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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] We Don't Need a Food Revolution, We Just Need to Learn How to Cook
  • Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2009 19:55:31 -0600


We Don't Need a Food Revolution, We Just Need to Learn How to Cook
http://www.alternet.org/environment/142503/we_don%27t_need_a_food_revolution%2C_we_just_need_to_learn_how_to_cook
By Dan Barber, The Nation. Posted September 14, 2009.

A lack of technique behind the stove is, in the end, as complicit in harming
human health and the environment as the confinement pig or the corn-fed steer.

We need radical thinking, but we don't need a revolution. We don't need an
overthrow of capitalism. Nor do we need to become vegetarians. We need not
become spartans. We're just going to have to learn how to cook.

It's impossible to overemphasize the importance of good farming for safe and
nutritious food. But the campaign for food democracy needs to start with
boning knives and cast-iron skillets. A lack of technique behind the stove
is, in the end, as complicit in harming human health and the environment as
the confinement pig or the corn-fed steer.

Yes, that sixteen-ounce rib-eye takes precious resources like water
(approximately 2,500 gallons) and grain (about twelve pounds) away from
feeding the poor, and the environmental havoc associated with raising beef
most often affects the disenfranchised. By 2050, if we continue this gorging,
livestock will be consuming as much as 4 billion people do.

These horrors of conventional animal husbandry are tied to the amount of meat
we eat, which is intimately linked to the parts of the animal we choose to
eat. That is, choosing the rib-eye -- as opposed to choosing, say, the
brisket -- determines how many animals are produced.

It's the equivalent of eating high on the hog, and it doesn't just mean a lot
of wasted meat. It means a lot more animals raised in confinement. How else
can farmers afford to increase production when there's increased waste? When
suppliers -- producers, processors, retailers and, yes, we chefs -- throw the
bulk of the carcass away, output must go up, leaving farmers little choice
but to engage in the mass-production practices that are so morally and
environmentally toxic.

Supermarkets in the United States stock cutlets and steaks and loins --
restaurant chefs, including me, feature them in seven-ounce portions -- but
unless you venture to an ethnic market (or dine at an ethnic restaurant),
you'll have a hard time getting your hands on liver, kidney or tripe. For
commerce's sake, it makes more sense to use these odd cuts for dog food, or
simply to dump them abroad, in places like Mexico and India. (The only way
we've accepted using these less-than-desirables is grinding them up into
sausage links and hot dogs -- creating dull food products out of disparate
and delicious parts.)

Paul Roberts, in his book The End of Food, calls this the "protein paradox":
meat production has outstripped people production. Through advances in
breeding and grain feeding, the cost of one pound of meat is cheaper now than
at any time in history. And yet that downswing in cost hasn't led to any kind
of meat-eating democracy. If anything, it has enabled -- and at this point,
even encouraged -- a kind of pork chop dictatorship. Not only do we eat too
much meat, we also eat too much of the wrong parts. We don't know where our
meat comes from, we don't know what the animal we're eating ate, and we sure
don't know how to get behind the stove and take control of what we put in our
mouths.

We ought to start by looking at the great food cultures of the world. The
traditional cuisines of Asia and North Africa, not to mention France and
Italy, are based on rice, wheat, spices and smatterings of all cuts of meat.
In just about every other cuisine, protein plays second fiddle to grains and
vegetables. When meat appears, it does so modestly; it takes up less space on
the plate, and more often than not it's a piece of the animal -- tripe or
oxtail -- that Americans so willingly discard.

American cuisine co-opts other cultures' cuisines with the eye of the
entitled: special-occasion foods turn into everyday staples, center cuts take
center stage. There's nothing inevitable about that, and very little that's
delicious. Good cooking gives a voice to these disenfranchised parts.
Democratizing the carcass should be the future of food.






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