Eating Animals

A good read for anyone interested in the travesty that is factory farming is Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book: Eating Animals.  Here’s an excerpt:

We have let the factory farm replace farming for the same reasons our cultures have relegated minorities to being second-class members of society and kept women under the power of men. We treat animals as we do because we want to and can. (Does anyone really wish to deny this anymore?)

At the end of the day, factory farming isn’t about feeding people; it’s about money. Whether or not it’s right to kill animals for food, we know that in today’s dominant systems, it’s impossible to kill them without at least inflicting occasional torture. That is why some farmers apologize to their animals as they are sent off to slaughter. They’ve made a compromise rather than cut a fair deal.

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to centre our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war.

The everyday horrors of factory farming are evoked so vividly, and the case against the people who run the system presented so convincingly, that anyone who, after reading Foer’s book, continues to consume the industry’s products must be without a heart, or impervious to reason, or both.

~ J.M. Coetzee

It shouldn’t be the consumer’s responsibility to figure out what’s cruel and what’s kind, what’s environmentally destructive and what’s sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don’t need the option of buying children’s toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabelled side effects. And we don’t need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

Historians tell a story about Abraham Lincoln. that while returning to Washington from Springfield, he forced his entire party to stop to help some small birds he saw in distress. When chided by the others, he responded, quite plainly, “I could not have slept tonight if I had left those poor creatures on the ground and not restored them to their mother.” He observed, quite simply, that once those suffering birds came into his view, a moral burden had been assumed. He could not be himself if he walked away.

Whether I sit at the global table, with my family or with my conscience, the factory farm … feels inhuman. To accept the factory farm…to feed the food it produces to my family, to support it with my money — would make me less myself, less my grandmother’s grandson, less my son’s father.

This is what my grandmother meant when she said, “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.

Image: Christopher Rogers.

Home: Yann Arthus-Bertrand

On June 5, 2009, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, film-maker, aerial photographer and champion of ecology, released Home, a movie about the dangers human activities create for our Earth.

On the night of the release, many theaters offered screenings for free and a giant open-air screening on Paris’ Champ-de-Mars drew 20,000 spectators. The simultaneous TV broadcast of the movie on France 2 TV channel drew more than 8 million people. The following Sunday, the ecologists had an unexpectedly high score in the European elections and just fell short of becoming France’s second political party.

Watch Home.

The Matrix Redux: Food, Inc.

Earlier we blogged about the state of our food system as prophesied in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. We described Vandana Shiva’s grassroots efforts in India to battle corporate greed, monocultures and genetic engineering. Is it already too late for North America?

That is why Food, Inc., just released, is so important.

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on America’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from consumers with the consent of government regulatory agencies.

The US (and Canadian) food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of e. coli. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

What happened to nutrient-dense food that leaves us satisfied, healthy and safe?

Featuring Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farm’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals shocking truths — about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become and where we are going from here.*

Beavertails

After meeting with PM Stephen Harper, U.S. President Barack Obama made a quick stop in Ottawa’s Byward Market Thursday where he bought a beaver tail, picked up some cookies from a French bakery and looked for a snow globe to bring back to the White House.

Those who work at the BeaverTail hut in the Byward Market told CTV Ottawa one of Obama’s security personnel came up to the hut and asked if one of the employees could serve the president an Obama Tail, a winter treat designed specifically to honour the American president.

Employee Jessica Milien, who was selected because she’s a big Obama fan, served Obama his dessert and explained that the Obama Tail is dressed with the classic beaver tail cinnamon and sugar flavour, topped with maple flavoured eyes and a Nutella ‘O’ for ‘Obama.’

“This is the most exciting day of my life,” Milean told CTV Ottawa Thursday afternoon.

“We started talking and he was such a down to earth guy, it didn’t even feel like I was talking to the president of the United States.”

BeaverTails® are fried wholewheat dough pastries individually hand stretched to resemble a beaver’s tail. They have become a popular pastry in Ottawa and some other Canadian cities. Many toppings can be selected, including cinnamon and sugar, chocolate hazelnut, banana and chocolate, and maple walnut.

BeaverTails began when Grant and Pam Hooker decided to turn their family recipe for fried dough into a business. In 1980, they opened up the first BeaverTail stand in the Byward Market in Ottawa. There are now close to 100 beavertail stands worldwide.  The website of the city of Ottawa says BeaverTails are, “A uniquely Canadian tradition, hand-made Beavertail pastries are served up with a variety of toppings at special events throughout the year…”

The Hookers now plan to take the BeaverTails to the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., to serve them at a “Tailgate party.”

“This is a very special occasion for the BeaverTail.”

They will be serving garlic butter and cheese BeaverTails as well as ObamaTails — cinnamon and sugar BeaverTails topped with Nutella “O’s” and maple eyes — to 1,000 guests at the party.

