Yesterday, Renzata posted this Talk topic, "WTF is on my swiss chard?" with the above accompanying images. "No freakin' clue," was my first answer. Luckily, Serious Eats readers were more helpful and pointed out they were beetle eggs. Or UFOs.
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Good magazine—with the help of a Michigan State University agriculture and resource studies professor—has put together a chart showing which of the major U.S. corporate food processors own or have ties to the organic brands we often see on the shelves. It's a helpful chart, but there's no accompanying article that I could find on the site. So I ask: What's the point? I'd like to read something that informs me as to why I should care about the relationship between these entities. Otherwise, the chart's implication is "association with corporations = bad." Which prompts me to play devil's advocate: Is it a given that simply being a subsidiary of a major corporation paints the organic brand with a less-than-green brush? Do you avoid these brands because of their ties? And if so, the info I'd find even more useful: What noncorporate organic brands do you buy instead?
Related: Be It Ever So Homespun, There’s Nothing Like Spin [New York Times]
Salon.com ran a fascinating article over the weekend about organic wines, and how the USDA prohibition against using sulfites in those wines can lead to instability and unpredictable flavor changes during aging. Some wine-makers get around this rule by labeling their product as "made with organic grapes," a designation that guarantees that at least 70 percent of the grapes in the wine are organic, but one that also allows for the addition of sulfites to help preserve flavor.
Sulfites are a naturally occurring byproduct in wine-making, and are additionally added as a preservative to prevent oxidation. According to the article, wine-makers have been adding sulfites for hundreds of years to help slow the gradual transition into vinegar that all wines undergo. Hence some experts are wary of wines produced without sulfites. There's something about the directness of this statement that I find really refreshing:
The UK's Soil Association, a nonprofit organization responsible for certifying 80% of the country's organic produce, has released a set of rules that govern whether it will certify produce that has been shipped by air. At one side of the issue is the fact that shipping food by air has a very large carbon footprint, and as such is not sustainable as a food-delivery mechanism. On the other side, however, is that 80 percent of the produce that is shipped to Europe by air comes from "lower or middle income countries," primarily in Africa, and so curtailing the means of delivery from those countries could have an adverse affect on their agriculture economies.
The Soil Association has therefore proposed two recommendations to allow air-freighted produce to be organic:
1.) All Soil Association–certified air-freighted products [must] meet the Soil Association’s Ethical Trade standards or equivalent fair trade standards by 2011.
2.) Businesses reliant on air freight [must] develop initiatives to reduce the amount of product they air freight [to] encourage people and businesses to be less reliant on fossil fuels for their livelihoods.
The New York Times had a blog post the other day that was brilliantly titled Five Easy Ways to Go Organic. Throw "easy" and "organic" into the same title and you're bound to elicit a response. If they had thrown "cheap" in there as well, they would have seen thousands of comments on the blog posts instead of hundreds.
The gist of the post, which was mostly gleaned from an interview with Alan Greene, author of Raising Baby Green:
Switching to organic is tough for many families who don’t want to pay higher prices or give up their favorite foods. But by choosing organic versions of just a few foods that you eat often, you can increase the percentage of organic food in your diet without big changes to your shopping cart or your spending.
The key is to be strategic in your organic purchases. Opting for organic produce, for instance, doesn’t necessarily have a big impact, depending on what you eat. According to the Environmental Working Group, commercially-farmed fruits and vegetables vary in their levels of pesticide residue. Some vegetables, like broccoli, asparagus and onions, as well as foods with peels, such as avocados, bananas and oranges, have relatively low levels compared to other fruits and vegetables.
So how do you make your organic choices count? The author suggests five organic foods that are readily available, consumed frequently, and not prohibitively expensive.
But were the five easy ways easy and right?
Yes, if you are a rat. Harold McGee shares the results of a 21-year study of organic wheat production:
As an "integrative method" for assessing quality, they gave lab animals a choice of biscuits made from organic or conventional wheat. The rats ate significantly more of the former. The authors call this result remarkable, because they found the two wheats to be very similar in chemical composition and baking performance.
Recent studies conducted with humans have shown that we can less reliably (if at all) discern a difference in taste between organic and non-organic foods. Assuming the rats are right and organic foods are tastier, what's to account for it? One hypothesis is that the higher levels of phytochemicals are responsible.
Photograph from {saffron} on Flickr
Here's what your mixed organic box might look like this time of year if you lived in Sydney, Australia.
Recently, I bought some baby food. This was unusual for me, since my daughter, Iris, is three. "Is this for your baby?" the cashier asked, ringing up a couple of jars of Dr. Susanna's World Baby Foods.
"Uh, I'm going to try it myself."
Food writer, I explained, while the clerk looked around for the Security button.
