We’re on vacation at Grandma’s house. Kate and I took our first walk without the stroller.

Stopping to chat with the neighbors.

Gotta go — see ya!

I’m reading a fascinating book. It’s called “Beating the Food Giants” by Paul Stitt, former corporate biochemist who worked for some of the big multinational food companies.

Another dirty trick the food companies have been pulling on the American public since 1911 is hydrogenated fats.

They have been selling partially hydrogenated fats (margarine and shortening) as a healthy, kosher alternative to lard, butter and other fat.

Until the ’80s, no one tried to find out if it was any more healthful than lard or butter. No one, that is, except for a few scientists like Ralph Holman at the Hormel Institute, who intuitively knew that hydrogenated fats were inherently dangerous.

Finally, Harvard School of Public Health did a long-term study by asking people how much margarine they were eating, then sat back and waited to see what they died from. Lo and behold, they discovered that the people who ate as little as three pats a day of margarine had twice the heart-attack rate of those who ate less than a pat a day, far worse than those who ate lard or butter.

I hope that every marga­rine manufacturer in the country gets his pants sued off for grossly misleading people about how healthful margarine is.

You’ll find margarine or shortening or partially hydrogenated vegetable fat in nearly every bread, cookie and cake sold in America.

Really interesting, huh?

Even if you don’t think you’re eating margarine, if you’re eating processed foods and baked goods, you’re eating it.

Chips Ahoy
Ingredients: enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate [vitamin B1], riboflavin [vitamin B2], folic acid), semisweet chocolate chips (sugar, chocolate, cocoa butter, dextrose, soy lecithin - an emulsifier), sugar, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, high fructose corn syrup, leavening (baking soda, ammonium phosphate), salt whey (from milk), natural and artificial flavor, caramel color.

Why don’t we hear about these studies that show that margarine and hydrogenated vegetable oils cause heart disease?

Because they don’t want you to know. They’re making a whole lot of money selling cookies.

Just how much money are they making?

1. Oreos: $519 million a year
2. Chips Ahoy: $347 million
3. Chips Deluxe: $160 million
4. Newtons: $137 million
5. Fudge Shoppe: $127 million

Source: Information Resources Inc.

That’s almost 1.3 billion dollars a year. Of course, those numbers are a few years old — so it’s more than that.

You think maybe those corporate executives have something to hide? You think maybe they have an incentive to blame foods like butter and cream and lard?

I agree with Paul Stitt. It’s disgusting how they are misleading the public and getting rich off of it.

I really recommend reading “Beating the Food Giants”. You can’t find the book in stores because it’s out of print. Turns out though that you can read the whole thing online.

We’re headed out early tomorrow morning.

I will try to post from New York but if I don’t, I’ll see you next week!

Senate Bill 201 passes out of the Appropriations Committee

SB 201, the Bill that will change the way raw milk is produced in California, passed unanimously out of the Appropriations Committee last week. Now that SB 201 has passed out of all necessary Committees, it will next be presented to the floors of the Assembly and Senate for a vote. That vote is expected sometime in mid-August. If passed by both houses it will then be presented to Governor Schwarzenegger for his review. If the Governor signs the Bill into law, raw milk will have won a major victory in California.

Under SB 201, all raw milk producers can opt to be either regulated under AB 1735, the one that imposes the 10 coliform limit, or the dairy can opt to be regulated under SB 201. If the dairy chooses SB 201 it will have to conduct pathogen testing (which currently is not required in California) and it will also have to submit what is known as a “Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point” plan (HACCP). The purpose of a HACCP is to allow each dairy to identify in its own production processes the areas that are most critical to ensure the safety of the milk and to take control measures to ensure that safety. HACCP’s for each dairy will be different for each dairy and will depend on how each individual dairy operates. A HACCP approach with pathogen testing is a much better approach to raw dairy safety than an arbitrary limit of 10 coliforms.

Source: Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund

I’m in bread heaven right now.

Seriously. This is the best bread I’ve eaten since I was in Germany 16 years ago. Actually, this bread is better.

I just sat down to a classic German breakfast. At least, this was the breakfast we had every morning when I visited Germany. Whole grain rye bread with cheese (they serve rolls as well, and butter, jam and Nutella, and sometimes poached eggs or fruit).

