The Oyster’s Garter

Genetically modified (GM) food has never been something that particularly worries me. They certainly have problems - pesticide use, mingling with wild plants - but industrial agriculture has these problems anyway. The large companies that make them take advantage of farmers in icky ways, like making the crops sterile so farmers have to buy new seeds every year, but that sort of behavior has a legislative fix. If industrial growers, say in California’s Imperial Valley, were using GMOs that saved water and didn’t need pesticides, I’d think it was a great idea (assuming proper environmental testing).

However, I also believe that people have a right to avoid GMOs if they wish. So it was troubling that a recent study in Spain found that GMO agriculture drives out organic agriculture. The study showed that a small amount of genetically modified pollen fertilized nearby organic plants, making them also “genetically modified.” There’s not a lot of mixing - 6% seems to be the high estimate - but that’s enough to put organic consumers off their feed. Since the organic produce was not GMO-free, it was unsellable in Europe. This drove organic farmers out of the organic business, and they started planting GMO crops.

The European Commission’s GMO policy is based on “coexistance” - assuming that GMOs and organic produce can be grown side-by-side. This is clearly not the case, if cross-contamination is an issue for organic consumers. So if genetically modified foods have a place in modern agriculture - and I think they do, particularly because of climate change - that place is far away from organic agriculture.

Via A Blog Around the Clock

Best measuring cup ever.

Via Boing Boing

If I dine on a giant 1-lb sustainably caught shrimp for dinner, wash it down with scallop beer, and have maple-bacon lollipops for dessert, would that hold the world record for number of treyf courses consumed? YUM.

Then again, Eric & I immediately followed our Orthodox Jewish wedding ceremony with a New England-style clam and lobster bake. So nu? We better not move to Israel.

Why is my ground up turkey “infused with spice extract”? You can’t read it from the tiny image at right, but the text below “Ground Turkey” reads “infused with natural spice extract”. Why? Foster Farms supplies decent turkey: no hormones, no steroids, no artificial enhancers. But I just don’t trust this “spice extract” business. And unfortunately, the other ground turkey in the store, Shady Brook Farms, also has spice extract. Do I really need to shop at Whole Foods Market just to get plain old ground turkey?  Sigh.

The environmental movement is rooted in guilt. The idea is to effect change by making people identify with being a Good Person who Does Not Do the Bad Thing. Good people recycle, bad people do not. Good people do not litter, bad people do. Both of these have been very effective in changing behavior.

But then we get into the realm of food. In the US, the subject of food is practically boiled in guilt. The most common guilt is weight-related - will eating this tasty thing make me a hideous obese social outcast? But environmental food guilt is on the rise, particularly in regards to fish comsumption. Mark Powell has a thought-provoking post up on the role of desire in conservation:

I’m no expert on religion, but it seems like many environmentalists, and quite a few sustainable seafood advocates, make a big mistake in using guilt and expecting it to be strong enough to get people to fight their desires. When we use this approach, I think we risk marginalizing ourselves and we might even start to resemble a sad caricature of a preacher seeking religious converts by threatening fire-and-brimstone.

Threatening problems for people who fall off the straight-and-narrow path of sustainable seafood might work if the prize we have to offer is something really big like everlasting life, but it seems futile when the only thing we can promise is the reward of a bland but sustainable dinner.

Mark suggests trying to unite people’s desire for tasty food with their desire to do environmental good. This reminded me of message of the The Omnivore’s Dilemma - the food that tastes the best is the least processed and most sustainable. But then I was reminded of Sam’s falling-out with Michael Pollan. His new book, In Defense of Food, made her feel bad about eating:

But IDOF made me feel like a gluttonous pig contributing to the wasteful, nutritionally devoid, environmentally blighting indulgence of modern American culture, in the way that overweight people are encouraged to feel by diet books. And I don’t have to take that from a book!

So, TOG readers, is that how you feel when told not to eat something for environmental reasons? Do you think Mark is on to something with trying to encourage people to desire sustainable food, rather than berating them for desiring unsustainable food? Can environmentalists educate without using guilt? And, most importantly for me, should the marine biologists of the world be banned from engaging in dinnertime lectures education?

The Oyster’s Garter does not endorse putting bivalves in beer. This is rank heresy! Obviously, perfectly good bivalves should be breaded, buttered, and fried.

My dad loves his Splenda and his no-calorie drink mixes. He’s a bit of a health fanatic, but I’ve been after him for years to eat less weird gross manufactured food and more real food. (Recently, in an attempt to wean him off margarine, I bought him this French butter dish.) Now I have even more ammunition for my Omnivore’s Dilemma-inspired Real Food Diet - evidence that artificial sweeteners make rats gain weight. From Scientific American:

Typically, they [the study's authors] say, the taste buds, sensing something sweet, signal the brain to prep the digestive system to gear up for a caloric onslaught; when the expected sugar jolt (extra calories) fails to materialize, the body gets rattled and has trouble bouncing back and regulating appetite when other food is available. As a result, the rats eat more or expend less energy than they would have had they had the real thing.

In other words, real food makes you feel full and satisfied, so you eat less. Isn’t it great when your health depends on making food that tastes better?

Orange Roughy are a slow growing and long lived fish making them extremely vulnerable to overfishing. The filets that arrive at market are likely from fish 50+ years in age. Orange Roughy is caught by bottom trawling, particularly on seamounts where aggregations occur. Bottom trawling destroys the seafloor ecosystem including deep-water corals…Environmental Defense has also issued a health advisory for this fish due to high levels of mercury.

Deep Sea News even has a handy pre-written letter and a link to Trader Joe’s online comment form. Go tell your happy organic grocery store to stop destroying the ocean!  

I was in Whole Foods Market the other day, perusing the macaroni & cheese options (Does anyone else take a perverse pleasure in buying a purely fake foodstuff from Whole Foods?) when the urge to consume chocolate ice cream with whipped cream overtook me with the force of an off-shore hurricane. I hurried to the freezer aisle, where lo and behold, a new brand of ice cream appeared before me: Green & Black’s Organic. Look at that packaging! So dark and mysterious! It just screams chocolate decadence. Plus, hey, organic. And only $.30 more than Häagen-Dazs. Organic is worth 30 cents, right? But a little voice in my head whispered to me in a sibilant Spanish accent, “This word ‘organic’. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Obeying voices in my head isn’t usually good policy, but this one seemed harmless enough, so I perused the ingredient list. Here it is:

Organic Whole Milk, Organic Whipping Cream (18%), Organic Sugar, Organic Dark Chocolate (12%) (Organic Cocoa Mass, Organic Sugar, Organic Cocoa Powder, Emulsifier: Soya Lecithin, Organic Vanilla Extract. Minimum Cocoa solids 60%), Organic Skimmed Milk Powder, Organic Cocoa Powder, Stabilisers (Guar Gum, Xanthan Gum, Locust Bean Gum).

Hmm. Guar Gum? Soya Lecithin? Are those food items? And what about Xanthan Gum? They all sound suspicious. So, I perused good old New Jersey-based Häagen-Dazs. Here’s the ingredient list:

Ingredients: Cream, Skim Milk, Sugar, Egg Yolks, Cocoa Processed with Alkali.

There’s a kind of poetry there, don’t you think? I know what all those things are (”Cocoa processed with alkali” is dutched chocolate.), and I’m happy to eat them. And so, with some rum-flavored whipped cream, I did.