Dr. Susanna's is based in Seattle, and its shtick is international foods. There are currently six flavors. I tried Tokyo Tum Tum and Lullaby Thai; also available are Sweetie Tahiti, Baby Dal, and so on. They're organic and, according to the website, "favor local farmers," which makes no sense, since the products are sold nationwide. I guess the farmers could be local to the United States.
The Lullaby Thai tasted like bananas with cardamom, which it is. Not bad. The Tokyo Tum Tum was a bad collision of flavors: sweet apple juice, bok choy, and edamame. Each 4-ounce container is $4.
Andrew Martin reported in the New York Times yesterday that "the Department of Agriculture, the final arbiter of all things organic, is poised to approve a list of nonorganic ingredients that can be used in food stamped with its green-and-white organic seal."
I for one find this whole argument really silly.
In a piece in Saturday's New York Times about Stonyfield Farms' founder Gary Hirschberg being dispatched to Paris to introduce and market an organic yogurt brand, he said something quite thought-provoking: "If organic is going to be relying on being better for the environment or saving farmers, then I don't believe it's going to be successful in Europe. It has to be about better taste."
Does organic yogurt taste better? Does an organically grown tomato taste any better than a conventionally grown one? My experience in trying to answer this question in general has not been kind to the organic movement. In taste tests Jeffrey Steingarten and I did on our regional cable television show a few years ago, organic milk and organic butter did not fare very well at all. They were both among the lowest rated products we tried in each category.
But I'm going to start conducting blind taste tests in multiple product categories, and perhaps some Serious Eaters want to join me and play along at home and online. Let's start with full-fat yogurt. It would be great if we could find a brand of yogurt that puts out both an organic and nonorganic product, because at least we would be comparing apples to apples. But I'll see what I find, and all of you do the same, and let's report back by the end of the week.
My friend, Rebecca Blood, is 2 weeks into her month long project of eating on a food stamp budget while maintaining her and her husband's normal standard of eating - organic food and one alcoholic drink with every dinner. Her budget: $74.00/week or $320.80/month, the USDA "Thrifty" standard for a family of 2 adults, aged 20-50 years.
So far, so good! She came in under budget in week 1, and based on her photos documenting the project, it certainly looks like they are enjoying some tasty and filling meals.
Alan Richman's latest GQ column on San Francisco's Ferry Building, "the West Coast's new temple of tastes" is a riveting read until you hit this sentence:
"Alice Waters and sourdough bread aside, the Bay Area has contributed surprisingly little to the culinary ripening of America considering its proximity to fertile growing regions from the Central Valley to Napa and Sonoma counties."
and then all you can do is shake your head, furrow your brow, and start wondering if he's begun smoking crack. The SF Chronicle's Michael Bauer naturally took exception and wrote about it on his blog, saying, "I simply don't know where to begin. Has he heard of wine? Artisan cheeses? Arugula?" and promises to post a list of the Bay Area's culinary contributions tomorrow. (And no, I don't think Rice-A-Roni's gonna make the cut.)
It's not every chef who can say they've cooked for royalty, but after this Saturday's Kentucky Derby, Gil Logan will be able to say exactly that because Queen Elizabeth II will be visiting Churchill Downs and choosing from the menu he's put together:
"When it was decided that they'd be visiting the Derby and eating here, the queen's staff Googled me," Logan said. "The royal family prefers to eat organic, natural foods, and they travel with their own food service staff.
"But when they saw that I buy as much as I can from local farmers who are growing and raising food without pesticides or hormones or antibiotics, they were quite happy to eat from our regular menu."
Logan actually planned out this year's menu last June, long before the queen's trip was decided. He chose to do it so far in advance so he could have the time to properly source the ingredients from local organic providers.
So what's on the menu? One dish he'll be serving is his "Kentucky-fied" version of the classic French dish cassoulet: "Instead of just white beans, I use black-eyed peas. I use country ham, which is just as good as, if not better than, European ham like Serrano. And I splash in a little bourbon too." And among the desserts will be sugar cookies colored after the silks that Derby jockeys will be wearing on the day, "so you can bet on your cookie."
How do you know your organic veggies are as labeled? Out of this concern, the The Food Standards Agency in the U.K. "funded a study to come up with a test to confirm the authenticity of finished organic foods." The test uses nitrogen content as a measure. Natural fertilizers like manure leave detectable amounts of nitrogen in crops, while synthetic fertilizers do not. In the test's current form, results aren't stunningly accurate, but it can be used to "support or corroborate the suspicion of trading standards commissions."
Many dairy farmers are switching to organic methods to beat new federal regulations, according to the New York Times. That's all well and good, but when Jeffrey Steingarten and I did a blind milk taste test on our tv show a few years ago, the organic milks we sampled did not fare well at all.
