La Vida Locavore is the blog for anyone whose crazy life includes planting, growing, weeding, fertilizing, raising, picking, harvesting, processing, cooking, baking, making, serving, buying, selling, distributing, transporting, composting, organizing around, lobbying about, writing about, thinking about, talking about, playing with, and eating food!
Is milk from non-supplemented cows different from rbST-supplemented cows? No. All milk is the same. Because rbST is genetically identical to what cows produce naturally, milk from rbST-supplemented cows cannot be distinguished from milk that is produced by cows without using rbST.
Does rbST negatively affect animal health? For products to be approved, they must meet stringent animal-safety criteria, and this product has met such criteria of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as well as those of 19 other regulatory authorities that have approved this product for use in dairy cows.
What does the acquisition of Posilac mean for the dairy industry and consumers? The acquisition further enhances Elanco's commitment to the dairy industry. It means farmers have continued access to this vital technology. And, that consumers can continue to have access to affordable, wholesome milk.
Why are you buying what some see as a controversial product? We recognize the overwhelming scientific evidence that Posilac is safe, and that milk from rbST-
supplemented cows is the same as all milk - despite the mistaken assertions of some special-interest groups.
Lying about it already. Obviously they were the right customer for the product. They are going to have a conference call with more info about it later today (11am PST). I can hardly wait to hear what they have to say.
Iowa's legislature and state agencies have been notorious for doing nothing to address huge pollution problems stemming from confined-animal feeding operations (CAFOs).
The state Environmental Protection Commission today rejected previously approved permits for two large hog confinements in Dallas County.
The surprise move came after a two-hour meeting in Urbandale at which commissioners said rules drawn up to dictate approval of large-scale confinement permits leave out important environmental considerations and neighbors' quality-of-life concerns.
"There are battle lines being drawn on this, and it creates a political situation that the Legislature cannot ignore," commission chairman Henry Marquard said.
Only a handful of permits have been denied in Iowa, but rarely has one been turned down after it met approval from the Department of Natural Resources and passed a complicated scoring system adopted by counties, including Dallas.
The nine-member commission voted to block these permits on a strong 6-2 vote. I wouldn't be surprised if the matter ends up in court, however.
The proposed hog confinements would have a total of 7,440 hogs in rural Dallas County, which is the fastest growing county in the state. These confinements will produce as much waste as a town of 30,000 people and it will go untreated.
Earlier this month, Dallas County Supervisors voted against allowing these proposed hog confinements, but in reality there isn't much the local people can do about the hog confinements that will be owned by the out of state company, Cargill.
We need federal legislation to make CAFOs pay for the harm they cause, because our state legislature has shown itself to be unwilling to act to protect air and water quality in Iowa.
But in the absence of federal action, a state law giving counties "local control" (agricultural zoning rights) would at least offer some protection. Some county supervisors would rubber-stamp every proposed CAFO, but others would follow the lead of the Dallas County supervisors.
For all I know, Cargill will sue to reinstate their permits to open these hog confinements. But however this story ends, it's good to see the majority of the Environmental Protection Commission's members doing something to protect the environment.
UPDATE: I learned from the online newsletter of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement that the Iowa Department of Natural Resources recently denied a permit for a different proposed CAFO.
Because of the efforts of CCI members and other local residents, the DNR recently denied a 4,900-head hog factory proposed for southern Appanoose County. The permit application did not meet legal requirements, nor did their master matrix pass muster. Although the applicant for this proposed confinement is a local resident, the 4,900 hogs would have been owned by Cargill. Cargill, one of the largest privately-held corporations in the world, has been behind a number of proposed factory farms around the state, including two proposed 7,440-head hog factories in northwest Dallas County.
I don't know how much closer one can get to Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" that the Irish eat babies to simultaneously deal with hunger and overpopulation.
PATNA: A state government in eastern India is encouraging people to eat rats in an effort to battle soaring food prices and save grain stocks.
Authorities in Bihar, one of India's poorest states, are asking rich and poor alike to switch to eating rats in a bid to reduce the dependence on rice. They even plan to offer rats on restaurant menus.