I am having coffee with raw milk and honey, and a slice of toasted Sprouted Seed Spelt Loaf from Grindstone Bakery, topped with some raw milk cheddar.

This is not your typical bread — this bread is similar to the rye bread they have in Germany. It’s very dense and flavorful. And it’s baked in a real wood-fired brick oven (which is why it tastes so good; the best pizza crusts are baked in wood- or coal-burning brick ovens).

This bread actually makes me want to eat breakfast! It would be delicious with homemade cream cheese (yogurt cheese), or with melted butter and jam. Or as an egg and cheese sandwich. Hmmm… how about French toast?

I think it would also go extremely well with soup or salad. Or with liver pate. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Egg salad. The possibilities are endless.

Not only is this bread delicious, but it’s good for you, too. They say it actually fights cancer.

According to researchers at the German Research Center of Food Chemistry, it is not just the vitamins, minerals and dietary fiber in bread that makes it good for us. They found a cancer-fighting chemical that is concentrated in the crust.

The compound, called pronyl-lysine, which is not found in raw flour, forms from the amino acid lysine and the starch in bread as it is baked. They tested pronyl-lysine on human intestinal cells in the laboratory and found that it boosts cancer-preventing phase II enzymes in the cells.

This potent antioxidant is created during a chemical reaction between the amino acid L-lysine and starch and sugars in the bread. This same reaction causes the crust to have a darker color than the rest of the bread.

The crust of our wood fired brick oven baked bread has an increased content of Pronyl-lysine because a high temperature is required to generate that compound. The intense energy radiated from the hot bricks of our oven penetrates the surface of the bread in a way no conventional oven can, producing the most outstanding crusts loaded with pronyl-lysine.

You can read more about the health benefits here on their website.

For just $8 (shipping included) you can get your own loaf of this fabulous Grindstone Bakery bread, delivered right to your door. What are you waiting for?

PS: The bread is best when lightly toasted. It will last 7 days in the fridge. But you can freeze it and eat it later. I bought 3 loaves which I’m going to slice and freeze. That way I can take out one or two slices at a time.

Right now I am watching the documentary, “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices”.

Please rent this movie. You can get it on Netflix or at Blockbuster.

Just watch it and then see if you can continue to shop at Wal-Mart.

I know I can’t. I will not spend another dime there.

Never again.

Wal-Mart Movie

This is masa. It’s the dough used to make corn tortillas and tamales.

The Spanish word for “dough,” masa is the traditional dough used to make corn TORTILLAS. It’s made with sun- or fire-dried corn kernels that have been cooked in limewater (water mixed with calcium oxide). After having been cooked, then soaked in the limewater overnight, the wet corn is ground into masa. Masa harina (literally “dough flour”) is flour made from dried masa. Source

I didn’t make this masa. My friend Victoria (our LA WAPF chapter leader) did — and she dropped some off for us to try.

Lucky us! We are having homemade tortillas tonight. Along with organic black beans with raw cheese melted on top, soaked brown rice (I would have cooked in stock but I ran out), and grass-fed taco meat (from US Wellness Meats). Along with some guacamole, creme fraiche (for sour cream) and homemade lacto-fermented salsa.

From what I have heard, masa harina just doesn’t come close — better than storebought but not in the same league as homemade masa.

The other problem with most storebought masa harina (like Masceca) is that it is most likely (a) rancid (b) not properly soaked and/or (c) made with genetically modified corn.

And storebought corn tortillas don’t taste anything at all like the real thing. Kinda like Wonder Bread compared to a real French baguette.

I’m going to be trying my hand at making masa very soon — I got my organic field corn and pickling lime. I will post photos and recipes.

A friend of mine posted a query to the DNT (Discussing Nourishing Traditions) list the other day.

She and her husband became violently ill from something they ate a few nights ago, and she was trying to figure out what might have been the culprit.

She described in detail what they had eaten. For lunch, they had hamburgers (cooked medium rare) made from beef from a local grass-based organic farm. For dinner, they had chicken, made from chicken she bought at Whole Foods (free-range, organic, but not pastured).

