Wednesday food sections

Today the Washington Post had a very interesting article on bourbons. Or at least it was interesting to me because it introduced me to something I didn't know about bourbons -- anything made with 51% corn in the mash can be called a bourbon. So the other 49% of the mash that is not corn (or more typically 30%, according to the article) is up to the distiller. As a homebrewer there is a lot of appeal in having that wild of flexibility in choosing mash ingredients. Of course until I learn how to weld (and I guess until they legalize it as well), I won't be designing my own amaranth bourbon recipe.

The Post also had an article on a food service company putting pressure on the tomato growers in Florida to treat their farm workers humanely. This is an issue that's been going on a long time. I remember protests at the Taco Bell in the UT food court when I was in school. So it's nice to see someone finally doing something about it. And the food service company isn't exactly being wishy-washy about it. Here's a great quote:

The growers "can do the right thing, and our five million pounds of business can go to them," said Fedele Bauccio, Bon Appetit's chief executive. "Or they can let the tomatoes rot in the fields."

The New York Times had a good article on how meat scientists, on a quest to market some other cut of beef to consumers, came up with the Denver steak.

In personal news - I bought a tri-tip steak, a pork rib chop, and some bacon from Eco-Friendly this past weekend. I seared half the tri-tip and ate it as a steak and I am marinating the other half as fajitas right now. Nikki ate half of the butterflied chop and the other half is waiting for me. The bacon went in the freezer for some future breakfast.

Daily reading

The Washington Post food section has an interesting article about a guy from Iowa (with political skills honed in Washington) trying to influence farm policy.

First Garden

The Obamas are starting an organic vegetable garden on the White House grounds. That's about the coolest thing I've heard in a while. Here's an article about it.

NAIS for Dummies (like me)

I didn't really understand until today what all the hullabaloo over the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) was about. That changed when I read this article by Shannon Hayes, a New York grass farmer. I honestly always thought the opposition was from a fear-of-the-nanny state. She lays it out from the perspective of the small farmer and what the economic costs would be to her operation. My thoughts were that if you were already putting ear tags on, then slightly more expensive ear tags wouldn't be a deal breaker. But she goes into a lot of things I hadn't thought about like computer fees and scanners.

The other pre-conceived notion I had was that this would create a lot more accountability among factory farm operations. And it might but that ignores a central tenet of her argument -- the factory farms are for the most part the ones creating the health problems by intensively raising meat (esp. swine and chicken) in such squalid conditions. And they are also the only ones who can absorb the cost of this attempt to fix the problem they created in the first place. So the small farmer get pushed out because of a problem he or she had nothing to do with. Not really fair, is it?

Of course, none of my synopsis here will be news to any small farmer that is confronting this issue, but I was glad to finally understand it a little better.