My friend Eric Sneve knows and loves good wine, so I sent him this link to a brief article about Kentucky wine. Eric replied:

I have had great wines from Michigan. They say Llano Estacado (AZ or TX) makes great vintages. Thomas Jefferson was a total wine fanatic — importing lots of French wine and growing lots of vines at his Monticello estate in Virginia. NY is famous for its Finger Lakes region for Chardonnay. I think Long Island is also a player, Maryland and Idaho too.

So much depends on the microclimate, soil, and what the current growing season gives you. Minnesota is tough because the European vines (Vitus Vinifera) like longer growing seasons and freeze in our harsh winters. The University of Minnesota has created a lot of hybrids of Vitus Vinifera x Vitus Labrusca domestic US vines. They aren’t quite as tasty as the European varietals but do usually survive the winters and make acceptable wines. St. Croix vineyard and orchard will make you think you’re somewhere in Northern California. Well worth the visit.

You can find a some of these in the better local shops [Minneapolis/Saint Paul area]. There was a lot of talk about being able to order by web in or across state lines. Don’t know how or if that got resolved.

Best Kentucky ‘wine’ I have tried so far is Bourbon.

Cheers, Eric.

“… Fuel for international travel and transport of goods, including food, is exempt from taxes, unlike trucks, cars and buses. There is also no tax on fuel used by ocean freighters.”

Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.

… Under longstanding trade agreements, fuel for international freight carried by sea and air is not taxed. Now, many economists, environmental advocates and politicians say it is time to make shippers and shoppers pay for the pollution, through taxes or other measures.

… Proponents say ending these breaks could help ensure that producers and consumers pay the environmental cost of increasingly well-traveled food.

The food and transport industries say the issue is more complicated.

- Elisabeth Rosenthal @ New York Times: April 26, 2008: Link.

Via Jon Taplin’s blog: Link.

Interesting post at Boing Boing today:

Feds plan digital spying on pigs, llamas, terrorcritters.

Boing Boing quote the LA Times:

A Bush administration initiative, the National Animal Identification System is meant to provide a modern tool for tracking disease outbreaks within 48 hours, whether natural or the work of a bioterrorist. Most farm animals, even exotic ones such as llamas, will eventually be registered. Information will be kept on every farm, ranch or stable. And databases will record every animal movement from birth to slaughterhouse, including trips to the vet and county fairs. But the system is spawning a grass-roots revolt.

Various interesting comments @ Boing Boing:

Caveats

According to the article, there are a few caveats:

1) Pigs are excluded.

2) Agribusiness is excluded.

Somehow that just makes the idea even worse…

- Christovir: Link.

British farmers borrow animals to fool inspectors

Erm… is’t there at least some good in this idea?

Part of the reason behind Britain’s terrible record on animal diseases (e.g. foot-and-mouth) is that farmers “borrow” livestock from each other, so that they appear to have a larger herd when the dept. of Agriculture inspector comes by to calculate their subsidy. (Farms are subsidised based on the number of cattle.)
- spazzm: Link.

No mad cow screening

If this meant we’d do proper screening for mad-cow disease, that’d be awesome. Sadly the current administration is against that.
- dharrison: Link.

Why It Might Be a Bad Thing

“Apart from the cost, why is this a bad thing?”

Well, first and foremost, cost is the number one reason it’s a bad idea, so don’t dismiss it. Who will pay for this? Will it be subsidized by tax dollars or will farmers pay and then pass on the cost to consumers? Do we really need another reason to make meat more expensive?

2. Who’s going to monitor this? Looks like it will be creating more bureaucracy in a system already overrun with it. How and where will this information be stored? Who will have access to it?

3. Why is agribusiness excluded? What would be a more effective terrorist attack, wiping out Farmer Brown’s 5000 chickens or on Tyson’s 50 million?

- thivai: Link.

To Control the Food Supply

No, this is to control the food supply. Look at what the Nazis did to the Ukrainians during WWII and you will see this is an attack on those who want to live off the grid and be self sufficient.the new regulations are very burdensome for small farmers. For instance, the “Premises Identification” part of the plan requires owners to report any movements or visitors of the animals, even in the case of a few chickens and goats. The cost and time for such monitoring is prohibitive and also an invasion of their privacy. when you control the food, you control the people. we need to wake up folks!
http://www.nonais.org

- Angelastarling: Link.

