To Eat or Not to Eat... Or What to Eat or Not Eat... Or Something...

“If beef is your idea of ‘real food for real people’ you’d better live real close to a real good hospital.”

--Neal Barnard, M.D.

Meat has always been a problematic question for modern humans, even for those who have chosen not to think about the problems associated with the consumption of meat.  Leaving aside the ethical questions for a moment, and just focusing on health, there are a handful of advantages posed by meat consumption (particularly seafood, but also including red meat), juxtaposed with an ever mounting pile of disadvantages (particularly as related to red meat).  We aren’t doctors, but we do think it’s a subject worth revisiting from time to time, particularly because most people on both sides of the consumption aisle are (to put it mildly) not used to discussing the matter politely.

Lest you think we’re going to dogmatically say “don’t eat it,” we’d like to start with some interesting data points from a 1999 metastudy of data from 5 different countries, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition: 

Dietary Style	Mortality Ratio
Pescetarian (fish eater)	0.82
Vegetarian (lacto-ovo)	0.84
Occasional Meat Eater	0.84
Regular Meat Eater	1.0
Vegan	(0.7 to 1.44 owing to limited data points)

Obviously, as is true of any population study, these findings do not mean that there are absolute truths applicable to each and every individual regarding healthy eating habits… but the trend lines are clear.  As a general rule, one would expect a person whose diet consists of no animal flesh other than fish or the occasional egg or dairy product to greatly outlive the person who has red meat at every meal.

It is interesting to note, of course, that the statistical differential between this optimal group and the occasional meat eaters is not particularly significant; there is a far greater difference between the frequent meat eaters and the occasional meat eaters (defined as someone who eats no more than two servings of red meat per week) than there is between the occasional meat eaters and the vegetarians and pescetarians.

Vegans, naturally, are in a category all to themselves, owing to the fact that their nutritional intake is perhaps more variable within their category than is true for any of the other categories – a careful vegan is better off than anyone.  A not-so-careful vegan?  May as well be playing in traffic.  We’ll get to why in a future post, more than likely, but the odds are that most vegans reading this blog probably know more about how to eat a healthy vegan diet than we do, anyway.  We’re more concerned with elucidating for the omnivore crowd for purely utilitarian reasons, so please, don’t feel excluded.  And for any vegans who don’t know about nutrients typically not available in plant sources, for heaven’s sake, go find yourself a vegan mentor who does.

Now then, back to meat…

We suspect that a great deal of the differential between the occasional meat eaters and the regular meat eaters has less to do with the dietary value of beef and more to do with the effects of a whole host of corollary factors – quantity consumed at any given meal, preparation methods, what else is eaten, etc.  For example, an occasional consumer of beef is more likely to consume fatty fishes (that is, fishes high in omega-3 fatty acids) than is a regular beef eater; as it turns out, omega-3 fatty acids are essential for a host of bodily functions that have a strong correlation to long-term health.  So… it’s not just that occasional beef eaters eat beef; it’s that they also eat other things in greater proportion than do frequent beef eaters.

Likewise, the occasional beef-eater (especially those who are doing their best to minimize the ecological impact they have vis-à-vis cattle raising method – hello grass-fed free-range, good-bye corn-fed, factory farmed) is much more likely than the regular beef-eater to be getting a healthy dose of dark green vegetables and healthy starches (long grain rice, quinoa, etc.) and is much less likely to be gobbling fried foods and processed flour and sugar – it’s not just what they are eating, it’s also what they are not eating.

Then, too, the occasional beef-eater is more likely to be a gourmand, someone who takes the tastes they consume seriously, and is therefore not likely to be eating lower quality cuts of meat, nor are they likely to be eating processed meats.

And, as it turns out, there are strong correlations between heavy consumption of processed meats (hot dogs, bologna, pepperoni, spam, etc.) and several different cancers, as well as cardiovascular disease.  Those same correlations are not found to be red-meat specific.  In other words, there is something about the way in which the meat is processed which makes it inherently unhealthy.  Much the same can be said for processed flour, processed sugar… seems like maybe processing is a bad idea, no?