She said they also had “an organic arugula salad (the kind in the pre-washed bag) and sliced Parmesan cheese made from (aged) raw milk” with dinner.

She asked the list if we thought the food poisoning had more likely been caused by the undercooked hamburger, or perhaps the chicken. She was wondering if she should throw away the leftovers.

Almost every single person (myself included) who responded said it was most likely the bagged arugula.

Our reasoning? For one thing, Earthbound Organics (the brand of arugula she bought) has had issues with E. coli before.

I am not sure is Earthbound Organics was absolved of the charges of E. coli contamination. But scares of bacteria contamination are becoming more and more frequent, affecting a plethora of different fruits, vegetables, and grains.

Most recently it’s tomatoes. And Malt-O-Meal was recalled a few months ago, due to salmonella contamination.

Do we know for sure it was the arugula? No, we don’t. But it’s very likely. Since the other food was cooked (or in the case of the cheese, aged) and it came from small farmers. The arugula was the only food eaten raw — so if it was contaminated with bacteria, they would not have been killed by cooking.

My friend and her husband were lucky. They are young and in good health. But what if they had been very young or very old, or infirm? They might not have survived. They could have died.

What is happening here? Why are so many foods, especially innocent vegetables and grains, many of them organic, being contaminated with deadly pathogenic bacteria?

I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I have come up with a couple possible causes:

1. The groundwater is contaminated from run-off from CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations).

2. The farm workers picking and packaging the produce are not washing their hands after using the restroom. (This I heard from a local grass farmer. He said it’s very tough to enforce.)

I’m not sure how likely either of those scenarios are and how much they could be contributing to the spread of lethal bacteria — I’m not an expert in agriculture. However, they seem very plausible.

I thought of a third possible cause. When I went to the Earthbound Organics website to learn more about their farming practices, I read that they use compost and pelletized chicken manure on their crops:

“The compost mixture reaches and maintains an internal temperature of 131 to 149 degrees Fahrenheit for at least 5 days to kill any disease-causing bacteria and weed seeds before it is used in a field. We also use pelletized chicken manure, which has been heat-steam processed to kill unwanted bacteria.”

Considering how large their operation is, it’s doubtful that they use chicken manure from small farms with pastured chickens. It’s more likely the chicken manure comes from factory farms.

I googled “E. coli” and “pelletized chicken manure” and found this article:

“On Wednesday, Marler told the Free Lance he has known since November that the E. coli contamination occurred on land farmed by Mission Organics and leased from Paicines Ranch, and that the state agency’s investigation only confirmed that.”

And this one:

““The Salinas Valley appears to have seasonal, systemic E. coli O157:H7 contamination in the environment,” said a California health department official.

A portion of Paicenes Ranch was leased by Mission Organics, a company using organic production practices and products in a transition-to-organics program. While not implemented, pelletized, heat-treated, composted chicken manure was used in the production process on that field, the only field on which manure was the major fertilizer.

Samples testing positive for E. coli O157:H7 were also found on the Eade Ranch, where the company Braga Ranch was growing spinach; on the Wickstrom Ranch; and on the Taix Ranch in places next to the Nyland Ranch, which had a 3,500-head cattle feedlot a half-mile away.”

So it looks like Mission Organics was also using pelletized chicken manure — and they also had E. coli contamination (again, I’m not sure if they were later found innocent or not).

To understand more about these lethal bacteria, I found an excerpt from a Food Safety Newsletter discussing E. coli 0157:H7:

The problem of E. coli O157:H7 contamination is complex. The largest known reservoir of these pathogens is the colon of cattle. When cattle are fed large portions of grain — as is the case in feedlots and large factory farms — both the number of E. coli and their acid resistance rise significantly. This increases the likelihood that pathogenic E. coli — including O157:H7 — will survive and reproduce. Perhaps 30-50% of grain-fed cattle harbor E. coli O157:H7. Because the strain is acid resistant, if it contaminates uncooked food it survives the acid environment of human stomachs, which normally kills most bacteria, and then can cause serious illness.

The author of the newsletter opines:

“Although it may be hard to swallow, you’re probably much safer eating a hamburger made from grass-fed beef slaughtered in a local slaughter house and topped with a piece of lettuce from your neighbor’s organic farm that used the grass-fed cow’s composted manure as a fertilizer than you are eating products of all-American industrial agriculture.”

