Tester Takes on E.Coli Problem

Posted on March 24, 2010 by cmf

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.”

“We Won’t Bow Down”

Posted on March 23, 2010 by cmf

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.

HCR 1.0 Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Posted on March 23, 2010 by cmf

Obama HCR Speech edits 300x200 HCR 1.0 Signed, Sealed, Delivered

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.

Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution

Posted on March 22, 2010 by cmf

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.

Politics, Food and Otherwise

Posted on March 18, 2010 by cmf

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.

On Hipsters, Food Stamps and the Permeability of the Poverty Line

Posted on March 17, 2010 by cmf

FoodStamps 300x195 On Hipsters, Food Stamps and the Permeability of the Poverty Line There was an article in Salon the other day that I almost blogged about, but it seemed like such as setup: Hipsters on Food Stamps. The article was a profile of out-of-work “hipsters” in the Bay Area, New York, Baltimore and other urban areas who were, thanks to the ongoing recession and the stimulus package, eligible for and using food stamps. Of course, the twist was that they weren’t eating “government cheese” but were using their food stamp money to buy fruits and vegetables at small stores and farmers markets, and were gasp, cooking fairly delicious meals from them. One of those meals was described, rather snarkily, as “Thai yellow curry with coconut milk and lemongrass, Chinese gourd sautéed in hot chile sauce and sweet clementine juice, all of it courtesy of government assistance.” Hmm. Sounds like a healthy cheap vegetarian meal to me.

So anyway, I wasn’t going to write about this because it just seemed so dumb. But today I was cruising past Salon, and found Gerry Mak’s response to the story. He’s one of the so-called “hipsters” profiled in the piece, and while he defended his decisions about food with eloquence, he correctly pointed out that the original article was a smokescreen for a larger and more important issue:

… the core of this discussion is an ideological debate between those that believe private entrepreneurship and simple hard work are the cures for poverty, and those that believe that the the poverty line is permeable in both directions. Among the latter, there is yet a deeper debate about whether we can, in a deep recession with record unemployment rates, make the same old assumptions about class based on race, occupation and education, particularly when increasingly, only poorly paid, unprotected, insecure jobs are available even to people with master’s degrees.

As someone who grew up with many many advantages, especially those of class privilege, but with parents who were usually broke, I have never been unclear on the permeability of the poverty line. I’ve been broke most of my life, with the exception of the ten years I spent at the Big Corporation. I have almost always worked at least two jobs; I have advanced degrees; and yet, in every other job I’ve ever had but that one, I’ve been underpaid, and have worked in environments where benefits weren’t even offered. Until the Big Corp. job, I’d never worked anyplace where I qualified for unemployment benefits when the job ended, and it continues to make me crazy that the majority of the jobs I’ve had in my life don’t even qualify as “real” jobs to the government. So if, for once, unemployed, educated, white-collar information workers are eligible for a little bit of government assistance, and they’re being creative about using it, who are we to mock them?

This is a deep and terrifying recession, and although I’ve been weathering it pretty well so far, let’s face it, there are real dangers out there. People are losing their houses. Kids are getting out of school and looking at the worst employment prospects in decades, but unlike those of us who graduated in the mid-1980s with similar recessionary stats, these kids are carrying tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. And it’s not just kids who are in trouble. There are a lot of people, like the author of this article in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, “Off The Job, Slouching Toward Social Services” who have good educations, and creative professions they’ve sustained with the sorts of underemployment jobs that those of us who want to write or paint or dance or create theatre have always had — secretarial and translation and waiting tables — and even those jobs are gone now. I’ve been lucky so far — I’ve had enough freelance work to keep my head above water, and it looks like I’ll be able to swing a part-time contracting gig back at the Big Corporation. I’m thrilled that I can survive on a part-time gig as I have some creative projects I really feel it’s time to commit to and I’ve spent the past eight years since I’ve moved here paying things off and trying to get my financial house to the place where I can live on a lot less. However, even though I can do this, and I’m deeply grateful for the job opportunity, I’m still going back to a world of self-employment — no health insurance, no stock options, and should this gig end, no unemployment benefits. I’m going back into that ever-increasing sector of the economy where there is no safety net, and where bankruptcy and ruin are one broken leg or appendicitis or cancer diagnosis away. And that’s NOT the change I voted for, it’s not the United States in which I want to live, and it’s not the nation where I want our kids to grow up. We have the ability to take care of one another better than this. And one way we can start the process is perhaps by rethinking some of the stories we’ve been told about class and race and education and opportunity.

Jeans, a Feminist Rant

Posted on March 15, 2010 by cmf

jeans Jeans, a Feminist Rant

So. Jeans. A perennial problem, the jeans. Remember when we were kids (you geezers out there like me) and there were just jeans. There weren’t five thousand different styles and different fabrics and different makes. There were jeans. Usually Levis.

I gave up on jeans a few years ago. Every time I’d find a make that fit, and that was reasonably comfortable and reasonably attractive, they’d go change them on me. And yet, even a LivingSmall type like moi, does sometimes read the fashion rags, usually while the magical Dezray is doing that thing she does to my hair that a) makes it cute and not just a mop, and b) gets rid of those grey hairs I don’t have. So, there’s this trend right now … “boyfriend jeans” … which pretty much just looks to me like comfy jeans, rolled up at the bottom. I live in Converse in the summer, and the look was cute, and so I thought … hmmm … jeans.

I was in a big-box store this weekend, and got looking at the jeans, and as usual, became immediately overwhelmed. When somehow, I wound up in the men’s section. Did you know that mens jeans are clearly labeled? That the labels describe the fit? Hmm. Boyfriend jeans. I don’t want the Sweetheart’s jeans, I want my own jeans, that don’t cut or bind or hurt my tender bits and that are kind of fun to wear. Men’s jeans?

I tried on a pair. They were FABULOUS! They had a nice clean cut to them. They fit as advertised. There was no binding. No pinching. Of course they were too long, but all the girls’ jeans are too long too.

I bought two pairs. For 20 bucks each. Yes, 20 bucks, what jeans should cost. And I LOVE them. I had to cut 4 inches off, but I used my pinking shears, and rolled them up. I have “boyfriend jeans” — they’re cute. They’re comfortable. No wonder men don’t walk around looking pained all the time. Their jeans don’t hurt. I feel like I’m ten years old again, wearing jeans, about to go outside and run around in the woods all day. I’m never going back to the women’s department for jeans ever again.

Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I don’t want pants that I can identify on the shelf, and that don’t hurt me, and that are both sort of cute and practical. Jeez oh Pete fashion people. I don’t need an 8 page spread in Oprah magazine about the different cuts you came up with just to make us feel even more inadequate and neurotic about our bodies than we already are. I just want a pair of pants. You can’t see me flipping you off, you terrible people who took over women’s jeans and who have rendered every pair of jeans I’ve worn in my adult life problematic — even when I was skinny enough that I was wearing jeans from the kids’ department. A pair of pants is what I want. A pair of pants that don’t cause me pain! That I have to go to the mens department to get them is a failure on your part. I’m never coming back, either. So there. Me and my very own non-boyfriend jeans are going to have a happy old age together, and while I might be crabby about many things, from now on, it’s not going to be about my pants.

Re-Thinking Quality of Life

Posted on March 2, 2010 by cmf

Over at Alternet, Kate Pickett, and Richard Wilkinson have a fascinating introduction to their new book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. It’s no surprise to anyone who has been reading this site that I think we all need to re-evaluate ideas like “standard of living” and “economic growth” — here at LivingSmall, I follow Ed Abbey, who said in all the way back in 1977, in The Journey Home that: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Picking up on this idea, Pickett and Wilkinson have done a demographic study of countries (and states) in which there is wide variation in ratios of income between the top and bottom 20% of the population. What they found was that:

Throughout the centuries, there have always been those who have believed that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive. That intuition seems to be borne out by our data. In the more unequal countries and US states, only about 15 or 20 percent of the population feel they can trust others, compared to around two-thirds in the more equal ones. More equal societies are also more cohesive, with stronger community life. Coupled with the evidence on violence, this confirms that inequality damages the social fabric of society. If you have to walk home alone late at night, you’d feel easier about it in a more equal society.