Help Shut Down Family Farms, Promote the Nanny State

It’s really going to hurt the small farmers and make it too expensive to make a living.

… This is meant to really help shut down the family farms and people who rely on themselves to provide food for their table rather than the Nanny state.

- america_in_danger: Link.

Keeping Food Safe: Initiative is a Good Idea

I doesn’t seem to me that the people representing the anti-NAIS side of the table have done their research properly. I know you should take what you read from the government with a grain of salt but the actual website for NAIS, http://animalid.aphis.usda.gov/nais/index.shtml seems to lay things out fairly simply.

The program is voluntary at the Federal level and is free besides what a farmer might incur incidentally, a typical tag costs about $2.50 according to online farm supply retailers. States can mandate participation in the program but have not to my knowledge.

… Seems to me like this initiative is a good idea. I want to know that my food is safe.

- prisonersdelights: Link.

We already have this in Mud Island … Kafkaesque

We already have this in Mud Island, have done for years. all cows have passports & must be recorded every time they are moved from one field to another (EU subsidies are involved somehow). Sheep have ‘em too. Dunno about pigs. I have worked in the administrating department. ‘Kafkaesque’ does not even begin to describe it.

- Gilbert Wham: Link.

Stupid Summaries

The summaries that Xeni posted are just stupid.

First, this proposal has been around in one form another for years and has nothing to do with terrorism.

Rather, it is designed to allow for tracking down any disease outbreak, such as foot-and-mouth disease, BSE, etc. (Google to see the problems the gov’t had tracking the source of that BSE positive calf a few years ago).

- Brian Carnell: Link.

Wired “Danger Room” post isn’t accurate

That Wired “Danger Room” post isn’t accurate in at least 3 respects:

a) the motivation for this system is not bioterrorism but infectious diseases in livestock, especially bovine spongiform encephalopathy (”mad cow” disease) and avian flu, which pose a risk to human health;

b) agribusiness is not “excluded”; the “exemptions” mentioned might refer to the fact that individual animals in large groups are not required to be individually tagged if they are kept together throughout their lifetimes, which is reasonable if your goal is to identify and control infectious disease outbreaks;

c) swine are definitely included in the program.

At least these are the facts as laid out in the LA Times article, provided in the original post.

- d913: Link.

Equine Flu in Australia: records spotty and ill-kept

Australia is only just now getting an outbreak of equine flu that started last August under control - and part of the reason it was so unmanageable was that because records of animal movements were spotty and ill-kept. Cost the racing industry a fuckton of money, and that was just the start of it.

- alisong76: Link.

Fewer Small Holders, More Agri-Business

pestilence or war; same end result: fewer small holders, more agri-business.

- Takuan: Link.

Animal transport and processing facilities totally unaccounted for

I can understand and appreciate the growing need to track the progression of diseases. Two things don’t make sense to me though. The first is why accumulation of tracking data stops once the animal leaves a farm.

This leaves animal transport and processing facilities totally unaccounted for. Unless the animals are strictly segregated, it’s entirely possible that it could spread when they are aggregated for transport. If it survives outside the body (like avian flu virus) it can even infect later arrivals.

- cteegarden: Link.

Reform the System

If the goal is to prevent transmission of disease from animal to human, this is a backward and band-aid like approach. Why not reform our overcomplex, fundamentally unsafe, national meat and food production system.

- TheFool: Link.

A brief history of a much-maligned dish:

Pudding is an ancient British food, originating way back in the medieval period as plum pottage. It joined with mince pies to warm the heart and stomach in manorial halls flecked with candlelight in which diners sat in hierarchical order stretching away from the high table. The taste for sweet dried fruits mixed with meat and wine and exuding the heady waft of spices began with the Norman invasion of Britain; it was part of a flourishing in the culinary arts across Europe that marked a sophistication in the kitchen unseen since the Romans.

Because fruits were considered dangerous raw, they were almost always cooked and strained into pulps. Dried fruits, especially currants, came back with the spices discovered by Crusaders in the East and were soon mixed with meat in pottages and pies. For feasts and celebrations, cooks stewed beef with imported dried plums and broth, wine, onions, herbs and spices.

