Mindfulness Mondays 27: Wszystko jest mozliwe
November 30, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
In the same conference where I heard the incredible Navy Seal, Marcus Luttrell, recount his harrowing, death-defying expedition in Afghanistan, I also heard a lecture from a gentleman, Henry McGovern of AmRest, after Luttrell on how he expanded his restaurant empire in the former Eastern bloc nations. In fact, McGovern opened up his talk by saying, “I was in the bathroom a few minutes ago behind two guys at the urinal who said, ‘I feel sorry for the guy coming up who has to follow the Navy Seal.’ Well, I am that guy!” Everyone uproariously laughed. (I felt sorry for him too, as Luttrell simply killed, literally and figuratively.)
McGovern, an American, opened his headquarters in of all places Wroclaw, Poland, at a time when the grip of Communist thinking was slowly slipping away. He discussed how he first bought a building to house the humble beginnings of what would turn into a billion dollar a year business by enlisting the services of a University student who could serve as his Polish translator. In his first business meeting, he asked the telephone company if they could have something like 100 phone lines installed in his building so that he could run a proper business. After the meeting, the student said to McGovern, “My family has been waiting 15 years for a single phone line. I doubt you will get any phone lines any time soon.” Surprisingly, McGovern got one phone line per floor for a total of 7 or so in a relatively short timeframe and was able to sell the building at a very high premium to a bank because of the unbelievable number of phone lines that he had obtained.
From that moment, McGovern always used the expression “Wszystko jest mozliwe” (pronounced roughly Shisko yest mosh-leeveh) which means “everything is possible” whenever he encountered the apparatchik thinking of his business acquaintances. It opened many doors because it primed his targets to think much more broadly than they would have otherwise done so, given the cultural burden that was imposed by the Eastern European legacy.
When we think things are impossible, just remember “Wszystko jest mozliwe”, everything is possible. Set your intention this week and thereafter to remember the phrase “Wszystko jest mozliwe” that all things are possible. Nothing is impossible.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 8 of 10: USDA and Organic Rules
November 27, 2009 by dr. lam · 17 Comments
Since 1990, the definition of organic has been manhandled by the USDA, more specifically by the many lobbyists. In 1997 the USDA released a watered down set of standards that defined organic food that allowed genetically modified crops, irradiation, and sewage sludge with the idea that the government wanted to impose a lighter regulation on the industry. However, the “organic movement”, or little organic, pitted against the “organic empire”, or big organic, still wanted to exemplify better values than these loose regulations called for. However, little organic is well, little. The question in 1997 was would a factory farm be considered organic? How about grazing on pasture? How about food additives and synthetic chemicals? Guess what, big organic won on all 3 counts. This was a reversal of the stricter 1990 guidelines and a victory that paved the way for things like Cascadian Farms’ “organic tv dinner”. What an oxymoron!
The USDA received a backlash about cows who do not roam on pasture so they mandated a very vague idea of “access to pasture”. How often did this access have to occur? Many of the critics have argued that “access to pasture” is so vague that it really is both meaningless and unenforceable. The example of the chickens at Petaluma mentioned in yesterday’s blog is a great one to understand that this 2 week short hiatus to pasture is really never even used by the chickens so “free range” in that case is a real farce.
Pollan goes on to examine big organic and finds that many of the farming practices are decidedly better than pure industrial. However, no large industrial organic can by its very nature produce the same high quality food as say Polyface farms of Joel Salatin that relies on polyculture, bioregionalism, and sustainability. All of this is simply fascinating. This exposé on organic and the organic industry is not meant to condemn organic food. It just means as consumers we need to be a little bit more educated than subscribing blindly to romanticized notions of our food. I encourage everyone to read Michael Pollan’s book because these short blogs simply cannot embrace the in-depth and comprehensive nature of his wonderful book. It is simply an articulate, brilliant, and literate treatise.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 7 of 10: Industrial Organic
November 26, 2009 by dr. lam · 5 Comments
Rather appropriate that we are talking about food on Thanksgiving Day: Hope I don’t ruin any meals!
When we walk the aisles of Whole Foods, a romantic notion swirls in our brain that the eggs spawned from “cage-free vegetarian hens” or the heirloom tomatoes from Capay Farm, “one of the early pioneers of the organic movement”, would give us a heady concoction of civility, health, and well, organic-ness to our lifestyle. In short, that we were making the right choices for our diet and our children’s diet. However, what Pollan begins to show is that despite Whole Foods and other big chain organics’ desires to remain true to organic qualities, they can’t. Whole Foods can no longer buy from small farms but must buy from huge industrial organic farms like Earthbound Farm and Grimmway Farms, which together dominate the organic marketplace of America.
