Category Archives: politics

Tester Takes on E.Coli Problem

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cattle xing Tester Takes on E.Coli Problem

This morning’s Billings Gazette had a story about Senator Tester, with the help of a local slaughterhouse owner, taking on the lack of accountability in the nation’s meat testing protocols. Montana’s one of the few states where small slaughterhouses still exist, which is a good thing if you want to buy local meat. I have a friend in Colorado, for example, who has a ranch, but doesn’t raise cattle for her family in large part because they’d have to be sent to a big feedlot operation to be processed. What’s the point in that? How would you even know if you got your own meat back?

From the article:

“If nothing changes, we are virtually guaranteed there will be ongoing outbreaks and recurring recalls as a consequence of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s unwillingness to trace contamination back to the source,” said John Munsell, a former Miles City butcher and advocate for reforming food safety laws.
Eight years ago, a USDA inspector found E. coli in beef at Munsell’s family meat processing plant, Montana Quality Foods. Munsell told the USDA the contaminated beef came from the slaughterer ConAgra Beef Co., but under existing food safety laws, the government’s investigation stopped at Munsell’s plant. Federal regulators said they couldn’t positively trace the bacteria back to ConAgra despite records offered by Munsell.
Munsell recalled 270 pounds of hamburger. Months later, ConAgra Beef was caught in an 18 million pound meat recall, one of the nation’s largest.
Munsell has been lobbying for regulatory changes since 2002. He helped write the bill Tester is introducing. Currently, inspectors are not allowed to document the source of the meat they sample on the same day they collect material to test, Munsell said. Once the test results come back, enough time has lapsed that inspectors can’t say for sure where the meat originated.
“Why have they always required policies that intentionally delayed evidence gathering? Who are they trying to protect?” Munsell said. “In five days, the trail of evidence grows cold.”

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“We Won’t Bow Down”

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P2040004 225x300 We Wont Bow Down

With the deeply-flawed but still revolutionary Health Care Reform bill on my mind, I thought I’d point folks to this terrific piece by Rebecca Solnit (for whom I have total essay-talent-envy, if only I could do what she can do). Anyhow, it ran in the Nation a while back, and it’s an eloquent rebuttal of defeatism:

Six years ago I wrote a book about hope. A few years later I went to look at the worst things that happen to people and found some more hope in the resilience, the inventiveness, the bravery and occasionally the long-term subversion with which people respond. It culminated in another fairly hopeful book, based on the surprising evidence of what actually happens in disaster. Civil society happens, and sometimes joy in that society; institutional failure often also transpires. Sometimes a power struggle to re-establish the status quo follows, and sometimes the status quo wins, sometimes it doesn’t. Which is to say, sometimes we win, though that’s far from inevitable. This is grounds to be hopeful. Now, being hopeful seems to me like it’s preferable to being hopeless, but for six years I’ve been talking about these books in public. This means I’ve also been running into people at readings, talks and interviews who are furiously attached to hopelessness, to narratives of despair and decline, to belief in an omniscient them who always wins and a feeble us who always loses. To keep hold of this complex, they have to skew the evidence, and they do. They cherry-pick. They turn complex facts into simple stories. They constitute a significant sector of the left.

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HCR 1.0 Signed, Sealed, Delivered

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I’m posting this under the “Living” category in honor of the many lives this flawed, compromised, not-as-great-as-we’d like it bill will save. As the vice president so eloquently said: “This is a big fucking deal.”

Just this week I got another letter from the collection agency that is still trying to collect money from my mother for an operation she needed while she was uninsured in her early sixties. She thought she had insurance, but her employer had dropped coverage for his employees without telling them. It was a very small company, and the rates went too high (which is not to excuse him). The hospital refused several offers to settle, and although we keep thinking this issue is dead, since she lives on Social Security alone (and it’s illegal to collect SS funds), they keep sending dunning letters.

