Last month I crossposted a DawnWatch alert about Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, who was appearing on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

This month Grist Magazine scored an interview with the omnivore:

Ever wonder where the food on your plate came from? Writer Michael Pollan wondered, and has spent some 15 years finding out, tracing edibles back to their sources and uncovering a stomach-turning web of industrialization, government subsidies, and ignorant, unhealthy eaters. With his writing for The New York Times Magazine and a quartet of books — the latest is The Omnivore’s Dilemma — Pollan has become a celeb among foodies. He dropped by Grist’s office to chat with David Roberts about industrial organic, ubiquitous corn, and the cult of convenience.

You can read the whole Q&A here.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch
Date: May 22, 2006 9:00 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: “Petri dish certified” — Los Angeles Times article 5/22/06

The Monday, May 22, Los Angeles Times has a fascinating article headed, “Petri dish certified; Growing meat in a lab sounds far-fetched, but some scientists see it as an inevitable evolution. Whether it’s practical remains to be seen.” (Page F3)

It opens:

“The new good-for-you meat won’t be pork or grass-fed beef, and it won’t be made of soy. If the efforts of a few future-minded scientists succeed, it will taste and look like old-fashioned meat — only it’ll be raised in a lab, not on a farm.

Several groups of scientists are cultivating edible meat in dishes from animal muscle cells. The technology, which involves choosing the right starter cells, stimulating and fine-tuning their growth for taste, texture and nutrients, has a way — a long way — to go before meat could hit supermarkets. But these researchers insist it will be a more efficient way to produce a staple of the American diet — and will make meat healthier to boot.

“Growing lab meat, they say, will mean scientists can control levels and types of fats (such as omega 3 fatty acids), protein and other substances and produce a product less likely to be contaminated with such food-poisoning culprits as E. coli.

“‘Suddenly a McDonald’s breakfast sausage patty could protect you from heart disease instead of giving you heart disease,’ says Robert Lawrence, director of the Center for a Livable Future at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.

We are given an idea of what would be involved:

“To culture meat, scientists cut a small piece of muscle from a pig or fish, or use a few cells cultured in a lab. (Popular starters include embryonic myoblasts, which are cells destined to become muscle cells, or adult muscle ’satellite’ cells, which help muscle recover from injuries.) The cells are placed in a dish or bioreactor then ‘fed’ with a fluid containing a combination of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, sugars, salts and growth factors.

“Early success came in 2002, when Touro College biology professor Morris Benjaminson reported growing fish meat in the lab. He and his colleagues cultured the flesh using pieces of muscle tissue (about 20 square centimeters) harvested from anesthetized, living goldfish.

“The tissues were doused with fibroblasts (cells that form connective tissue), incubated and nourished with either fetal cow serum, maitake or shiitake mushroom extract or fish meal.

“Within a week, the fish muscles increased up to 89% in size.

“Collaborator James Gilchriest, also a researcher at Touro, marinated a batch of the cultured fish — which the researchers said ‘resembled fresh fish fillets’ — in olive oil, lemon and garlic before breading and deep-frying them.

The full article is available on line here or at http://tinyurl.com/lx9nh

Focusing on health, it make no mention of animal protection issues but opens the door for letters to the editor against the cruelty of factory farming and slaughterhouses. A great source of information on factory farming is www.FactoryFarming.com

The Los Angeles Times takes letters at letters@latimes.com

Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Shorter letters are more likely to be published.

Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi If you forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts, please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

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Last week I mentioned the release of Peter Singer’s newest book, The Way We Eat, and pointed readers to an interview with the controversial philosopher in Salon. This week, the news is making the rounds on the animal rights lists.

Thought y’all might be interested in this summary of all things Singer-related from DawnWatch.

Enjoy.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch
Date: May 21, 2006 8:47 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: “The Way We Eat” by Peter Singer and Jim Mason — reviews and interviews — May 2006

Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, and Jim Mason, who co-authored with Singer the 1980 book “Animal Factories,” have a new co-written book out on food, titled “The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter.” (In Australia it is titled “The Ethics of What we Eat.”)

It is aimed not at animal rights activists, but at the general public, and gives an entertaining and highly informative overview of what is behind dinner. You’ll find information about it, and some reviews, at http://tinyurl.com/qdmds
where you can also purchase it (for $16.35).

You can hear an Air America interview with Peter Singer about the book, as part of Mother Jones magazine radio, on line at http://www.motherjones.com/radio/2006/05/singer_bio.html. It includes some fascinating information.
Peter Singer’s portion of the show starts at 18:15.