As with every aspect of medieval life, religion soon reshaped what was on the table: for the many fasts and Lent, the British developed meatless versions of pudding, including “figgey,” made with figs and bread boiled in wine, raisins and pine nuts and highly spiced.

- Kate Colquhoun @ New York Times: link.

Wikipedia: fruitcake.

“What’s it take to be a good truffle hunter?”

The principal personality trait required is the ability not to brag about it, because someone will follow you to your patch the next time you go.

- Charles Lefevre, Smithsonian Magazine: link.

Via Boing Boing: link.

Wikipedia: truffles.

“After the cows were done in one pasture, the chicken cages were rolled in. “

I read recently about an experiment in permaculture, which is the science of making food production ecologically sustainable. The Chinese have been making an art of it for thousands of years, with complicated interlocking cultivation systems, where the waste from one part is always recycled in some other part.

In this system, chickens were kept in small flocks in 20×20 foot covered cages. The cages were on wheels. Small herds of cows were also kept, in constant rotation among many small pastures. After the cows were done in one pasture, the chicken cages were rolled in. The chickens broke the cow patties apart looking for bugs, which were plentiful. This allowed the cow manure to break down faster, resulting in quicker regrowth of the grass, as well as lower rates of disease among the cows. The chickens were healthier as well, and got to run about and hunt for bugs, which if I were a chicken, I would vastly prefer to living in some overcrowded factory. Overall, the production of both beef and chicken increased dramatically over other organic ranching methods, putting it on a par with non-organic methods.

The inventor of the system based the idea off of the fact that in nature, herds of wild ungulates are always followed by flocks of birds. Pretty clever, eh? Another thing: you don’t need a robot chicken catcher, you just wheel the cage up to the slaughterhouse and pull the chickens in with a net.

- spun @ SlashDot: Link.

Comments from SlashDot readers

Uh, your forgetting the other benefit the chinese animal husbandry has brought to our world: a fresh stream of animal hosted viruses (note to the pedantic: virii, as a word, sucks balls) to infect our biped bodies and boost our immune systems. If we don’t choke on our own mucus first.

In their recent email, the Organic Consumers Association reports:

Creekstone Farms has won one of the most bizarre court cases the USDA has brought upon itself in recent years.

Early last year, after the discovery of another case of Mad Cow Disease in the U.S., foreign markets tightened their ban on U.S. beef based on the fact that the USDA requires such a small percentage of meat to be tested for this fatal disease. In an attempt to maintain sales with customers overseas, Kansas-based Creekstone Farms announced it would voluntarily test all of its meat for Mad Cow Disease.

Surprisingly, the USDA responded to Creekstone, saying it was illegal for them to have such high quality food safety testing. This action left Creekstone and its lawyers scratching their heads trying to figure out where in the law books it states that it’s illegal to test food for safety beyond what is required by law. Creekstone took the USDA to court and last week a federal judge ruled against the USDA. The results of the case will likely create a domino effect in the industry where more meatpackers will voluntarily choose to increase testing for Mad Cow Disease in order to allure international and domestic customers.

[Organic Consumers Association]

Google: Creekstone Farms

Melvyn D. Magree on the custom of smörgåsbord –

A smörgåsbord is a buffet but one you approach with a plan for a long meal of complementary dishes. You take what you want of certain foods, eat them with bread, cheese, beer, and snaps, go get a clean plate to serve yourself the same or different foods, and repeat until you are satisfied.

What’s snaps? It rhymes with schnapps and is alcoholic but not sweet. Snaps include aquavit and vodka. My favorite liquor store used to have five kinds of aquavit, but now only has three. I prefer the Norwegian and Swedish aquavits to the Danish.

According to Tore Wretman (1) one makes five visits to the smörgåsbord, taking from a different group of foods each time. These are:

• First, “Hans Majestät Sillen”, His Majesty the Herring
• Second, fish
• Third, cold meats
• Fourth, warm dishes
• Fifth, dessert

Så, till bords, skål, god aptit, God Jul och Gott Nytt År
(so, to the table, skål, good appetite, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year).