Lest you think this means there is a green-light for beef consumption, though, just so long as you’re paying extra for the grass-fed good stuff, there are other considerations that require attention. 

Heterocyclic amines (HCAs) are chemical compounds containing at least one heterocyclic ring (atoms of at least two different elements) and at least one amine (nitrogen containing) group – long story short, it’s just a category of organic compounds.  A lot of them are not only beneficial, they are downright essential.  Niacin would be a good example. 

However, there are several HCAs which are classified as carcinogenic (cancer causing), and they are created by the charring of flesh.  Like you might find in, say, the famous “bark” (that tasty outside crust) on a particularly well cooked brisket.

Let that sink in for a minute… the thing that demarcates beef as “really good” for certainly most Texans, and we’re guessing most people in other parts of the world… is carcinogenic.  Not “might be”, but “is”.

Now, can you cook red meat without charring it?  Yes, you can.  Does it still satisfy your meat cravings?  We can’t answer that for you.  And depending on the method one chooses, there may still be other health risks involved – meat cooked on a grill or over a flame which is not hot enough to char (and therefore not hot enough to create carcinogenic HCAs) may also not be hot enough to destroy flesh-borne pathogens (bacteria and viruses).  Microwaves can kill those pathogens without charring the meat, but they also have the nasty side effect of changing the chemical composition of meat (and of anything else they are used to heat) in unpredictable and hard-to-quantify ways, especially when cooked in, on, or near plastics.  Microwaves do break down a variety of prions, though, which may be beneficial, in light of…

Prion disease.  One form of which is known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE).  Also known as “Mad Cow Disease”.  There are actually variations of this particularly nasty affliction for every kind of consumable mammalian flesh, including human flesh, if you’re into cannibalism.  And while some sources of beef are free-and-clear of the potential for BSE (that would be local, free range grass-fed beef), the vast majority of red meat sources for grocers, restaurants, etc. are not. 

Safeguards in place are laughable, given that the only protection measures in place are to prevent the use of bone meal made with already infected animals.  These measures are sensible, of course, in that allowing contaminated animals to be used to make feed for non-contaminated animals would, naturally, spread the condition around.  The problem is, this approach ignores how the condition started in the first place.

Spongiform encephalopathy, whether of the bovine or other variety, is a condition wherein prions (protein fragments which are self-replicatable, but do not comprise a complete RNA or DNA sequence) run amok in the host animal; they invariably attack the central nervous system, and are only noticeable by their effects.  Autopsies done on diseased animals (including affected humans) will find brains eaten away like millions of little swiss-cheese bubbles.

And while on extremely rare occasions these prions are a more-or-less spontaneous creation in a genetically prone individual… on more occasions than not, these prions are created during the process of ingesting, digesting, and metabolizing flesh from a creature with similar DNA to the affected animal’s own DNA.  Hence the references to cannibalism.

Most beef (and pork… and chicken… and farm-raised fish) in the United States (and increasingly in the rest of the world) is “factory farmed” – that is, raised in cramped conditions and fed a slurry made from a mixture of corn, bone meal, and animal wastes (recycled poop, yum!); which means most meat sources are, in fact, cannibal meat sources.  Animals who have eaten their own kind, or a kind awfully similar to their own.

Given these conditions, it’s not a question of if some new strain of encephalopathy will emerge; it’s a question of when will it make itself known. 

Now, there are a few factors limiting the likelihood of onset, and they should be almost as troubling as the event they are forestalling.  A good example is the famed “pink slime” of McDonald’s fame.  Various industrial processes, such as the “cold pasteurizing” (euphemism for irradiation) of meat, or the use of ammonia-baths, etc. are good for removing bacteria, viruses, and even (in the case of irradiation) prions… though if those procedures don’t make you nervous, you are either very brave, or very drunk.