Springwise is a site about new business ideas and one they've recently identified is the growing market for both fresh and frozen organic gourmet baby food. I don't know that this is a new idea really, as Diane Keaton's character in 1987's Baby Boom was basically doing this at the end of the movie, and the companies Springwise describes are exactly like hers was: "relatively small and regional start-ups, founded by parents who couldn’t find foods they wanted to feed their babies and toddlers". What really matters is that this provides more food options for parents who eat organic and want the same for their babies, but maybe don't have the time or are just too tired to prepare meals from scratch.
Bohemian Baby and Evie's Organic Edibles deliver fresh food to customers in Los Angeles and New York, respectively; their menus rotate weekly so parents can choose from a variety of offerings. Mom Made, Plum Organics, Happy Baby and NummyNums all sell organic, flash-frozen food meant for the frozen food aisles; Plum Organics is available in some Whole Foods as is Mom Made, which can also be found in some Wegmans and Balduccis.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Hsiao-Ching Chou talks to Greg Conner, the founder of Eat Local, an area company dedicated to providing frozen microwavable meals made with organic, sustainably-raised seasonal produce and meats that all come from within a few hundred mile radius of the city, cooked in small batches every day for maximum freshness. "The cost runs from about $7 for a single portion to $55 for an eight-person entree. "We're not the cheapest," Conner acknowledges. "But we know the provenance of the food. You pay for the safety in your food and you're having less impact on the environment." [via The Food Section]
Lots of great pieces in the Chicago Reader's recently released yearly food issue—a guide to subscription farms for those who want to eat local, where to shop for ethnic groceries to diversify your larder, and the requisite Top 50 Restaurants as chosen by their readers—but the best by far is Nicholas Day's cover story on chef Michael Altenburg, whose soon-to-open pizzeria Crust will be Chicago's first ever certified organic restaurant and only the fourth in all of the US.
Why so few? "Before a restaurant can flash the USDA organic seal, an inspector has to check the provenance of every ingredient in every recipe, which means chefs can’t be nearly as flexible. "Let’s say you’re Bill the Tomato Grower and today you just did a bumper crop,” Altenberg says. "For me to create a special pizza, I have to go through the whole process of resubmitting a recipe." That could take up to a week. "It’s not going to prevent me from being seasonal. What I’m going to have to do is think ahead."
[via dirtynerdluv]
Time Magazine's current cover story is Eating Better Than Organic by John Cloud, in which he explores the debate between buying local and buying organic. Which is better for the food system, food grown by a small farmer locally or one grown by a big organic firm that uses large-scale industrial methods? Is buying local food that might have been treated with pesticides better for the environment than organic food that's been trucked, shipped and flown from far away, using up tons of fossil fuels? Which tastes better? Cloud asked Whole Foods CEO John Mackey for his opinion:
He told me that when he can't get locally grown organics--and even he can't reliably get them--he decides on the basis of taste. "I would probably purchase a local nonorganic tomato before I would purchase an organic one that was shipped from California," he said. He called the two tomatoes "an environmental wash," since the California one had petroleum miles on it while the nonorganic one was grown with pesticides. "But the local tomato from outside Austin will be fresher, will just taste better," he said.
Cloud goes on to check out restaurants dedicated to local ingredients, like New York's Blue Hill which sources 80% of their food from within the New York region, or the free restaurant at Google HQ in Mountain View, CA called Café 150, which only uses food produced within 150 miles of them, as well as joining a Community Supported Agriculture, which lets you subscribe to a local farm and receive fresh produce every week or month.
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and Michael Pollan, author of last year's bestselling The Omnivore's Dilemma are talking tonight at UC Berkeley's Wheeler Hall Auditorium after a presentation by Mackey called "The Past, Present, and Future of Food". There aren't any more tickets for the event but it will be a live webcast—it starts ten minutes before the event at 7 pm PST/10 pm EST. You can read more about how Mackey and Pollan's long-running conversation got started over at the Ethicurean.
It's always perplexed me to watch Florida, that perma-tropic state, import its strawberries from Mexico, lemons from Seville, and oranges--I kid you not--from California, when all of these grow prolifically in our own back yards (or at least they did, before cutting crews cut down all the citrus trees during the canker scare of '02--I swear, if it's not one thing it's another).
But this article in the Palm Beach Post claims to have seen people joining forces to buy organic food. Have I judged my people too harshly?
Confused by the morass of acronyms and catchphrases on your bag of beans? Organic, Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, Smithsonian Bird Friendly, Utz Kapeh, 4Cs, and Starbucks CAFE Practices are explained in this article by Erik Ness.
I sure have. Now I know.
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