More at CTV News.

A Wee Toast to the Haggis

Something unusual is happening in the kitchen. A huge stock pot has been gently bubbling on the burner for hours, a piece of parchment paper covering a dark, exotic mass of meatlike objects that bob gently in the broth. The aroma is unique, a rich, heady mix of lamb stew with sharper, more acrid undercurrents that evoke sensory description more common to complex wines: musty, earthy, sweet with a citrus finish.

Jan. 25 approaches and, with it, the 250th anniversary of the birth of Scottish poet Robert Burns. Fans of Highland clan lore praise haggis as a national treasure. Others find it alarming, a concoction of seemingly inedible organ meats and roughage better suited to a dog’s breakfast than a banquet table.

The truth is somewhere in between. It is essentially a form of sausage, composed for the most part of lamb offal and steel-cut oats.

The offal in question is organ meat – lamb kidneys, liver, hearts and lungs. Once darkly red, glistening specimens of varying texture: firm hearts; resilient, elastic kidneys; puffy, yielding lungs; glutinous liver, they are simmered down and ground up.

Drained and cooled, the organs are brown, dense and sweet. They are minced, mixed with fat, diced onion, oats and spices and packed into casing to be poached (traditionally, a lamb stomach; these days, into a more conventional beef intestine or canvas sausage sleeve). Two hours or more in 165F water complete the cooking, blending the flavours and softening the oats.

The end result is a lot like a country-style pâté: rich and creamy, with the oats giving a bit of a nutty, crunchy texture.

It was originally eaten during poor times or war. The meats involved were cheap and available, high in iron and other minerals and promoted strength and endurance. You’d feel good and full in the cold.

Now, butchers have worked with it over the years, adjusting the seasonings, so it also tastes delicious. Like good pâté, the ingredients may sound scary but, once they taste it, most people want some more.

Is it good for you, too? The fat, oats and spices make it stable, with a long shelf life (a bonus in the days before refrigeration). Organ meats are rich in vital nutrients. Fat fuels the diet of all cold-climate cultures. Most versions of haggis are at least 50 per cent fat – but just three ounces per serving will do.

The world record for throwing a 1.5 pound (680 gram) haggis is 180 feet 10 inches (over 55.2 m.) The sporting haggis weighs 500 grams, with a maximum diameter of 18 cm and length of 22 cm. An allowance of 30 grams is given and this weight is used in both junior and middle weight events. The heavyweight event allows haggis up to 1 kg in weight, but the standard weight of 850 grams is more common, with an allowance of 50 grams.

Burns Day is a great excuse to try it. Just as millions discover an inner Irishman every St. Patrick’s Day, the splendour of skirling bagpipes, kilted porters and steaming haggis at a Robbie Burns night banquet connects with a wild, passionate side of the Scottish character. The heady poetry of “Rabbie” can intoxicate even more than the generous servings of single malt whisky.

Serving it is easy: Just reheat the cooked haggis in a bag in hot water until the internal temperature reaches 155F or bake it for 30 minutes in the oven along with traditional mashed potatoes (tatties) and turnip purée (neeps).

Excerpted from: Toronto Star, January 24, 2009.

Image: Darren McCarty competes in the throwing of the haggis competition during Highland Games in Livonia, Michigan in 2000.

In Pursuit of Happiness

There are people who feel compelled to leave the place where they were born and the culture in which they were raised and go to Paris, where they find themselves.

The mere act of going through the motions in another city, in another language, can be a distraction from the mundane. In Paris, every errand requires a new vocabulary, words one would never come across in Molière or Baudelaire: tournevis, crochet, marteau for a trip to the hardware store; tache, doublure, before heading off to the dry cleaner.

But the truth is, Paris also takes one’s mind off troubles in unforeseen ways. Everywhere, something urges you to pay attention: a taste, a smell, some subtle flourish that a person trudging through life might otherwise miss.

From a walk-up apartment half a block from the Seine, you might listen through open windows on a summer night to the chamber-music concerts across the street at the Musée de la Monnaie, with Mozart’s ripe harmonies carried upward on the dense, warm air. Going on midnight, the noise of the traffic might be interrupted by lurching, bleating oom-pah-pah renditions of popular standards as the Fanfare des Beaux-Arts, a marching band of students from the school of architecture, snaked its way through the narrow streets, its gusto fueled by wine.

Shopping for groceries, you might bring home fraises des bois, plump figs from Turkey, and yogurt made from goat’s milk. At the bakery on the corner, you might discover congolais—haystacks of pure, intense coconut or, if it is Christmastime, crystalline marrons glacés. In the Luxembourg Gardens, you might see children sailing their boats in the fountain or, in October, watch a parade of citrus trees in their jardinières, being taken to the Orangerie, where they will sit out the winter.