All of which, we are sure, has by now convinced you that it might be easier just to forego that big platter of ribs you were planning on smoking this weekend, right?

No?

Well, at least let us convince you to spend a few extra dollars to make sure that if you are going to continue to be a meat eater, you get your beef from a healthy source.  Archer-Daniels-Midland will do just fine on their own without you throwing away years of your life just to line their pockets.

And make sure that you eat plenty of veggies along with your main dish of choice, no matter in which longevity category you’ve decided to plant yourself.  As we noted when first breaking down the meaning of the statistics, it is quite likely what unhealthy folk aren’t eating that is putting them in the wrong categories; dark green veggies and fatty fishes top that list, so hop to!  We like you; we’d like to have you around reading our blog for a long, long time.

Happy farming!

Tastefully Vegetarian

"Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second."
--Edward Abbey

Taste is everything in modern life.  It is also missing, from practically all our food and beverages.  This is our rule and measure, and our curse.  Prepackaged foods are heated in microwaves with perhaps a dash of processed salt and pre-ground black pepper for seasoning, and this passes for food preparation.  And it is usually bland and tasteless.

We at Myrtle’s place have gone as close to vegan in our daily fare as we can reasonably do, and while there is a long history of veganism from which to draw inspiration, and a large swath of literature describing much of what anyone could desire in terms of tastiness, it has nevertheless not been easy.  In the modern context, most people are frankly incapable of being vegan for one simple reason – prepackaged vegan foods prepared using the aforementioned convenient methodology taste even worse than prepackaged fatty meats.

Trying to be vegan under such circumstances would inevitably be counterproductive, given the high incidence of bisphenol-A (BPA) in the packaging, and the chemical alteration of food cooked in microwave ovens, and the lack of flavor, leading to a lack of satisfaction.  No satisfaction?  Higher sugar and fat intake.  Higher sugar and fat intake, even in vegan households, means weight gain and health problems.

The solution – and thankfully there is one – is to think about the coffee/gasoline conundrum described by Edward Abbey.  Obviously, coffee is good for a body, and gasoline is bad.  Why is the gasoline getting into the coffee?  Solve that simple problem, and you go a long way towards solving the more general problem of why vegetables and fruits and whole grains don’t taste as good as cheeseburgers and milkshakes.

The reason coffee tastes like gasoline is because it is all too often in close proximity to petrochemical inputs.  Either it is brewed in a gas station, or drive-through restaurant, or it is pre-ground, packaged in plastic, and brewed in a plastic container, or (worse still) turned into dehydrated flakes to be reconstituted in a microwave oven, where it comes out as something almost like coffee, but just slightly off, as you could tell either by examining it under an electron microscope, or (if you absolutely must) by tasting it. 

And in all these scenarios, we haven’t even touched on the fact that the coffee is likely made with municipal tap water which is rife with chemical additives – yes, the chlorine and fluoride kill off most of the bacteria, but… what about all the unnecessary chlordates, and all those bizarre salts your body is simply not designed to ingest?  Not to mention all the beneficial bacteria in your body which the chlorine and fluoride will kill off once you actually drink the noxious stuff!  It is, quite frankly, amazing that anyone anywhere has ever had a good cup of coffee.  (We’ll share the secrets of how to make a good cup of joe some other time…)

Likewise, it can only be expected that it would be difficult to get children to eat their vegetables. 

Take a good look inside the can from which all too often our peas, beans or tomato paste have come.  At first glance, one thinks, “Big deal, a tin can.”  Only, it’s not tin or aluminum; it’s also not stainless steel, or any of a dozen other metals you can readily name.  No, it’s a proprietary blend of metals formulated by one of a handful of chemical companies who have learned how to maximize the tensile strength of the material while minimizing its weight and cost; the interior surface of the can has been lined with – wait for it – a plastic film containing our old enemy bisphenol-A, which leaches out in the presence of many of the amino acids found in foods which (prior to being exposed to this BPA can lining) were putatively healthy.

