Monday, January 4 2010

Resolutions Kept

Funny Cow Blue, Marcia Baldwin Looks blue-licious!

The last day of the year is traditionally one where new resolutions are made. In this context, my dictionary says a resolution is 'a a decision to do something or to behave in a certain manner'. Deciding to behave a certain way is much easier than actually doing it but that's human nature all over.

One of my two resolutions this year is to work on my overall fitness. I'm a competitive power-lifter and while the weightlifting has kept me strong and my joints and bones working well, lately when I step on the scale it says, 'one at a time, please'. Even my wife's new Wii fitness game device makes a discomfited noise when I step on it. Who knew video games were jerks?

It's useful to review past resolutions at this time of year, and see which ones panned out, and which didn't. My resolution to stop procrastinating has been pushed back again, and my efforts to work on my patience were too frustrating, but one resolution that I made many years ago seems to be standing me in good stead: about 15 years ago I resolved to eat better.

This was an easy resolution to keep, for the most part. My wife is a Red Seal chef who firmly believes in the best ingredients and simple, healthful preparations. As astounding a concept as it may be, she has never eaten fast food, and wouldn't let me either. Five years ago we planted our own organic/bio-dynamic garden, an switched over to whole and organic foods. If the goal was to double my food budget, that worked out pretty well. Our health (aside from the increasing and inevitable entropic curve associated with a cruise through ones fifth decade) is very good: no cholesterol, low blood pressure, no chronic conditions. To be sure, genetics plays a component (as does my longstanding, regular consumption of red wine!), but I feel better than I did when I was much younger and an eager consumer of fast-food hamburgers and fried foodstuffs.

 

You want fries with that?

Vindication has come our way as well: in 2004 I saw Morgan Spurlock's documentary, Supersize Me. If you haven't seen it yet, it's like watching a car crash happen right in front of you, but instead of cars it's hamburgers, and instead of injuries and property damage, it's cardiovascular disease and obesity. I haven't eaten as much as a single McNugget since then.

A few years after that I picked up a copy of The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. It dovetailed very neatly with a lot of ideas I had about food, nutrition and respect for the resources I was using. In particular it solidified my decision to continue being a happy carnivore--as long as I was sure of my place in the food chain and knew exactly where the animals I was eating came from, and took responsibility for their humane use. I figure if the creator hadn't intended us to eat animals, she wouldn't have made them from tasty, tasty meat.

Early in 2008 I read Pollan's next book, In Defense of Food. This clinched it for me, and his thesis, 'Eat food, not too much, mostly plants' might seem bizarrely simplistic, when you dig down it's pretty startling to think that a large part of the western diet is made from things our grandparents would not have recognised as food: hydrogenated fats, corn in everything, 'mechanically separated meat', dyes, preservatives, emulsifiers, 'stabilisers', thickeners, enhancers . . . it goes on, and you might think, 'Oh Tim! Those things may not be the best food choices, but at least they're safe and government controlled.' Like most folks I too trust Agriculture Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and the USFDA to make sure that the foods I buy aren't actually harmful.

Grade Z goodness

Today's New York Times kind of throws a monkey-wrench into that idea. It turns out that agribusiness processors in the USA have come up with a novel way to reduce the incidence of lethal e coli and salmonella bacteria from ground beef: they're injecting it with ammonia. From the Times article:

Mr. Roth spent the 1990s looking to give Beef Products a competitive edge by turning fatty slaughterhouse trimmings into usable lean beef.

Mr. Roth and others in the industry had discovered that liquefying the fat and extracting the protein from the trimmings in a centrifuge resulted in a lean product that was desirable to hamburger-makers.

The greater challenge was eliminating E. coli and salmonella, which are more prevalent in fatty trimmings than in higher grades of beef. According to a 2003 study financed by Beef Products, the trimmings “typically includes most of the material from the outer surfaces of the carcass” and contains “larger microbiological populations.” Beef Products said it also used trimmings from inside cuts of meat

Pathogens died when enough ammonia was used to raise the alkalinity of the beef to a high level, company research found. But early on, school lunch officials and other customers complained about the taste and smell of the beef. Samples of the processed beef obtained by The Times revealed lower levels of alkalinity, suggesting less ammonia was used.

Beef Products acknowledged lowering the alkalinity, and the U.S.D.A. said it had determined that “at least some of B.P.I.’s product was no longer receiving the full lethality treatment.”

 Trimmings? Outer surfaces of the carcass? That's hide, not meat--I'm not eager to eat my shoes, belt and wallet for lunch.  And all this shaves three cents off a pound of meat, which then has to be treated with ammonia (the same thing in your bottle of window cleaner) to a pH of 9.5+ to kill the enormous colonies of lethal bacteria. At that pH it would be suitable for sanitising counter tops, not for eating.

 It's not like I think I have the answer to everything, or that seizing on one food fad or another, however well-intentioned, is a guaranteed pathway to perfect health and a better world. But it stands to reason that it's better to eat food that's actually made out of, uh, food, than it is to eat mechanically not-food processed to within an inch of human understanding. I'm going to keep on grinding my own chuck for hamburgers, from happy organic cows who ate grass under open skies--if nothing else it'll help me sleep better at night.

What's that? The second resolution? I'm going to learn to play the Ukulele. Okay, maybe not like Jake Shimabukuro, but I'm practicing!

Posted by Timulator AT 3:47PM

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