(1) Svensk Husmanskost, Tore Wretman, Forum, Stockholm, 1967. Originally husmanskost meant plain food for the servants, but I won’t try to translate its modern meanings. Wretman took seven pages to do so.

[Melvyn D. Magree]

I particularly enjoyed learning about “His Majesty the Herring”.

Image: the catch in progress.

See also Herring @ Wikipedia.

Memo to self: next year, have a smörgåsbord party.

This is too strange and disturbing — and fascinating — to ignore:

Mellified Man was a manmade dish popular in ancient Arabia. According to Mary Roach, author of Stiff, men 70-80 years old, on death’s doorstep anyway, would cease to eat food, instead partaking solely of honey. Pretty soon, they would be mellified, that is, “he excretes honey (the urine and feces are entirely honey).” Soon he dies and is placed in a honey-filled coffin which is then sealed for 100 years. At the end of the 100 years, the goop is eaten up.
[Gridskipper: Link]

Via Boing Boing

A new chewing gum “causes a rose fragrance to be emitted from the body one to two hours after it is chewed” –

The gum, called “Otoko Kaoru” (male scent) Rose Menthol, contains the fragrant component geraniol, which is found in roses. According to Kanebo’s food research laboratory, the component is emitted from sweat glands easily, in much the same way as garlic and alcohol. Maca, a plant that is rich in nutrition, was added, creating a mint-flavored, sugarless gum.

The gum is aimed at men between their 20s and 50s who are worried about body odors and scents. Each packet, which costs 126 yen, contains nine pieces of gum. The product will be sold at station kiosks and convenience stores.
[Mainichi Daily News: Link]

Via Fark

See Also: Hygiene @ Wikipedia

Which reminds me. Commercially bred flowers are losing their scent — flower breeders have selected for bloom size and color, at the expense of scent. See Diminishing Nutrition.

I’m also reminded, obliquely, of the novel Ascendancies [1980] by David G. Compton … mysterious substance falls from the sky, people start to disappear into thin air, leaving behind the smell of roses ….

“There is no sincerer love than the love of food.”

- George Bernard Shaw

Accoording to a report published by Scientific American, milk and meat from cows raised on Bovine Growth Hormone contribute to women having more twins:

Over the last 30 years, the number of twin births has nearly trebled. This rise seems to have followed the introduction of in vitro fertilization and a preference for having children later in life. But in the mid-1990s, doctors began limiting the number of embryos transferred in the course of in vitro fertilization and still the proportion of twin births rose. Now new research seems to show that bovine growth hormone in the food supply may be responsible.

Using data obtained from mothers by way of questionnaire, physician Gary Steinman of the Long Island Jewish Medical Center and his colleagues compared the number of twin births from moms who consumed meat and/or milk and those who consumed no animal products at all. They found that the omnivores and vegetarians were five times more likely to have fraternal twins than the vegans.
[Link]

Via Organic Consumers Association

Journal of Reproductive Medicine, May 2006: “Mechanisms of Twinning: VII. Effect of Diet and Heredity on the Human Twinning Rate”
G. Steinman

Genotypes favoring elevated IGF and diets including dairy products, especially in areas where growth hormone is given to cattle, appear to enhance the chances of multiple pregnancies due to ovarian stimulation.

Wikipedia on Bovine somatotropin (BGH) –

Bovine somatotropin (bST), or bovine growth hormone (BGH), is a protein hormone that occurs naturally in the pituitary gland of cattle. It is a factor controlling the amount of milk produced by a dairy cow. Bovine somatotropin is naturally in the milk extracted from a cow.
[Link]

See also Twin @ Wikipedia

Kate Hopkins of The Accidental Hedonist posts her thoughts on the high-fructose corn syrup debate:

The truth? Well, the truth is that we don’t know the truth. No one can say for certain that HFCS is better or worse than cane sugar. When we look to the Corn folks for information, all they point to is the fact that the FDA has allowed the use of HFCS, so it has to be safe, right?

Of course, that’s a bit disengenuous on the Corn folks’ part, because the FDA has NEVER tested HFCS, nor accepted any outsourced test results. The have deemed HFCS as “generally regarded as safe”, which essentially means that No one has been reputed to have died of the stuff.