"Eating of rats will serve twin purposes: it will save grains from being eaten away by rats and will simultaneously increase our grain stock," said Vijay Prakash, an official from the state�s welfare department.
Officials say almost 50 per cent of India's food grains stocks are eaten away by rodents in fields or warehouses.
Jitan Ram Manjhi, Bihar's caste and tribe welfare minister, said rat meat was a healthy alternative to expensive rice or grains, and should be eaten by one and all.
"We are very serious to implement this project since the food crisis is turning serious day by day," said Manjhi, who has eaten rats.
This is giving me flashbacks of British govt officials doing photo ops eating burgers during the height of the mad cow problem.
Here in sunny San Diego, one of my precious angels peed on the floor. I was on my way to work today, already running late, when I smelled cat pee. Sure enough, there was a few shirts of mine right next to the door, soaked and dripping. Ew. We'll be visiting the vet soon. The only problem is I don't know which of my furry friends did the crime so I have to guess. My money's on Molly.
Not great news for farmers and anyone growing food. I have just finished rereading Mark Lynas book, "Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet". A book which, alas, won't be read by the likes of global warming denier Senator Inhofe (R-OK), who has amply demonstrated his ferocious loyalty to big oil and the energy cartel to the detriment of logic. His pockets are full of graft.
Let me explain what's in store for us. First of all we now know for sure, as does German Chancellor Merkel who tried to talk some sense to the other leaders, that the world will start to unravel once we heat up another two degrees (though some deniers seem to think that we're entering a mini ice age!) Simply, as Mark Lynas explains, the Amazon rain forest has no resistance to fire because it is constantly humid. When the planet heats up by another three degrees the humidity dries out, and the Amazon, being the lungs of the Earth, burns to a cinder. This will cause the Siberian peat-bogs to thaw and release its massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. We are now getting closer to five degrees. Once we get to six degrees we have reached the end game. Adios!
A variety of headlines from the USA tells me that he's not wrong: Scorched USA suffers worst drought since Great Depression....Drought, a fixture in much of the West for nearly a decade, now covers more than one-third of the continental USA. And it's spreading....
I've been following the Scott Kleeb Senate race in Nebraska, and not only because Scott Kleeb is incredibly HOT. Kleeb raises beef (and even if he didn't - coming from Nebraska he'd have to know a thing or two about farming and ranching). The New Yorker has a piece on him called Where's the Beef? ... not terribly informative about how Kleeb will be for food and ag policy but at least it's not the hit job they did on Obama.
And he made references to his childhood: he grew up moving with his parents from one military base to another and spent time with his grandparents in Broken Bow, Nebraska. Then, in 1998, he started working summers on a ranch while getting his Ph.D., in American history. As part of his dissertation research, he spent a year living in his old pickup and driving around to state parks. Once, he was chased by a bear. The thesis topic? "The Atlantic West: Cowboys, Capitalists and the Making of an American Myth." "What's interesting is we tend to think about the cowboy as being this iconic American image, but in reality he resold his cattle globally, and he was part of the world economy," Kleeb said. He does something similar, raising organic Kobe beef, which he sells to restaurants in Los Angeles and Europe. "I spend my days doing paperwork," he said.
I guess we'll have to work on converting Kleeb over to the idea of local food?
This diary is a follow-up to one I posted earlier this week that might have had inaccurate information. Here's what I was able to come up with. From Global Seed Industry Concentration
With the January 2005 acquisition of Seminis for $1,400 million, Monsanto takes a dominant position in the fast-growing vegetable seed market - a previously untapped seed segment for Monsanto. Under a variety of brand names, Seminis supplies over 3,500 seed varieties to fruit and vegetable growers in 150 countries. The Seminis acquisition includes the following brands:
- Royal Sluis
- Petoseed
- Bruinsma
- Asgrow Vegetable Seeds
For Monsanto, "vegetable seed is the next logical strategic move" because it's a "high value, high growth segment in agriculture."13 According to Monsanto, seed and trait gross profit as percent of sales is higher for vegetables (64%) than for soybeans (63%) or for corn (57%). Monsanto now assumes a leading market share in the global vegetable seed market, where they were virtually invisible before:
Beans Monsanto controls 31% of the global seed market
Cucumbers Monsanto controls 38% of the global seed market
Hot Pepper Monsanto controls 34% of the global seed market
Sweet PepperMonsanto controls 29% of the global seed market
Tomato Monsanto controls 23% of the global seed market
Onions Monsanto controls 25% of the global seed market
I know you may be shocked (shocked!) to hear this, but well -
Federal inspectors at U.S. border crossings repeatedly turned back filthy, disease-ridden shipments of peppers from Mexico in the months before a salmonella outbreak that sickened 1,400 people was finally traced to Mexican chilies.
