As summer farm production swings into high gear, we wanted to share a couple of items of news and comment with fellow local food foragers.
See Our Article on Local Food in Mother Earth News
First, we are very happy to see the account of our local food experiment finally published this summer by Mother Earth News. The August/September magazine has an article called “How to Find the Best Food: 20 ways to get fresh, sustainable food in your neck of the woods.” Our experiment is referenced in the sidebar “Taking On a Local Food Challenge,” and a full account of our month of eating locally, with photos, is at www.motherearthnews.com/Whole_Foods_and_Cooking/2006_August_September/Suburban-Foraging-Two-Families-Eat-Only-Local.
Read About Local Food in Edible Chespeake
A brief article on our June discussion about local food will also be in Edible Chesapeake’s fall issue. If you didn’t have a chance to look at the copies of the magazine we had at the talk, check out the web site at www.ediblechesapeake.com. This is a great publication for the growing community of local food devotees around our region.
Get On Top of the Grass-Fed Beef Discussion
The article “What’s the Beef?” in Tuesday's Washington Post Health section grudgingly allowed the health benefits of grass-fed beef versus grain-fed beef, but left the impression that the benefits might not be worth the price difference, either in nutrition or in taste (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/31/AR2006073100891.html). Taste is certainly a personal thing, and the flavor of grass-fed beef can be unfamiliar to Americans brought up believing corn-fed is the gold-standard of beef. What the article does not include is the fact that cows are not built to eat corn. In fact, they have only been doing so for the past 50 or so years, since American industrial agriculture made it more economical for farmers to pen cows up in feedlots and grow corn on their land, than to grow grass and let cows graze the land. Animal welfare screeds aside, forcing cows to digest a substance unnatural to their bodies is part of the reason prophylactic antibiotics are used so widely in beef production. Some studies also suggest it creates subtle alterations in the digestive tracts of cows that allow the e.coli bacterium to flourish, leading to more incidences of food poisoning.
Check Out Michael Pollan's New Book
Michael Pollan’s recent book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, contains an excellent and understandable description of this whole strange system of industrial beef production. Also, for more information on grass-fed beef, and the latest research about it and its health benefits, check out http://www.csuchico.edu/agr/grassfedbeef/index.html ,
a website that's a collaboration between University of California Cooperative Extension Service and California State University, Chico.
Enjoy the heat and summer's bounty!
Until next time,
Renee and Kristi
Renee Brooks Catacalos and Kristi Bahrenburg Janzen
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