And Mother Jones has a web interview with Peter Singer at http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2006/04/peter_singer.html

The online magazine “Salon” also has an interview with Singer. It is on line at http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/05/08/singer/index_np.html
At the bottom of the page is a place where you can post a letter about the article, and you can read the other letters that have been posted.

Melbourne’s daily newspaper, The Age, published an except from the book last week (May 18) — a particularly fun section about freeganism, or dumpster diving for food. It is headed, “Food for Nought.” You can read it on line at http://tinyurl.com/ethhp

And this weekend, Australia’s national paper, The Weekend Australian, published a favorable review of the book. The review is informative and insightful, and I will paste it below. Aussies might wish to respond with a letter, about what we eat, to the Australian at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/files/aus_letters.htm

Weekend Australian
May 20, 2006 Saturday
REVIEW; Books; Pg. 14

Chew on this

Stephen Romei

Peter Singer’s new book is a cerebral Super Size Me, writes Stephen Romei

The Ethics of What We Eat

By Peter Singer and Jim Mason

Text Publishing, 303pp, $32.95

LET’S start with some good news: the consumption of veal — calves separated from their mothers a few days after birth and slaughtered about three months later — has fallen to about a quarter of what it was 30 years ago.

While this remains extremely bad news for the calves concerned, it’s good news in a broader sense because it shows attitudes to what we eat can change dramatically. Many carnivores refuse to eat veal, drawing the line at the suffering involved in rendering a baby cow into a wiener schnitzel.

Another example: in several European countries, free-range eggs outsell eggs from caged hens, and two British supermarket chains, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose, stock only the free-range variety. It may take another 50 years but the end of the battery hen industry, which accounts for 85 per cent of eggs produced in Australia, is a real possibility.

And it’s not just about animals. Sales of fair-trade coffee and chocolate are booming as increasing numbers of consumers decide it’s worth paying more to ensure their simple pleasures are not produced by slave labour.

Consumer education is at the heart of such shifts — it’s said that if abattoirs were made of glass, not even Sam Neill could save the meat industry — and Australian philosopher Peter Singer has been at the forefront of that effort since his 1975 book Animal Liberation.

The Ethics of What We Eat is a less harrowing read than that landmark tract. Singer and his co-author Jim Mason, a lawyer, animal rights advocate and vegan who grew up on a farm in the US, do not judge or preach; they accept that for many people, for many reasons, ethical considerations do not loom large when deciding how to feed their families.

Although there are some descriptions of the extreme animal cruelty that is the hourly reality of factory farming, Singer and Mason by and large holster the stun gun. That ground has been well covered, including by the authors in their 1980 book Animal Factories, and more recently by George W. Bush’s former speechwriter Matthew Scully in the superb Dominion (St Martin’s Press, 2002). Perhaps Singer and Mason believe public opinion slowly is turning against factory farming and that gentle persuasion — in the form of information — is what is most needed.

Even so, I must contest their use of the word ”humane” when discussing ways of raising and slaughtering animals. It’s not more humane to decapitate a chicken rather than scald it to death (as happens all too often in factory farming); it’s just less cruel.

That complaint aside, this is an accessible and well-researched book, with extensive footnotes for readers who want to check the authors’ sources for themselves or learn more about the topics discussed.

”Food choices are only one aspect of what people do and not a sufficient basis for judging their moral character,” Singer and Mason write. ”Indeed, since food ethics has been such a neglected topic in our culture, it is quite likely that otherwise good people are making bad choices in this area simply because they have not really focused on it, or do not have access to information they need to make good choices.”

They also emphasise that there is not one right way and that compromises are understandable, that ”you can be ethical without being fanatical”. This approach is sensible — animal rights extremists turn people off — and an acknowledgment of the complexity of the terrain.

Take free-range eggs, which have such a feel-good factor, yet male chicks suffer the same fate on free-range farms as on battery operations: they are killed immediately.

Singer, who moved to the US in 1999 to become professor of bioethics at Princeton University, and Mason cleverly humanise their story by looking at food ethics through the shopping and eating habits of three American families.

The options available to them and the choices they make will be familiar to Australian readers. For good measure, most chapters also contain specific discussion of the comparable situation in Australia.

Here the news is mixed: Australian standards on animal welfare and environmental protection are better in many respects but there is vast room for improvement. And we have some peculiarly home-grown problems, such as the joeys left to die of thirst and hunger when their mothers are shot to become trendy steaks and cat food. Singer and Mason estimate three million joeys have suffered this fate in the past decade.

This is a more obvious example of the hidden costs of food production that can complicate our choices. Many people consider eating roo an ethical decision — the animals are plentiful, live in their natural habitat and are killed quickly — but will learning about the little Skippies change their minds?

Similarly, say you like chicken and are indifferent to the welfare of the birds. Might you nevertheless reconsider buying factory-farmed drumsticks if you knew the waste discharged by the plant means people living nearby ”can’t enjoy being in their yard because of the flies and have to keep their windows shut because of the stench … [that] kids can’t swim in the local streams [and] their drinking water is polluted”?

Even more taxing, say you have $1 to spend on coffee beans and the choice is between a local producer who will receive the whole dollar and a Kenyan grower who will receive 2c in the dollar. Singer and Mason have a surprising suggestion.

There is no doubt that consumer attitudes towards food are shifting, not least for health reasons. In the US, the Whole Foods Market chain, which specialises in organic produce, is a Fortune 500 company, with 180 stores and an annual turnover of $US5billion.

Founder John Mackey, who started with one store in Texas in 1978, predicts factory farming will be illegal in the US within 20 years.

In Australia, Pierce Cody, who made his fortune in outdoor advertising, has big expansion plans for his Macro Wholefoods supermarket business.

The publicity guff compares this book with Morgan Spurlock’s anti-McDonald’s documentary Super Size Me. But Singer and Mason operate on a higher plane, and don’t resort to vomiting on their pages to make a point.

Irrespective of where you stand on ethical eating — and, as Singer and Mason point out, most people don’t stand anywhere because they have not thought about it — this book will provide, yes, here it comes, serious food for thought.

Peter Singer will be a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival, which starts on Monday.
(END OF WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN REVIEW)

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(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi If you forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts, please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

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This week, Grist Magazine features an excerpt from Samuel Fromartz’s Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew.

Here’s a brief summary, as seen on their Daily Grist wrapup:

Chews Wisely: Is it better to buy organic or local?

Does locally grown food trump pesticide-free produce, or vice versa? Farmers’ markets and produce aisles are chock-full of earnest foodies agonizing over the green conundrum du jour. In a piece adapted from his book Organic, Inc., Samuel Fromartz addresses the local/organic dilemma — and his advice may surprise you.

Fromartz’s answer?

When I shop, visiting the Dupont Circle farmers’ market in Washington on Sunday morning and then going to the supermarket, I make choices too. I buy local, organic, and conventional foods too, because each meets a need. Is the local product better than the organic one? No. Both are good choices because they move the food market in a small way. In choosing them, I can insert my values into an equation that for too long has been determined only by volume, convenience, and price. While I have nothing against low prices and convenient shopping, the blind pursuit of these two values can wreak a lot of damage — damage that we ultimately pay for in water pollution, toxic pesticide exposure, unhealthy livestock, the quality of food, and the loss of small farms. The total bill may not show up at the cash register, but it’s one we pay nonetheless.

You can read the whole piece here.

Daryl Hannah, that is.

Sure, every celeb can give lip service to positive change, but Hannah actually spends most of her spare time walking the walk. The latest proof is her video blog, a series of five-minute films that offer snapshots of how people around the globe are helping each other, and the earth.

In the first spot, Hannah takes a lick off the gas cap of her 1983 biodiesel el Camino. The french-fry grease that powers it, she says, has a toxicity level “somewhere between table salt and maple syrup.” For another, she filmed her visit to Rwanda, where she encountered mountain gorillas — the country is home to the last 350 of the endangered creatures — and helped christen a village’s cisterns for World Water Day. A third video finds her profiling an organic vegan “junk food” joint. She plans to debut a new movie every Monday.

I know it’s not strictly food-related, but check it out.

Random fact: though we named the newest canine addition to our family O-Ren Ishii, Elle Driver was a close runner-up.

Via Grist, which I should really add to the blogroll…

In Salon.com, “The Way We Eat author Peter Singer explains the advantage of wingless chickens, how humans discriminate against animals, and the downside of buying locally grown food.”

It’s a long piece, but here are a few brief excerpts.

Some background on the book:

Singer’s new book, The Way We Eat, co-written with Jim Mason, looks at the eating habits of three different American families: vegans, “conscientious omnivores” and a family eating the “standard American diet.” The elements of each diet and the production chain that brought it to the table are then carefully considered in light of environmental impact, fair trade, the organic movement, the grow-local movement, genetically modified foods, animal rights and the depredations of agribusiness.

Singer on “organic chicken farms”:

When I got to this place, although it was in a beautiful green valley in New Hampshire, and it was a fine, sunny fall day, there were no hens outside at all. The hens were all in these huge sheds, about 20,000 hens in a single shed, and they were pretty crowded. The floor of the shed was basically a sea of brown hens, and when we asked about access to outdoors, we were shown a small dirt run which at the best of times I don’t think the hens would be very interested in. In any case the doors were closed, and when we asked why, we were told that the producer was worried about bird flu. So, yes, it was not really what I expected. It was still a kind of a factory farm production — although undoubtedly it was much better than a caged operation.

On the occasional perils of buying locally:

This is in reference to the local food movement, and the idea that you can save fossil fuels by not transporting food long distances. This is a widespread belief, and of course it has some basis. Other things being equal, if your food is grown locally, you will save on fossil fuels. But other things are often not equal. California rice is produced using artificial irrigation and fertilizer that involves energy use. Bangladeshi rice takes advantage of the natural flooding of the rivers and doesn’t require artificial irrigation. It also doesn’t involve as much synthetic fertilizer because the rivers wash down nutrients, so it’s significantly less energy intensive to produce. Now, it’s then shipped across the world, but shipping is an extremely fuel-efficient form of transport. You can ship something 10,000 miles for the same amount of fuel necessary to truck it 1,000 miles. So if you’re getting your rice shipped to San Francisco from Bangladesh, fewer fossil fuels were used to get it there than if you bought it in California.

And on the inefficiency of meat “production”:

The fossil fuel goes into the fertilizer used to fertilize these acres of grain, which are then harvested and processed and transported to the cattle for feed. We get back, at most, 10 percent of the food value of the grain that we put into the cattle. So we are just skimming this concentrated product off the top of a mountain of grain into which all this fossil fuel has gone.

Go check it out, it’s well worth a read.

Finally, a caveat: though Singer is often referred to as the “godfather” of the modern animal rights movement, he is actually an animal welfarist as opposed to an animal rights advocate (hey, the man’s a utilitarian). (For more on the rights vs. welfare distinction, click here.)

You can read my review of his most famous AR tome, Animal Liberation, on Amazon.com (as of this writing, mine is the top “Spotlight” review and is posted under the alias “easyvegan”).

Courtesy of Slate:

Food: Is MSG Making a Comeback?
Is the often reviled cooking ingredient monosodium glutamate making a comeback? Sara Dickerman explains why some chefs now say they favor the much-maligned MSG. Listen to the segment [on NPR's Day to Day].

This month is shaping up to be a good one in the icky food stories department. I first caught this little ditty on CNN’s ticker.

Drinkers shock at body in rum barrel

HUNGARIAN builders who drank their way to the bottom of a huge barrel of rum while renovating a house got a nasty surprise when a pickled corpse tumbled out of the empty barrel, a police magazine website reported.

According to online magazine www.zsaru.hu, workers in Szeged in the south of Hungary tried to move the barrel after they had drained it, only to find it was surprisingly heavy and were shocked when the body of a naked man fell out.

The website said that the body of the man had been shipped back from Jamaica 20 years ago by his wife in the barrel of rum in order to avoid the cost and paperwork of an official return.

According to the website, workers said the rum in the 300-litre barrel had a “special taste” so they even decanted a few bottles of the liquor to take home.

The wife has since died and the man was buried in a proper grave.

Most of the info is gleaned from a single web site, so it’s hard for an amateur like moi to determine whether this is in fact a true story.

Pestiside has a more amusing description of the incident.

Saw this story at the Veg Blog:

Piece of finger served to diner after worker accidentally cuts self at restaurant

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) — A diner found a piece of human flesh on his hamburger shortly after a restaurant worker accidentally cut his finger, and a spokeswoman said the company was “very, very sorry.”

A kitchen manager at the TGI Friday’s at College Mall injured himself Tuesday and no one immediately realized he had lost part of his finger while others rushed to help him, said Amy Freshwater, a spokeswoman for the chain.

Another staff member served the plate to a customer, who immediately spotted the piece of flesh.

Gross, yes, but I ask you: how much different from beef flanks could human fingertips possibly be?

Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.

Pepsi fined over condom in bottle

Soft drinks manufacturer Pepsi has been ordered to pay 20,000 rupees ($445) in damages to a man from Delhi who found a condom in a sealed bottle.

The case was brought before the Consumer Disputes Redressal Forum in the Indian capital by Sudesh Sharma.

Pepsi denied negligence and claimed the bottles were probably fake goods.

A company representative told the court the bottles may have contained a bogus product illegally marketed under its brand name.

Mr Sharma said he purchased two bottles of Pepsi from a shop in the Kashmere Gate area of the capital in 2003.

He said he suffered severe headaches and insomnia after consuming the drink from one of the bottles and had to seek medical treatment.

Mr Sharma said he found dirt in the empty bottle and when he looked inside the other bottle, which was still sealed, he found a condom.

The Press Trust of India reported the court as saying Pepsi had failed in its duty towards its customers by failing to take action against people passing off inferior products as Pepsi.

Makes me glad I stick to filtered tap water!