Yet no larger action was taken. Food and Drug Administration officials insisted as recently as last week that they were surprised by the outbreak because Mexican peppers had not been spotted as a problem before.
On Friday, Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's food safety chief, told reporters peppers were not a cause for concern before they were implicated in the salmonella outbreak.
"We have not typically seen problems with peppers," Acheson said. "Our import sampling is typically focused on areas where we know we've got problems or we've seen problems in the past, which is why we're now increasing our sampling for peppers."
Recently, I wrote a diary on a revealing report by the Federal Trade Commission about how food companies are targeting kids with all kinds of junk food marketing, to the tune of $1.6 billion annually. I praised the FTC for writing such a damning indictment of how the likes of McDonald's and Kraft Foods take advantage of children's vulnerabilities, often going behind parents' backs, for example, in schools. But the detailed description of how kids are marketed to is where my praise for the agency ends.
Like many other government reports, it's like one staff person (among the rank and file) wrote the description of the problem, while another (more politically accountable) wrote the recommendations. Trouble is the two don't go together. What's the point of having a government agency conduct a damning investigation that results in no meaningful recommendations for regulatory action?
Remember the news from a week or so back that now Whole Foods is included in a beef recall? Well, Reuters reported on that same recall of 1.2 million pounds of beef today. They are now recalling yet another 160,000 pounds of beef. This time the lucky store that got the bad meat was Fred Meyer in the Pacific Northwest. (Details are on the USDA FSIS site.)
Today, Renna's Meat Market, a Fresno, Calif., firm is recalling approximately 780 pounds of ground beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7.
Yesterday, Palama Holdings LLC, a Kapolei, Hawaii, establishment, said it's recalling approximately 4,535 pounds of fully cooked pork products because they may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes.
Aug. 8: Nebraska Beef Ltd., announced that it is recalling approximately 1.2 million pounds of primal cuts, subprimal cuts and boxed beef that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7.
Aug. 7: Dallas City Packing Inc., a Dallas, Texas, establishment, recalled approximately 941,271 pounds of cattle heads with tonsils not completely removed, which is not compliant with regulations that require the removal of tonsils from cattle of all ages.
Aug. 6: S&S Foods LLC., an Azusa, Calif., firm, recalled approximately 153,630 pounds of frozen ground beef products because they may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7.
Aug. 6: Tyson Foods Inc. of Vicksburg, Miss., recalled 51,360 pounds of raw frozen chicken breast tenderloin products because they may contain an undeclared allergen, soy, which is not declared on the label.
Aug. 5: DBC Inc., doing business as World Class Canapes of Wilmington, Mass., recalled approximately 285 pounds of ready-to-eat chicken products that may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes.
And these are just the ones we know about. Remember, with the exception of the cow heads and the soy-tainted chicken, the other recalls were USDA "Class 1," which means a health hazard situation where there is a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death.
The lesson I'm taking from this is "Don't eat beef from the grocery store. Period."
So what does the USDA have to say for itself?
However, the head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture said today that the food safety world is in good shape.
However, USDA boss Ed Schafer told Reuters today that the number of contaminated products has declined in recent years and things are lookng up.
"I don't believe that, from a USDA standpoint, we need to increase the number of inspectors or change the testing requirements," Schafer told Reuters.
He said he like to see the food industry experimenting with new and better equipment and ideas.