Many of us in North America share the middle-class values instilled in our parents by their parents: diligence, discipline, thrift, and a particularly Calvinist delight in the virtues of self-denial. Work is every upstanding person’s reason for being, and pleasure and leisure are the rewards for a job well done. From this austere outlook, we might conclude that the self is to be constantly policed and kept in check.

Spending time with the French allows us to loosen our iron grip. We envy their capacity for moderation, and realize for the first time that pleasure makes moderation possible. We begin to build little treats into the day: a walk along a street we love, 20 minutes with a book in the Tuileries on the way to an appointment; a late-night glass of Champagne at a café; Poilâne’s walnut bread for breakfast. Where we might consider flowers a reckless indulgence, except for Mother’s Day, in Paris, no vase ever goes empty.

The French know that pleasure is something to be discovered, there for the taking, and something to be cultivated. Its pursuit, as it turns out, is not a mindless slide into debauchery but a science, rigorous and exacting, discriminating between the merely good and the sublime. The thing about pleasure is that it immerses you in the moment. The present becomes more compelling than the future or the past. There is no better cure for heartache.

Having spent time there, could one ever be happy living anywhere else? That’s not the lesson.

Because in the course of learning to love the city and its inhabitants,  one also learns to savour the texture of everyday life, in Paris or anywhere.

Adapted from Holly Bruback, Gourmet, September 2008

Image: Arnaud Frich, Montmartre

Image: Eglise St Pierre et Sacré-Coeur par Jean Dufy

Canaries in the Mine

For those of us still sensitized to the pet food debacle of 2007, in which thousands of dogs and cats died or were sickened by food adulterated with melamine from China, it appeared to be déjà vu this past week with reports of cats in Australia who were sick or dying. The symptoms included a weakness in the hind legs which eventually progressed to paralysis and in some cases, death.

A common thread in the deaths was the feeding of Orijen kibble, a high-end pet food produced by Champion Pet Foods in Canada.

Their products for cats and dogs are highly regarded for their use of fresh local ingredients, prepared at low temperatures with thoughtfully researched holistic additives. By contrast, most commercial pet food is largely meal, by-products or worse, with the nutrients cooked out at high temperatures.

The problem was that the Orijen kibble was too good. Because their fresh meats are cooked at low temperatures, the Australian government required that the kibble be irradiated with Cobalt 60 gamma rays. This was a precaution to reduce microbial hazards, which was not required for other commercial pet foods.

Food irradiation is becoming a common practice. In this case, though, the cats of Australia were the canaries in the mine.

Irradiation is commonly applied to human foods at doses between 5 – 10 kGY. The Orijen kibble, however, was subjected to levels reaching 61 kGY. Studies have shown that cats fed dry food subjected to irradiation levels between 36 – 47 kGY developed neurological symptoms similar to those who reportedly ate the irradiated Orijen kibble.

What does irradiation do?

It depletes Vitamin A (and who knows what other nutrients).
It promotes the formation and release of destructive free radicals.

The jury is still out on what’s really going on. Tests point to irradiation, but an Australian veterinary neurologist says that identification of the problem could take up to six months.

Unlike the folks at Menu Foods and their ilk, who did their best to avoid taking responsibility for the pet holocaust of 2007 (and particularly Paul Henderson, CEO, who failed to convince us that he felt our pain, and Mark Wiens, CFO, who dumped his stock a week or so before the news hit – a horrible coincidence), the folks at Champion Pet Foods were on this issue right away. They took ownership of the problem, were forthcoming with their ongoing investigation, provided information to help with the recovery of pets who had fallen ill, and are in a continuing active dialogue with concerned pet parents.

They will no longer export to the Australian market because of the irradiation risks, but they have huge fans in North America and Europe.

And the food irradiation lobbyists have a whole lot of ’splain’ to do.

As of today, 80 cats are sick or have died, that we know of. One would be too many.

Champion Pet Foods press release

Orijen Cat

More on the pet food recall.

But Is It Journalism?

Kim Honey, a Toronto Star food scribbler, managed to generate readership for her employer this past week by regaling us with her dispatch of a little bunny at a foodie survival get-together.

Well, it wasn’t a survival course, exactly. It was a cooking class for locavores. That’s last year’s trendy buzz in these anxious days of global warming. Since it wasn’t rabbit hunting season, the writer bought a farmed one, although one not yet committed to a neat, square styrofoam package. So it was left to the writer to do the deed.

All beings tremble before violence. All fear death, all love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do? ~~ Buddha

After cuddling the creature to calm it, and telling us that grown men, soldiers even, broke into tears when faced with the choice of killing a defenseless animal, the writer failed to render the bunny senseless on her first try. She handed it over to the chef, who humanely clubbed it another three times.

We’re not sure what redeeming qualities Kim’s rambling article had. We doubt that it was intended to enlighten us on the obscenity of factory farms, slaughterhouses and speciesism. Was she advocating that Torontonians eschew the strip mall foodmart and, instead, trap raccoons for the stewpot because it’s somehow trendier? We think so. Why else would a locavore drive all the way from the Big Smoke to Hanover at today’s gas prices, to learn bunny bashing?

The city is overrun with cottontail rabbits. You can’t walk out the back door without staring down a couple of haughty raccoons, and Lake Shore Blvd. is like Canada’s Wonderland for geese. ~~ Kim Honey

We checked out a few of her other foodie scribblings for further clues. She’d written a couple of times about the orgasmic glories of foie gras, but she didn’t mention participating in the inhumane gorging of the goose. She just loves eating fat. And cake icing.

She also did a piece for the Globe awhile back about abusing animals in art for shock value. She mentioned some of the more notorious pieces, including the Toronto Casuistry incident.

At the crux of the controversy is the question: What is the definition of art? And who decides what is art…? Is it up to the individual who creates the piece to declare it as art, or should society decide whether the work has any validity? ~~ Kim Honey

We’re guessing her rabbit piece wasn’t a whole lot different.

Sadly for Kim, not everyone was in breathless agreement with her article. Her editor allowed her space the following day to whine about the emails she’d received. It was silly. We’re surprised the Star ran it.

Let’s hope she sticks to rhapsodizing over cake icing.

Read more at Taste T.O.

Cows with Guns

A half-century after the Hart of London got taken down, something was in the water of Mississauga, a bedroom suburb of Toronto, this morning.

Police shot and killed a steer that escaped from an overturned truck, saying they had no choice because the animal was charging at people. “It charged at one of the officers, right at him, and he had no choice.”

The steer escaped from a cattle truck, along with two cows and a bull. The truck overturned at about 6:40 a.m., snarling traffic on the Queen Elizabeth Way near Highway 427. (For you out-of-towners, this is a conjunction of two major rush-hour routes into the Big Smoke on Canada’s south shore, right at the corner of Sherway Gardens mega-mall).

Two of the animals ended up in the backyard of a home on idyllic Brentano Boulevard. Initially, the animals were peaceful, calmly munching away at the shrubs in the garden.

“They were rubbing up against my father’s shed. They were fine in the backyard. I guess when they tried to get them out of the backyard, that’s when they got really restless,” said a resident of the normally bucolic suburb.

The steer got spooked when handlers tried to corral it and force it into a truck. One of a number of portable iron gates used to guide the animals into the truck fell, scaring the steer. This blogger notes that the horde of residents and police might not have been helpful either; just watch the Toronto Star video and draw your own conclusions.

The officer in question then fired something like 30 rounds into the animal after which a second officer helped finish it off with a few more shots.

“He was using a handgun because we weren’t planning on taking the animal down,” noted a constable. “It was a last-minute call by the officer. Most of the streets were closed off. He was not going to endanger anyone’s life.”

Nice job, Dudley Do-Right.

Toronto Star

Dana Lyons’ Cows With Guns website

Lambs of God: Anniversary of the Pet Food Recall

We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own, live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way. We cherish memory as the only certain immortality, never fully understanding the necessary plan.
~~ Irving Townsend

The anniversary of the 2007 pet food recall is a particularly bittersweet time of remembrance for the thousands who lost their companions to contaminated food, corporate greed and inept oversight. The pet food industry is a sham, dressing up the shabby left-overs from human consumption as nourishment for animals. Its regulation is a gutless farce. Compound this with the cost-cutting efforts of income funds masquerading as pet food purveyors, and the unregulated corruption that allows plastic to pretend to be protein, and you have a recipe for disaster. Our pets were, sadly, the canaries in this coal mine.

At the end of a long, dark year, as the healing sun begins to melt away the ice from our hearts, here is some music from heaven for the small, much loved victims of the recall and those who love them. It is Samuel Barber’s hauntingly beautiful Adagio for Strings. This music is truly touched by God.

Adagio for Strings is a work for string orchestra, and it is Barber’s most popular piece. It originated as the second movement in his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 11, composed in 1936.

The recording of the 1938 world premiere, with Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Orchestra, was selected in 2005 for permanent preservation in the National Recording Registry at the United States Library of Congress.

The piece was played at the funerals of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and JFK. It was also performed in 2001 at a ceremony at the World Trade Center to commemorate the thousands lost there in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The composer also arranged the piece in 1967 for eight-part choir, as a setting of the Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God”).

The YouTube video features a stunning rendition by the BBC Orchestra, accompanied by images from 9/11.

Adagio for Strings mp3 download

Itchmo: In Memory Of

Pet Food Recall

A Dog’s Breakfast

Images: Pebbles the Yorkie, and from the Flickr Photo Gallery: Yeti (malamute) and Ashleigh (cat)