Someone who eats food stored in this manner on a regular basis will develop a dullness to their taste buds which matches almost exactly the taste insensitivity of a heavy cigarette smoker.  However, take a culinary purist who lives on fresh fruits and vegetables and give them a sample of canned peas, and they will likely spit them out, complaining of the metallic patina.  There is a similar taste sensitivity difference in the meat-eating world, too; organic, grass fed beef is vastly superior in taste to the factory-farmed variety, fed a slurry of god-only-knows-what.  We prefer to have no meat at all, but clearly the difference between home-grown and factory grown supports our overall theme.

What makes us even bring all this up?  The answer is revealing as a study in the dietary habits of the modern American.  When we decided to cut butter and other sources of animal fat from our already veggie-centric diet, we talked to as many vegan friends as we could about strategies for making complete and healthy meals. 

One such friend is a failed vegan – that is, she tried going vegan, and then a few months later went the entirely opposite direction and is now on the heavy-meat, low-carb Atkins diet.  When we informed her of  our new direction, she immediately gave us her old vegan notebook, including much material we already possessed, and some new items, including a recipe for vegan pumpkin muffins.

Pumpkin muffins?  Sounds good, right?  Especially entering this time of year, when pumpkin is everywhere.  The only problem is that on this list of ingredients, we weren’t advised how much pumpkin to use in terms of cups or ½ cups.  No, the recipe called for a can of pumpkin pie filling.

We are not surprised our friend is now a meat eater again.  The taste was not there for her in her vegan days, so she never really stood a chance of staying on such a diet.  We evolved with a craving for fat, the hardest nutrient to acquire on the African Savannah a million years ago, and that craving has never gone away.  In the absence of satisfaction, we revert to our cravings.  And there is nothing satisfying about canned fruits and vegetables.  No, to satisfy one’s hunger, one has to eat food that tastes good.

If you’ve ever had fresh baked pumpkin straight out of the garden, you know what we are talking about.  Fresh pumpkin is orders of magnitude better than canned pumpkin.  You can eat a roasted or broiled pumpkin off the shell with a fork or spoon, and hardly need it to be baked into anything else.  It is a meal by itself, without any other accoutrement.

The same is true of every other veggie you can name – kids everywhere tremble at the thought of eating bland, stringy, soggy spinach from a can.  Fresh spinach, cut from a plot right outside your kitchen window?  It tastes divine. 

Mushy, coppery, fibrous-but-not-in-a-good-way asparagus from a can?  Blech.  Fresh asparagus, sautéed in olive oil with fresh onions, garlic, lemon and peppers, or maybe with freshly picked oregano or basil or rosemary?  Yummm!

And if you’ve never had a peach straight off the tree, particularly in the Texas Hill Country, you don’t know what you’re missing.  Fresh peaches are as different from peaches canned in syrup as Tony Bennett’s I Left My Heart in San Francisco is from Justin Bieber’s Baby, Baby, Baby.

We have not been able to utterly eradicate the presence of plastic packaging in our pantry, but we have gone a long way.  Grains and legumes come home from bulk bins in plastic bags, and are then immediately transferred to glass jars.  We do occasionally indulge in things like frozen veggie-crumbles, which also come in plastic packaging.  And frequently pasta will come from a bag rather than a box.

However, as much as possible, we prefer fruits and vegetables which either come straight from the garden, or come straight from a local vendor – either a farmer’s market, or a market with a history of being friendly to the locavore community.

This also applies to another aspect of improving the tastiness of meals – the copious use of herbs.  Prepackaged herbs are not a source of evil in our time, but they are an inefficient tool in the fight against boredom on our plates.  The difference between fresh basil and dried basil flakes is like the difference between a performance of La Boheme at the Met, and a performance of My Ding-a-Ling on a kazoo on a kindergarten playground.

