It's about the movement

A common theme on this blog is joy in movement. Movement can and will make you happy.

Let's do a little thought experiment. Think of an unpleasant setting - one that is not particularly conducive to human health and happiness. I volunteer the following - the corner of a busy urban street in a treeless concrete jungle. Let's say it's raining, just to complete the oppressive scene.

Add in playful movement and even this place becomes beautiful. Don't believe me? Watch this:

 Thanks to my friend Brendan for passing this along.

Eggs, salmonella, and incentives

If you haven't heard yet, we're in the middle of a massive egg recall. The FDA announcement is here.

500 million salmonella tainted eggs. 500 million. Wow. That should blow your mind. More disturbing is that Jack DeCoster, the man behind these bad eggs, has a long history of health and environmental standard violations.

(For more on DeCoster, you can read the Grist article here.)

The whole situation is disturbing and profoundly sad. It speaks to everything that is wrong with our industrial food system, CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), environmental regulations and enforcement, and farm policy. We should be asking ourselves some fundamental questions about how we got here.

The easy path is to look at scumbags like DeCoster and lay all the blame at his feet. His big agribusiness pals probably deserve some too. And what about those lobbyists? They're all evil, right?

Wrong.

The real culprit is me. Yes, me. It's all my fault. I allow this system to continue every day. In my relative silence, I implicitly endorse the values that have allowed this tragedy to happen. And here's the bitter pill - it's your fault too.

Idiots they may be, but I highly doubt DeCoster and his ilk spend their days in an underground lair plotting and scheming on the best ways to poison 500 million people. They plot and scheme about the best way to make large amounts of money, because that is what our culture incentivizes and rewards.

This was Lesson 1 of Business School: You get the behavior you incentivize, not necessarily the behavior you want. A great case study on this point is as follows:

A vegetable canning company received some complaints from customers who found bugs in their cans of peas. The company decided to incentivize their plant workers to remove bugs by offering bonus cash for each bug a worker plucked from the peas. A few weeks later, complaints about bugs in the peas skyrocketed. The company execs couldn't understand, until they visited the canning plant. The workers had taken to dumping buckets of bugs into the peas in order to maximize their cash bonus. The company had unintentionally incentivized the addition of bugs to the peas and, Lesson 1, we always get the behavior we incentivize.

In this country we demand cheap food. The percentage of our paychecks we spend on food has plummeted in the past 50 years. I hear lots of people complaining about how expensive organic food is, but not questioning the hundreds they spend on cable TV each month, or all the new clothes they feel they must buy.

At the same time, we are increasingly losing our connection to the land. We operate under the assumption that a superior, elevated life is one that involves as little dirt as possible. Farming is for poor people. We have too much to do to pay attention to where our food comes from - making it appear in our restaurants and on our supermarket shelves is someone else's problem.

Add in our blind materialism and is it any wonder that we've got problems like DeCoster and his poisonous eggs?

So what do we do? How do we fix it? I think it is lazy to suggest we don't have any power or that the country is run by business interests and we can't make a difference. We do have power. If you don't want to wade into the muck of federal policy, work with your local community government. At the very least, vote with your fork. Find high quality local farms and support them. Join CSAs.

If we demonstrate that we value the preservation of our land and the quality of our food we will create a new set of incentives that agribusiness will have to adapt to. The people behind our current food system aren't evil - they're greedy. And we can use that to our advantage.

Culture, part 2

The journey into the wacky world of fermentation continues. After a week of experiments I am delighted to announce that I have, thus far, not poisoned myself. This news will no doubt come as a profound relief to all of you, or, at the very least, to my poor mother, who has thus far weathered all my tales of big jumps, big falls, and close encounters with snakes with a surprisingly small amount of facepalming - but who may have been pushed too far when I happily announced that I would soon be ingesting large quantities of bacteria on purpose.

Before we get into how it all went, let's touch briefly (me? brief? hah!) on why we'd want to do this in the first place. The consumption of cultured dairy products and fermented vegetables is very old and, as a little research will show, incredibly widespread - cultures from all around the world have their own unique traditions.

The primary benefit of culturing dairy products and fermenting fruits and vegetables is the production of lactobacilli, the catch-all term for bacteria that produce lactic acid. These bacteria act to preserve the veggies or dairy products in question (a valuable practice in the age before refrigeration), but also serve as digestive aids. They increase the vitamin availability of the veggies they're cultured in. They can also take up residence in your intestine where they help break down food and produce some neat enzymes that have antimicrobial and anticarcinogenic properties.

Not surprisingly, traditional food cultures evolved to take advantage of these effects. Pickled vegetables and cultured dairy were included as condiments or tonics with most meals. There's sauerkraut in Europe, kimchi in Korea, a wide variety of pickled veggies in Japan. There's keifer and kvass in Russia, laban in the Middle East, dahi in India, and the Masai people of Africa live largely on soured milk.

So why did we stop? I can now speak from experience when I parrot Sally Fallon in saying that this is an artisanal craft - I cannot see it being industrialized. Indeed, industrial pickling relies heavily on vinegar brine and a final blast of pasteurization, which destroys all the beneficial bacteria. We would all do well to re-educate ourselves with this rich slice of food culture.

And when it comes to experimenting with ancient food practices, you can count on me to blaze the trail for you! We left off with waiting for the buttermilk to fully thicken, right? Well, it did - 24 hours later I had a jar of beautifully thick buttermilk - it smelled pleasantly sour and tasted really good.

My plan was to leave this batch out to separate into curds and whey - the curds could then be fully drained and turned into cream cheese and the whey could be used to ferment some veggies. In hindsight, I should have reserved some of the buttermilk for the next culture, but I forgot.

 The beginning of the draining process

Fast forward 3 days. The milk had visibly separated  and the time had come for draining. I lined a fine strainer with a clean unbleached dishcloth and set it all over a big bowl. They whey began to drip through almost immediately, but it took several hours for the process to finish. Once it was done dripping, the bundle of still-kinda-liquid curds had to be tied around a wooden spoon (and ONLY a wooden spoon will work!) which, for some reason, made the whole thing start dripping again. Apparently it is very important to not squeeze the sack of curds, but that didn't stop me from poking it a few times. Another few hours passed, the sack stopped dripping and I was left with a jar full of pure whey and a bowl full of real cream cheese.

Yum

The whey was used to start a batch of ginger carrots, supposedly the easiest introduction to the world of fermented veggies. The cheese was immediately employed for breakfast. The bagels were ok, but MAN the cheese was good - so much better than store-bought cream cheese. A more complex flavor and much richer.

Ginger carrots, day 1

Another 3 days passed while the ginger carrots fermented. When I finally cracked the jar, it sounded like I was opening a bottle of seltzer. The smell was incredible. The first bite was even better. This stuff is delicious.

I have since started a batch of lacto fermented apricot butter and my first batch of sauerkraut. My whey supplies are already running low, so I have two more batches of buttermilk brewing. This is an incredibly fun activity that, although it takes a long time, requires not a whole lot of effort. I strongly encourage all of you to start experimenting.

All the recipes and techniques I've been using come from Sally Fallon's book, Nourishing Traditions, which can be found here. Check it out.

I've been taking photos of the whole process, which can be found here.

Let me know how it goes for you!