Such is the state of things, that I had to explain to my mother when she was worried after watching too much bad right-wing news coverage that it was Medicare, government health coverage, that saved her life after the head injury, and that has kept her in pretty good health ever since she turned sixty-five. She didn’t understand this. She thought she had private insurance. I had to explain that while she has Blue Cross/Blue Shield Part B, that only covers the 20% that Medicare won’t cover, that the majority of her health care is taken care of by Medicare, a government program. Just like the Social Security, on which she depends for her entire income, is also a government program.

The right has spent nearly thirty years since the Reagan era convincing middle-America that the government can’t do anything right, that government is incompetent — all to prop up the rapacious corporate forces that feed off a middle-class that has become increasingly fearful as it’s watched dreams of economic security erode. What I’d like to know is what have corporations been so successful at? Jobs? Hardly. They’ve sent all the jobs, including an increasing number of white-collar jobs overseas. Providing services or economic security or decent retirements for people? Hardly.

And the insurance industry, what can I say? Private enterprise hasn’t made this country healthier, or provided decent care to the majority. What it’s done is raise premiums, refuse to pay for preventative and necessary care, and use every trick in its extensive book to dump anyone off its rolls who might actually need health care. All in order to pay higher and higher bonuses to executives and to drive up stock prices.

The right has spent thirty years telling people it’s okay to be selfish, that we are not all in this together, that it’s every man, woman and child for him or herself. The Chicago school were wrong. Ayn Rand and Allan Greenspan and all the rest of them were wrong. They sold the country a bill of goods. There was no “trickle down.” The rising tide only lifted the boats of the 1% of the population that took all the money. The rest of us are left out here floundering, left with a broken banking system, raided retirement accounts, and no health care. That worked real well.

So really, I’m ready for a change. I’m not crazy about this bill, and I’m still furious with my senator, Max Baucus, who is already working to obstruct the reconciliation bill, and who is dutifully serving his masters in the insurance industry by preventing the logical addition of a public option to the reconciliation process (a public option that would save us huge expenditures of public money). But I am thrilled that as a nation we might, just might, be turning the corner again. We might be remembering who we are.

Now let’s move on to HCR 1.1, 1.5, and 2.0 (with a public option). Let’s make HCR actually work, and work for the millions and millions of uninsured, and underinsured people. Let’s stop unnecessary medical bankruptcies, stop lining the pockets of venal insurance agents and executives, and perhaps learn to live like a civilized modern nation. Let’s unleash the entreprenurial energies of all those people trapped in jobs they hate because they can’t afford to lose their insurance coverage. Let’s try it folks, try living in a nation in which health care is a right, not a privilege. We might just like it.

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Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution

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lrg 1854 300x136 Jamie Olivers Food Revolution

I caught the first episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution last night (full episodes available online here). I like Jamie Oliver — I realize he grates on some folks, but he’s got great energy, and unlike a lot of “foodies” he seems genuinely concerned for the well being of people who don’t eat in fancy restaurants, for kids, and for lost adolescents. His enthusiasm, and his perennial conviction that cooking “from scratch” is a skill that anyone can learn, and that by learning and practicing it we can improve the quality not only of our meals, but our health and well-being, is something I’ve always appreciated. (And I have some serious envy for his outdoor oven he featured in his show, Jamie at Home.)

At any rate, I thought there were a couple of things worth mentioning. First of all, the school he invaded has a whole crew of lunch ladies, who actually know how to cook, and who have real kitchen equipment: ovens, and stovetops in particular. As many of us who are interested in school lunches are learning, this has become increasingly rare in American schools, most of which don’t have full staffs of people who actually have cooking skills, and even more of which only have microwaves and steam tables. So he’s got one leg up on that front — that he’s dealing with some truculence is less surprising. It’s standard “reality show” fare — set up a “villan” at the beginning, who must be vanquished by the end. That part I found really tedious. Seems to me that with a pep talk at the beginning, pointing out how far ahead of most other schools they already are, and some genuine work to bring them aboard, a lot more could have been accomplished. If he’d woo’ed the lunch ladies the way he woo’ed that nice overweight mom and her kids, the whole project might have been off to a different start.