And the smell of bread baked with fresh rosemary is truly one of life’s great pleasures.  But you can’t have fresh rosemary without having rosemary plants nearby.  And if you’ve planted rosemary, you may as well go ahead and plant a full herb garden, right?  And once you’ve got a full herb garden, you may as well use it to improve the flavor of practically everything you make, because if you’re not going to take the time to make your food as delicious as possible, then what on Earth are you eating it for?

Which brings us back to pumpkins.  Yes, they are traditional for this time of year.  For the most part, though, what you’ll see in stores will be the carving varieties, which make great jack-o-lanterns, and even as uncarved doorstops they are attractive enough all Autumn long.  They do not, however, make for the best pies, or pumpkin bread, or pumpkin soup.  For that, you want the smaller varieties, and for that, you will more than likely want to think about devoting some more garden space next Spring and Summer.  Because taste matters.

 Happy farming!

Beef... It's Why There Is No Dinner!

“The fact is, though, that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave in ways that are biologically suicidal.”
--Malcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker, reviewing Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

The Dust Bowl drought gets mentioned on a regular basis every summer in the plains states, not just in a year like this one where a horrid drought has everyone talking about peak water, but every single year, because every summer we get hot and dry and we wonder when will it ever end.

And then along comes Pollyanna,  reminding us that we actually have it pretty good. Sure, there’s a drought, and our economy seems on the verge of a double-dip recession, and there’s rioting in the streets of London, but for the most part, Americans have roofs over our heads and food on our plates. So cheer up, right?

This, of course, is a selfish point of view, because what we do affects how other people live. The choices we make regarding how we dress, how we eat, how we get to work, have a direct impact on the lives of people halfway around the globe, whom we will never meet.

That bears repeating. It’s not just a bumper sticker, it is a moral code to guide our behavior:

“Live simply, that others may simply live.”

In context of drought, then, we at Myrtle’s place have made arguments in the past for direct improvement of individual lives by collecting rainwater, passively cooling homes, and eliminating unsightly turf grass from urban landscaping palettes. Now we would like to make an argument for indirect improvement of the lives of those in developing countries by a cessation of the consumption of beef.

This is, so to speak, the sacred cow of American (and, in particular, Texan) dietary arrogance. We like meat, so we say we will never give it up. But, as with so many other things we know intuitively we ought not be doing, we develop monumental psychological barriers to facing up to the truth. There is not a single living soul who does not know, deep down, that eating red meat causes obesity, heart disease, hypertension, colon cancer, lethargy, ulcers, and gude kens wha’ else.

In addition, though, cattle raising is the most prolific waste of water ever devised. Eating beef literally means that somewhere in the world, someone will die either of dehydration or of starvation. When The Smiths wrote Meat is Murder, they were thinking of the cows. But they may as well have been thinking of villagers in the Tibetan plateau, or in Sudan, or in Yemen, or in any one of dozens of water stressed countries around the globe. And someday soon, the same fate will await the citizens of Las Vegas, and of Memphis, and of dozens of other communities in the United States where water consumption (for personal use, for agriculture and for industry) far outpaces the ability of Mother Nature to play catch-up.

It takes tremendous quantities of water to raise animals for food. According to an estimate from David Pimental, professor of ecology at Cornell University, it takes 900 liters of water to raise a kilogram of wheat; it takes 100,000 liters of water to raise grain fed beef. Translated into units most Americans can understand, one pound of wheat requires around 108 gallons of water; one pound of beef requires 12,008 gallons of water. Given that within half a century, finding a city in the United States (let alone in the world generally) which is not in some state of water stress will be the exception rather than the rule, consuming that much water, that inefficiently, seems criminal.

Yet we are culturally prepared to eat our way into oblivion. Beef – it’s not “what’s for dinner.” It’s why there may be no dinner. Even the recently revamped food pyramid (and how often does the food pyramid really need to be revamped, anyway?) is a “My Plate” featuring “protein” as a prominent part of the plate.