"You start mandating things, and that incentive to improve goes away," he told the wire service.
Pedigree brand pet food is being recalled from Albertsons in SoCal and Costco in Northern Cal. It's kind of a timely news item, too, given that Marion Nestle's newest book Pet Food Politics is hitting the shelves this week. The book is all about the big pet food recall in 2007. I am definitely going to read it because even though I eat organic and local, my three furry daughters do not. They absolutely INSIST on mainstream nasty cat food (they boycott anything else I buy) and even though it's gross, it helps with the hairballs too. The thought of feeding my kitties anything that could make them sick or even kill them is beyond awful.
After the public outrage over the videos of downer cows being tortured at a slaughterhouse, I am a little surprised to see this headline: USDA Refuses to Ban Sick 'Downer' Cows from U.S. Food Supply. What's the story here? Veterinarians are still inspecting cows prior to slaughter, but those that collapse AFTER inspection may still enter the food supply (so long as they are re-inspected). Mmm.
Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer has rejected calls to ban downer cattle from the U.S. food supply.
Downer cattle are those too sick or injured to stand. Because these cows are at a higher risk of carrying the fatal, incurable neurological disorder known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, the USDA prohibited their slaughter in 2004.
This regulation was relaxed in 2007 to allow the slaughter of any animal that collapses after an initial veterinary inspection, as long as it is re-examined and slaughtered separately.
The Humane Society of the United States has sued the FDA to close this loophole, and Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee has also called for a complete ban on downer cows from the food supply. In addition, Kohl has called for stiffer penalties for companies that violate the ban, and for the installation of 24-hour surveillance cameras at meat processing plants.
I highly doubt that most downer cows have BSE (mad cow). The way we treat cows in CAFOs isn't exactly conducive to keeping them healthy, even if you totally ignore the issue of mad cow.
At long last, hospital food is getting an upgrade. Hospitals have long been on a notorious list (along with airplanes and college dorms) of places with horrible food. What distinguishes hospitals from airplanes, though, is that hospitals are places where the sick are supposed to get well. Serving them chicken that "looked like plastic painted with shoe polish" is probably not the way to accomplish that.
The quote above comes from a blog post that describes the national effort to improve hospital food, led by Health Care Without Harm:
Today, however, nutrition experts, doctors, hospital administrators, food service companies and patient advocates are working together to make hospital food healthier, better-tasting and a key part of the healing process. Ronald M. Davis, M.D., president of the American Medical Association, in an article for the AMA's April newsletter, called on hospitals to "buy meat and poultry raised without nontherapeutic antibiotics, use milk produced without recombinant bovine growth hormones, and replace unhealthy snacks found in many vending machines with healthy choices."
Gerard Mullin, M.D., director of Integrative GI Nutrition Services at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, points out that "food has biochemical benefits beyond just calories. Having the freshest food available to preserve the bioactivity of those nutrients is very important for healing sick patients."
Hospital food's need for reconstructive surgery has led 127 facilities to sign a pledge to serve primarily organic and chemical-free food, produced locally. Kaiser Permanente, the nation's largest health care system, has adopted similar healthy-food guidelines, declaring that its hospitals will work with local suppliers and other vendors to serve food that is "fresher, tastes better, and is associated with increased consumption of fruits and vegetables."
This effort has spread to hospitals in 21 states, ranging from very small (25 beds) to very large (900 beds). Recently the American Nurses Association also joined in the call for healthier hospital food. Yay!
Ceviche is a popular Latin American dish, a sort of a cold salad of citrus-marinated seafood, topped with corn tostado!
Ceviche is found throughout Latin American (and Spain). The most well known recipe is to be found in Peru but, in fact, almost all of Latin America has adopted this dish, each giving a twist to the original recipe (I've read that in Ecuador, for example, they use ketchup and orange juice to add flavor).
You go to the grocery store and buy food that (although sometimes it's hard to tell) originated on a farm. How much of each dollar you spend goes to the farmer? On average, TWENTY CENTS.
The National Farmers Union offers more detailed information on farm share for a variety of foods. (These are their numbers, with my calculations in the last column.)