I also felt like the chicken-vs.-pizza cookoff at the beginning was unnecessary. Oliver did this experiment already in England. He knows going in that the kids will almost always prefer the food they know, processed, salty, sweet pizza or chicken nuggets to the unfamiliar tastes and textures of real food. So why not build on what he did in England, instead of doing it all over again — perhaps the assumption was that referencing the English version of the show would alienate American audiences. Seems sort of odd to me, but then again, I don’t create reality shows.

The other avoidable mishap was not taking a little more care with people’s feelings. Surely it can’t be any big secret that Appalachia has a proud history of repelling invaders? That they’re used to being the butt of the joke, and that repeating over and over again that they’re the “unhealthiest” (code for fattest) people in America might not be the most useful way to get through to them. I don’t know, the confrontational aspects of the show just felt off to me. Oliver has always struck me as sort of a sweetheart, one who is passionate about is cause, but who knows better than to rub people’s faces in their shortcomings. So why start the whole project off on such a confrontational note?

Or did they? It might just be the editing. At any rate, it’s a great opportunity to bring the dismal state of most school food to the attention of more people, and I’m sure by the end of the six-episode series, we’ll have scenes of people happily eating and cooking real food. Who knows? Jamie might even bring the lunch ladies around.

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Politics, Food and Otherwise

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IMG 0226 300x200 Politics, Food and Otherwise

A few items from around the intertubes:

While I appreciate that Iowan’s are using the stupendous agricultural natural resources with which they are blessed to move away from agribusiness models, I do grow tired of the eternal surprise of journalists when they discover, yet again, that the midwest is full of interesting people. Here’s a French journalist who took a tour of some of the state’s more interesting agricultural entrepreneurs.

Civil Eats has a terrific interview with Mollie Katzen, author of The New Moosewood Cookbook. She’s written a book called Get Cooking: 150 Simple Recipes to Get You Started in the Kitchen and has put a series of videos on YouTube. She describes her goal for Get Cooking here:

The very basic act of cooking is becoming a radical necessity. That’s why I wrote Get Cooking, because people asked me to lay out the simple basics of how to cook. I wanted to give people the tools they need to make easy recipes, four to five things you can cook well. It sounds simple, but that’s the key to people digging their way out of bad food. They need to know how to shop and how to make food in their busy day and in a small kitchen. I wish cooking was required in school, but until then, we’ve got to teach simple lessons.

Daily Kos has a roundup of the latest on the mythology that is the “jobless recovery.” There is no recovery without jobs. Again for those who aren’t listening: without jobs, people will have no money. Without money, people can’t buy food, cars, washing machines, or pay their mortgages. Without jobs, and without money, the “economy” cannot recover. We need to stop bailing out banks and brokerage houses and hedge funds. We need to stop giving tax breaks to corporations that move manufacturing jobs overseas. We need to start making things again in the United States, which means we need to start hiring people to make things. People with jobs can “recover” from this economic disaster. People who do not have jobs cannot “recover.” It’s time to get over the cult of Uncle Milty and the ridiculous idea that the “free market” is going to solve everyone’s ills. We need a real jobs bill. One that puts people back to work.

Left in the West has the actual numbers on what passage of the health care bill will mean for Montanans:

  • Improve coverage for 564,000 residents with health insurance.
  • Give tax credits and other assistance to up to 261,000 families and 34,900 small businesses to help them afford coverage.
  • Improve Medicare for 162,000 beneficiaries, including closing the donut hole.
  • Extend coverage to 117,000 uninsured residents.
  • Guarantee that 22,000 residents with pre-existing conditions can obtain coverage.
  • Protect 900 families from bankruptcy due to unaffordable health care costs.
  • Allow 76,000 young adults to obtain coverage on their parents’ insurance plans.
  • Provide millions of dollars in new funding for 84 community health centers.
  • Reduce the cost of uncompensated care for hospitals and other health care providers by $54 million annually.

    • Clean food, locally produced, by farmers who can make a living growing and selling food, and who might have access to affordable health care: Now that’s change I can get behind. Here’s hoping.

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