Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, one of California’s few universities with a strong agriculture program, into converting what was to be an upcoming lecture by Michael Pollan into a panel discussion with a meat science expert and a representative from a large organic grower. How? By threatening to withdraw a $150K pledge for an on-campus meat-packing plant. The chairman’s threat letter to Cal Poly’s president also apparently criticized a professor who called Harris Ranch “unsustainable”.

Harris Ranch itself is more than usually well known to Californians. It’s a huge holding area for thousands upon thousands of cattle as they’re fattened for market. It’s an hour or so south of San Jose, a feedlot acres long, set right along the east side of the I-5, California’s main interior north-south highway between LA and San Francisco.  You can smell it coming a couple of miles before you get there, even with the windows and vents shut and the air conditioning on. And the cattle–herds and herds of them, closely packed. Quite a sight. All kinds, with very little room to wander around, and there’s no grazing to wander to. Elsewhere, on side highways through the hills, you see small herds, calves, occasionally lone cows or bulls meandering along the slopes, picking their way between boulders and foraging for grasses. Once they’re trucked to Harris Ranch, that’s over. It’s Cow City.

The manure piles, as you might imagine, are vast, and provide a valuable sideline business because the rest of the highway, all up the San Joaquin valley, is lined with cotton, orchards, and a variety of other crops, and the land itself is flat, dry, and chalky.

But does that make Harris Ranch Beef Co. sustainable? Probably not. Does  Harris Ranch’s size make it evil or exploitative? Also probably not, or not automatically.  It just makes it big. Really big–and maybe too big to run without depleting or damaging the local environment. Unless, of course, you have a good resource for researching better ways to farm.

But threatening to withdraw a big-ticket donation just because Michael Pollan gives a talk at the university might not be the best way to convince the world of Harris Ranch Beef Co.’s intentions toward the public or of its ethical business practices. More importantly, it might not be the best way to present the beef industry to students at the Ag school.

It is probably too much to ask a big business like Harris Ranch Beef Co. to act intelligently rather than in panic when it comes to criticism over its sustainability. But I wonder what would have happened if the chairman had looked at the university’s sustainability research as an opportunity rather than a threat.

Ironically, big agribusinesses like Harris Ranch probably need the kind of fresh thinking and research on sustainable practices that Cal Poly-SLO and other agriculture schools are starting to produce. The next 20 years are going to see a lot of changes in food production because a lot of resources are either already being depleted or getting more expensive faster than anyone could have predicted 10 years ago. Even the next 5 years are up for grabs. These changes are already hard to miss.

All the big agro and food processing businesses that decry Pollan’s food journalism today are going to be changing something about how they do business. They’ll have to, whether or not he (and other credible researchers) gets to talk freely about the problems of the status quo at the Ag schools they support. The question is whether the Ag schools will have thought about the problems he raises and be prepared with some solutions when agribusiness finally realizes it needs a new approach.

Filed under: Food Politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ag School: the New Farming vs. Big Agro

How to Eat Vegetables and Lose Weight and Save the Planet (Without Really Trying)

Posted on August 5, 2009 by DebbieN

One of my favorite stops at the New York Times online is Mark Bittman’s “The Minimalist” column, a series of 5-minute videos in which he demonstrates simple but pretty good cooking with clear and manageable directions and an easy close-up view of the pots and pans in action.

I’d say he takes a no-nonsense approach to cooking, but that would be misleading. He takes a full-nonsense, marble rye approach to the patter while doing some very basic common sense things like cutting up, mixing, and sauteing. And he features vegetables prominently.

Bittman,  recently seen schmoozing around Spain in a top-down convertible,on PBS yet, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Michael Stipe and occasionally Mario Batali and trying to look interested in the food (which somehow got upstaged, can’t imagine how), is the author of several big yellow cookbooks, notably How to Cook Everything in both meat-eater and vegetarian editions.

This year he’s come out with a new, slimmer volume called Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating* (and the asterisk leads to: *With More than 75 Recipes).

Unfortunately, we have to disregard the fact that Bittman’s title manages to evoke both Phil McGraw’s Self Matters and David Reuben, M.D.’s 1970s classic romp, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* … *But Were Afraid to Ask (or, more happily, Woody Allen’s movie send-up of same). This is a Serious Book. And like many Serious Books today (and anything at all with a “go green” theme), it’s a hybrid vehicle.

Between the asterisks on the cover sits a Granny Smith apple photoshopped with a map of the world and a red label, “Lose Weight, Heal the Planet.” The back blurb reads, “…the same lifestyle choice could help you lose weight, reduce your risk of many long-term or chronic diseases, save you real money, and help stop global warming…”

Food Matters is Bittman’s argument for getting the lard out and the greens in, for the sake of health, looks, and planet (quick, look holistic and place your hands reverently over your heart, if you can find it). The first half of the book is a set of essays reporting on the state of Big Food in the U.S., the state of obesity, the state of greenhouse gases and the global cost of raising a serving of beef as opposed to a serving of broccoli or tomatoes or whole grains.

Following Michael Pollan’s now-famous dictum “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” and citing him heavily, Bittman sets out to encourage readers to replace at least some of the earth-taxing meat and dairy in their daily eating with…plants. Which makes sense, of course.

The second half is a primer, with recipes, on how to eat more vegetation. Given that his pitch is geared at least partly to a male audience (he also writes a food column for Men’s Health, and the tone here is similar), you’d think his advice on the quickest route to getting vegetables into one’s diet would involve the least fuss: just wash and nosh. But no.

Bittman used to edit Cook’s magazine and the cookbooks he writes today do tend to feature recipes. It’s a common downfall, but what can you do? Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, Dips, Food Blogs, Food Politics, fruits, Grains, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How to Eat Vegetables and Lose Weight and Save the Planet (Without Really Trying)