Why?

When was the last time you heard of  someone having to be hospitalized for a protein deficiency?

Protein is perhaps the single easiest portion of our diets in which we may reach a satisfying stasis. Sufficient sources of protein may be found in legumes (beans, peas, certain nuts), in spinach (especially in combination with mushrooms), even in potatoes – really, in virtually all foods. “Protein” is actually the basic building  block of all DNA, so there is protein in every living cell. Not all of it is assimilable, of course, so vegetarians pay attention to how much comes from which plants. And not everyone is amenable to a vegan diet, but even if you limit your meat consumption to an occasional fish or game bird, you don’t need nearly as much
protein as the Beef Council would have you believe.

The U.S.D.A. daily recommended protein intake is orders of magnitude higher than it needs to be, and it is not difficult to figure out why. There are not millions of dollars being spent in Washington, D.C. by broccoli growers, or by peach farmers, or the onion lobby, or by farmer’s markets or community supported agriculturalists, with all their organic turnips and greens and potatoes and what-all-else, all of which is sufficiently high in protein to produce big beefy cattle, but evidently insufficient to support weak, flabby, addle pated weekend warrior “dittoheads” who order male-enhancement supplements from the back of Golf Digest and talk about how those vegetarians can’t possibly be getting enough to eat – wonder if they were chanting “USA! 
USA!” while vegan Carl Lewis was winning gold medals?

No, we have “protein” and “dairy” featured prominently in our daily recommended allowances precisely because we have such hefty (obese?) beef and dairy lobbies. One has to suspect that in addition to continuing to heavily advertise and push their addictive and destructive product, the Beef Council and their friends will in the future continue to advocate for their clients not just in terms of corrupting our nutritional standards, but also when it comes to allocating water.

During the health care reform debates of 2009 and 2010, the concept of rationing got more airplay than just about any other hot button keyword. It seems Americans do not ever want someone to tell us that we can’t have something – to tell us that there are limits to anything we desire.

Unfortunately, as many communities in the desert southwest know all too well, water is something which will have to be rationed at some point, regardless of how long we manage to stay in denial. There simply is not enough of it to go around, but until the actual time comes when scarcity is not just staring us in the face, but actually beating down our doors, we don’t seem capable of recognizing the plain and simple truth – fresh water is not a renewable resource. And since beef production takes a disproportionate amount relative to other healthier foods, the logical conclusion is…. Come on, put down that hot dog and answer, we know you
can do it…

Sigh.

To return to our opening theme, we are in the midst of a drought which reminds people yet again of the Dust Bowl era. Some people wonder whether the Dust Bowl was a trial sent by God to test the resolve of the American people. Anyone wondering this should seriously turn in their driver’s license, turn over their voter registration card, and admit themselves to the nearest mental hospital. God(s) had nothing to do with it.

The Dust Bowl was caused by farmers. By monocropping, not rotating, deep tilling and not using cover crops, farmers allowed topsoil to lose its ability to retain moisture. Prior to the 1930s, a drought would be bad, but it wouldn’t be devastating. Several pioneering soil specialists foresaw the danger of growing nothing but miles and miles of wheat and corn, but American farmers knew better than “those eggheads” and planted mile after mile anyway. After ignoring all the evidence before their eyes in the name of convenience and economic growth,  though, farmers all across the Great Plains watched their fertile lands literally just blow away.

Now, in spite of all the accumulated evidence, we are watching ranchers let their intransigence and greed shrivel our watersheds. Cows are slurping away our future, and we are looking the other way. Maybe we’re staring at our pretty emerald green lawns. We’re certainly not watching our aquifer levels.

It will be quite some time, we are afraid, before people reach the right conclusion on this one. It would be nice, though, if just once we could say that our society thought long enough with its collective head rather than its collective belly to solve a long-term problem before it overwhelmed us. Oh, well.

Happy farming!