They examine the ways in which those societies which have greater economic equity enjoy better health, longer life, and lower carbon emissions among all social classes than do those with more economic inequity. It’s well worth clicking over to read the full article here, since my paraphrase hardly does them justice. But for those of us who are tired of our more wealthy or Republican friends and family telling us that we’ve got our heads in the clouds for instinctively believing that social and economic equity leads to greater social benefits, Pickett and Wilkinson have mustered a lot of empirical evidence to back us up.

Reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act

Posted on February 24, 2010 by cmf

Here’s a link to the USDA News Release about the Child Nutrition Act and what’s been added to it. The list looks promising. It includes:

Improve nutrition standards. Establishing improved nutrition standards for school meals based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and taking additional steps to ensure compliance with these standards;

Increase access to meal programs. Providing tools to increase participation in the school nutrition programs, streamline applications, and eliminate gap periods;

Increase education about healthy eating. Providing parents and students better information about school nutrition and meal quality;

Establish standards for competitive foods sold in schools. Creating national baseline standards for all foods sold in elementary, middle, and high schools to ensure they contribute effectively to a healthy diet;

Serve more healthy food. Promoting increased consumption of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and low- and fat-free dairy products and providing additional financial support in the form of reimbursement rate increases for schools that enhance nutrition and quality;

Increase physical activity. Strengthening school wellness policy implementation and promoting physical activity in schools;

Train people who prepare school meals. Ensuring that child nutrition professionals have the skills to serve top-quality meals that are both healthful and appealing to their student customers;

Provide schools with better equipment. Helping schools with financial assistance to purchase equipment needed to produce healthy, attractive meals.

Enhance food safety. Expanding the current requirements of the food safety program to all facilities where food is stored, prepared and served.

School Food

Posted on February 15, 2010 by cmf

Hi folks — working on a really exciting redesign, so expect to see the maintenance mode page again over the next week or so.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot about school food. The Billings Gazette had a piece about an elementary school that was about to start offering breakfast to all students. Which sounds like a great idea, except that I read about it right on the heels of Ed Bruske’s series, Tales from a DC School Kitchen in which he spent a week in his daughter’s school, and discovered fun facts like the breakfast offered contained as much as 13 teaspoons of sugar. Hmm. Breakfast is good, but is that breakfast good?

The Bozeman Chronicle reports that the Farm-to-School movement is getting some additional support, but it doesn’t yet sound like they’re seeing much local food in the local schools (and no, selling “local” huckleberry jam as a fundraiser doesn’t count.) Personally I think a great use of stimulus money would be to rebuild actual kitchens in the schools, and, as Tom Philpott has suggested, run a debt-exchange with culinary school graduates to run them. They could learn budgeting and cooking for picky eaters, and the kids would get real food. Or just hire lunch ladies again. I’m a huge fan of lunch ladies.

The way we pretend to use agricultural surplus to feed our schoolchildren should be a national shame. There’s nothing “agricultural” about the sorts of highly-processed heat-and-eat crap we’re serving them. Here’s an eye-opening blog post by a mother from Houston who gave in to her daughter’s wish to buy lunch (which was social in nature, the kid ate food she knew would make her sick three days running). She told her kid she could try school lunch for a week, if she’d take a picture of each lunch. Take a look here at what the kid was eating.

To top off this little school-food roundup, here’s Jamie Oliver’s terrific Ted Talk. He can be a little annoying, but you have to give the guy credit for fighting the good fight for cooking and real food. It shouldn’t be so hard.

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