When Pollan investigated what he had in his shopping cart culled from the pristine aisles of his local Whole Foods, he found items that caused more distress in his heart than supposedly the “undistressed” cattle experienced who lived the purported organic life. For example, his organic milk was ultrapasteurized, a process that can compromise nutritional value, because the milk had to travel extremely long distances. In addition, the organic milk came from factory farms where thousands of Holsteins never encountered a blade of grass but did dine on certified organic grain (what?) tethered to milking machines three times a day. He also found organic beef derived from cattle eating organic high-fructose corn syrup (oxymoron perhaps?). Further, his entrée from Country Herb (from Cascadian Farms, now a subsidiary of General Mills), an organic tv dinner, contained a wide variety of unname-ables like guar, xanthan gum, soy lecithin, carrageenan, etc. These synthetic additives actually are permitted under federal organic rules. What? Finally, his chicken he procured, reportedly organic, came from Petaluma, where chickens are cramped in tight aisles and only have a “free range” access about 2 weeks before slaughter, when they are so used to staying indoors that the pasture outside only poses a threatening presence. So is organic organic? Hmmmmm. Joel Salatin’s term for the $11 billion a year organic food market as “the organic empire” is certainly sounding a bit more true now. HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!!!
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 6 of 10: Joel Salatin & Polyface Farms
November 25, 2009 by dr. lam · 8 Comments
We now leave the world of industrial foods to go organic. But are we? Well, that is more complicated than one or two sentences can convey. So let’s take a look at famed Virginia farmer Joel Salatin and his Polyface farms. If you ask Salatin who raises chicken, pigs, cattle and varied vegetables and crops what kind of farmer he is, he will say that he is a “grass farmer”. In essence, he is paying homage to the power that grass has on the entire structure of his farmed ecosystem. It serves as the nourishment for his livestock who run also free over the pastured lands and also upon which the crops grow in abundance. By rotating crops, he can create a sustainable farm that does not suffer the consequences of a monoculture like either the CAFOs or the corn farms. What George Naylor is to industrial, Salatin is to pastoral. Pastoral or organic? What?
Salatin actually is not organic since that is a term that the Federal Government now owns and regulates. He orders his chicken feed locally that has atrazine, a violation of federal rules for the claim on using the word “organic”. However, Salatin argues: “If I said I was organic, people would fuss at me for getting feed corn from a neighbor who might be using atrazine. Well, I would much rather use my money to keep my neighborhood productive and healthy than export my dollars five hundred miles away to get ‘pure product’ that’s really coated in diesel fuel. There are a whole lot more variables in making the right decision than does the chicken feed have chemicals or not. Like what sort of habitat is going to allow that chicken to express its physiological distinctiveness? A ten-thousand-bird shed that stinks to high heaven or a new paddock of fresh green grass every day? Now which chicken shall we call ‘organic’? I’m afraid you’ll have to ask the government, because now they own the word.”
Salatin considers himself “beyond organic” since he believes the rules that the government has set forth for being organic are bunk. As an example, he does not ship his product out of his local area because he simply believes that it is not “sustainable”, i.e., it destroys the integrity of the food item. When Pollan asked him to ship his chicken to him via FedEx, he received a polite no with the above explanation. Our labels for our food as this book outlines are a bit more contrived, vague, and elusive than we would otherwise want to believe.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 5 of 10: Republic of Fat
November 24, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
What is very interesting is that a couple hundred years ago when our founding fathers brought forth a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, they also brought forth a ton of booze. That’s right. Pollan shows how up until about the time of prohibition (and perhaps thereafter for a while as well), we were inundated with cheap corn whiskey, so that typical Americans drank alcohol for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and oh I forgot at eleven am (called the elevenses), what we would call our coffee break.
The same problem has plagued the United States since the 1970s but of a different variety. Now cheap, subsidized corn has led most U.S. residents not to out drink themselves (although some do that well) but to eat themselves into an early grave. In fact, the thought today is that children born after the year 2000 may have a shorter life expectancy than their parents, a landmark first in the history of mankind.
A lot of that corn we ingest comes in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS. 1980 was a watershed year. That is the year that Coca-Cola switched from pure cane sugar to HFCS and Pepsi followed suit shortly thereafter. No one complained or even noticed. What is the big deal anyway? Aren’t sugar and HFCS pretty much the same? Actually, yes. However, what happened was that tariffs that the corn lobby imposed on sugar made HFCS a few cents cheaper to make. Realizing that most consumers would not buy another bottle of coke just because of this marginal cost savings, the soda manufacturers upsized all the drinks from, e.g., 8 oz. to 32 oz. servings and charged an incremental premium for this bonus surplus. Most Americans favored the extra size and guzzled accordingly. What is shocking is that even though our HFCS intake since 1985 went from 45 to 66 pounds per person per annum, that is not at the expense of other sweeteners. In fact, we have enlarged our intake of all sweeteners (cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, maple syrup, etc.) from 128 to 158 pounds per year. We are in short supersizing everything.
We owe a lot to David Wallerstein who invented supersizing at McDonald’s. Ray Kroc simply did not believe that people would consume more if they were given larger portions. It is now known that we can consume 30% more if we simply see more on our plate, almost as a biological response to scarcity. Kroc changed his tune when Wallerstein reported people were scrounging around their tiny french fry bags because having 2 sodas or 2 bags of french fries was self-deemed gluttony. Having a large bag of fries on the other hand was simply no big deal. Wallerstein, until his passing in 1993, worked in a Texas movie chain before his stint at McD’s and helped people see that individuals would consume any size bag of anything so long as it was in a single container. Once you ordered two small bags of popcorn, you would think yourself more of a gourmand than the abstemious Puritan that we desired to be.
In short, we are in our predicament because of the flood of cheap corn that is so readily available making us spend less on our food and desire to eat even more of it not out of necessity but because it is there.