I have to agree. And this, my friends, is what makes me stand even more solidly in my belief that vegetarianism is not a sustainable practice for the environment.

Here’s why: It is impossible to grow crops without some kind of fertilizer for the soil. Farmers, particularly organic farmers, need animal manure in order to raise healthy crops of fruits and vegetables and grains. They do not want to have to resort to synthetic chemical fertilizers.

Why not? For one reason, they are are petroleum by-products.

What is a synthetic fertilizer?

Synthetic simply means “man made” and the common nitrogen sources such as ammonia, ammonium sulfate, and urea are by-products from the oil and natural gas industry.

Source

Hmm… back to petroleum again. Isn’t that something we are trying to avoid? Dependence on oil?

So, if organic vegetable farmers need manure to fertilize their fields, they have to get it from somewhere. They can get it from the factory farms. Or they can get it from small local farmers who raise their animals on organic grass.

Problem is, there aren’t very many small farmers left anymore. Most have been driven out of business by industrial agriculture.

How can we help to support these farmers who raise animals on grass? By buying their products. Raw milk and butter and beef from grass-fed cows, eggs and chickens and pigs who were raised on pasture. All of these animals provide healthy manure, which can then be used on crops.

So you see, there is one very important thing you can do for the environment and for the health of your family and the public health. And it’s not vegetarianism.

The best thing you can do for a healthy environment and a healthy populous is to support local farmers who raise cows and chickens on grass instead of feeding them grain. Farmers who do not use pesticides or antibiotics or growth hormones.

If you want to avoid eating meat, I think that’s fine. But don’t say vegetarianism is good for the environment. Or for public health. Particularly veganism. Because it isn’t. It is short-sighted and it is not a solution in the long run.

And if you are a vegetarian who cares about the environment and health, hopefully you still drink milk and eat cheese and butter and eggs, and you buy those products from grass farmers.

And if you are buying organic milk from cows that are fed grain (like Horizon Organic, a factory farm), you are part of the problem.

Here are some sources to help you find meat and dairy products from animals raised on pasture:

Eat Wild

Real Milk

In future posts, I will get into other issues regarding vegetarianism vs. meat eating, including methane, global warming, and nutrition and health.

How many three-star Michelin restaurants have you been to in your life?

Me, I’ve been to exactly zero.

Until next Friday — when I get to eat at… (drum roll) Le Bernardin in New York City.

Le Bernardin is one of only three restaurants in New York awarded Michelin’s highest award: three stars.

The Michelin three stars is arguably the highest culinary honor in the world. Yes, even higher than winning Top Chef America.

The restaurant was voted 20th best in the world in the Restaurant magazine, and Top 50 for 2008.

Here’s Chef Eric Ripert, with a whole lot of truffles:

After a multi-course dinner, we’re off to the theater to see “South Pacific”. What a perfect night it will be. I can’t imagine a better way to celebrate my 40th birthday.

In addition to Le Bernardin, we will be dining at the following two establishments:

(1) H & H Bagels - Best bagels in the free world.

And (2) John’s Pizzeria on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village.

Say what you want about Grimaldi’s and Lombardi’s. Yeah, they’re good.

But John’s is my first love.

I still have two more dinner slots to fill. (We’ll go to H & H and John’s during the day.) We are staying at the Palace Hotel for three whole nights!

For me, this is like going to Disneyland.

I want to thank reader Karyn Martin for commenting on a post and alerting me to the fact that the star of Broadways’ South Pacific, Kelli O’Hara is on vacation this week.

Karyn, thanks to you and the time you took to post. We were able to reschedule our trip so we can see Kelli O’Hara in South Pacific after all. YAY!!!

And thanks to Seth, who didn’t mind eating the cost of changing our flight — in fact, he insisted on it.

Karyn, I can’t thank you enough for alerting me to this. I will make a toast to you over bagels and cream cheese and NY pizza in the Big Apple.

This just goes to show you — one person’s voice does get heard. If there’s something you need to say, speak up! You never know who will hear you and who will benefit from it.