Recent reading

This is essentially how our strattu is made.

We buy meat like this.

Not like this.

Recent reading

Fast food "meat" is probably scarier than you think.

Many environmental footprint studies are flawed. This one appears to be pretty good. It shows the carbon footprint of a loaf of bread. You might be surprised at what's the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas. Hint: it's not transportation.

UPS taxed air and we cut back on shipping air. The same logic applies when you tax food — check out the eye-popping results of Philadelphia's soda tax.

Ibérico pig immigrants, coming to America.

Recent Reading, Food Visuals

A look at the scale of modern American farming.

What 2,000 calories looks like before you eat it.

Recent reading on meat

The lack of small, local slaughterhouses is often cited as one of the obstacles getting in the way of you and me buying affordable meat from small, local farmers. There's a bill being proposed to change slaughterhouse oversight rules in a way that would make it easier for them to get off the ground. The article quotes from some people we work with like Will Harris and Greg Gunthorp.

One argument against raising animals for meat is that it redirects calories to animals that we could otherwise eat. Except...

"...most of the feed that livestock eat is not edible by humans. Globally, just 18 percent of animal feed is made up of grains or other crops that people might otherwise eat. The rest is crop residues, grass, and waste from milling grain and other food processing. And so, despite the inefficiency of converting calories to meat, animals are able to give humans access to energy that they wouldn’t have been able to access otherwise."

Many more interesting points in the article Can meat ever be environmentally friendly?

Recent reading

Many Danish hog farmers are running industrial-sized confinement farms but they don't use antibiotics like we do. Here's how they do it.

What if we put salad in our vending machine and made it cost less than a candy bar? Hat tip to Betsy B.

Whose government does the best at issuing nutritional guidelines? It sure ain't ours. Maybe... Brazil?

Recent reading (and watching).

Look how big chickens have gotten in the last sixty years.

A typical cow in the European Union gets a government subsidy of $2.20 a day which is more than the daily wage of 1.2 billion of the world’s poorest people.

Have you been eating sushi wrong (video)?

Jaques Pépin's omelet (video) totally changed how I cook eggs.

Recent Reading

A farm should be aesthetically, aromatically, and sensuously appealing. It should be a place that is attractive, not repugnant, to the senses. This is food production. A farm shouldn’t be producing ugly things. It should be producing beautiful things. We’re going to eat them. One of the surest ways to know if a wound is infected is if it is unsightly and smells bad. When it starts to heal, it gets a pretty sheen and doesn’t smell anymore. Farms that are not beautiful and that stink are like big wounds on the landscape.

From an interview with Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface Farms (he was the Virginia farmer profiled in Omnivore's Dilemma and Food, Inc.). Compellingly argued in ice clear language. From one of our country's great communicators on the problems with modern agriculture. Hat tip to Glenn.

That urinary tract infection? There's good chance it came from the chicken you ate. And it's getting increasingly antibiotic resistant because the chickens are taking antibiotics too. 

More shark jumping for bacon.

The purple prose of the cheese counter.

Mitchell and Webb cheese fail: