Thinking About Food
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Fellow 3ones member Christian Spinillo is a big foodie and linked to a Rolling Stone article about Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer and apparently the poster child of immoral world domination. Seriously, the atrocities described in that piece make Fast Food Nation look soft in comparison.
The article reminded me of something I realized only recently - there's a big difference between organic food and humane treatment of the animals used to make the food. Those two labels don't necessarily mean the same thing and you really have to hunt sometimes to find food that's both.
I was thinking about that Sunday morning because I had grilled up some bacon that I got from Trader Joe's and the long laundry list of positive qualities on the front of the package was really impressive - no nitrites, no hormones or antibiotics, all vegetarian feed, free roaming pigs, etc - which probably was intended to be good marketing catchphrases for a newbie hippie foodie like me. And it worked. On the other hand, when I'm at Safeway shopping for eggs, I always feel like I have to choose between organic eggs that are the products of grain-fed chickens without antibiotics and the ones from free range uncaged ones that are being fed who-knows-what. I can never seem to find a brand that's both.
What adds to my trepidation is that I know that a lot of these newfangled so-called organic companies are actually rebranded versions of BigCos like Coca Cola and since big evil corporations will cut whatever corners they can find, stuff that is labeled "organic" might still be the same old factory-based inhumane treatment as always. So if something doesn't explicitly say what the animals were fed or the conditions they were raised under, you can pretty much be confident in assuming the worst.
There's another reason to shop according to a moral compass - that bacon from this morning tasted sooo good... it was absolutely yummy. It's also the reason why some of the expensive cheeses I like are so damn tasty - they come from tiny little farms where they treat the cows or goats like queens, with plenty of fresh grass (not grains!) and only seasonal milkings. An example is Cypress Grove Chevre, a little family-owned company that makes the popular Northern Californian cheese Humboldt Fog.
Great, now I'm hungry.
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