Any excess of sweetener is a bad thing, whether it’s sugar or HFCS. The question that no one seems to be willing to answer is “Which is worse - Too much sugar or too much HFCS?” Until this question is answered, any indictment of HFCS is premature.

That being said, there’s much to circumstantial evidence that excessive Fructose is really bad for you. I’ve mentioned some of the test studies here. The short version is that excessive frutose in the diet can lead to a magnesium imbalance in the body, spurring bone loss. The University of Minnesota produced a study where it was found that in men, fructose produced “significantly higher levels” of trigylcerides in the blood than glucose does and that “diets high in added fructose may be undesirable, particularly for men.” Finally, University of London researcher P.A. Mayes wrote that excessive fructose consumption causes the liver to release an enzyme called PDH that instructs the body to burn sugar instead of fat. Are these issues worse than those caused by cane sugar? No one seems to be able or willing to answer that.

The one part of the HFCS debate which bugs me is the one that surrounds personal responsibility in regard to sugar intake. According to “An Omnivore’s Dilemma”, HFCS has not replaced sugar consumption in the US, it has merely added to it. In other words, not only are we consuming the same amount of sugars we did 20 years ago, we’ve added HFCS consumption on top of it. Before we can say “HFCS causes obesisty”, we have to be honest with ourselves and say “Too much sweeteners cause obesity”, because the consumption of both absolutely plays into our weight gains.
[Link]

Via boingboing

HFCS Facts takes a pro-industry, pro-HFCS stand:

How is HFCS made? The corn wet milling industry makes HFCS from corn starch using a series of unit processes that include steeping corn to soften the hard kernel; physical separation of the kernel into its separate components—starch, corn hull, protein and oil; breakdown of the starch to glucose; use of enzymes to invert glucose to fructose; removal of impurities; and blending of glucose and fructose to make HFCS-42 and HFCS-55. (2)

Both HFCS products share functional advantages, but each offers special qualities to food manufacturers and consumers. The sweeter HFCS-55 has a predominant role in carbonated colas and soft drinks. HFCS-42 is popular in canned fruits, condiments, baked goods and other processed foods for its mild sweetness that won’t mask natural flavors. The dairy industry uses HFCS-42 in fluid products such as flavored milks and eggnog; yogurt, ice cream and other frozen desserts and novelties.
[Link]

Sprol.com takes a partisan stand against HFCS, in surprisingly lurid terms:

More stable than sugar against the disintegrating elements (such as moisture), foods with High Fructose Corn Syrup can literally travel thousands of miles and sit on the shelf of your local convenience store forever and (almost) never go bad. Cheaper ingredients meant cheaper groceries for the good American consumer. A win- win situation, it seemed.

Because of the unusually long shelf life of HFCS, store-bought cakes, cookies, brownies, mixes, breads, sodas, juices, tomato sauce and all of the rest could be sold with practically no expiration date. HFCS, despite misleading labels that read “all natural,” is an ENTIRELY man-made substance. It’s almost indestructible. Like Styrofoam, eternal and immortal.

The pornographic underbelly of all this (and there always is one, it seems, where money and government and conflicting desires come into play) is that in laboratory tests High Fructose Corn Syrup causes male rats to never fully develop their testicles. And High Fructose Corn Syrup also causes the hearts of female rats to expand until they burst. Exit pornography, enter horror flick.

But is this a rat tragic story or a human tragedy? Well, hold into your seats because the seemingly innocuous little sweet nothings that Secretary Butz so gracefully introduced to our bellies in the seventies are now linked to obesity, diabetes, and yes, even cirrhosis of the liver. And as if the above were not enough, there is also some preliminary evidence that HFCS is carcinogenic.

In his groundbreaking book FatLand, Greg Critser breaks down exactly how HFCS is metabolized by the human body. In short, because our bodies have absolutely no way of understanding this highly engineered substance…they convert it into storage material and chuck it away…hence we are fattened up.

The explanation goes like this: glucose molecules, which are the building blocks of sucrose, can be metabolized (used, eaten) by any and every cell in the human body. This is not so with Fructose. It has to be metabolized through the liver. Hence, your liver ends up releasing triglycerides into your bloodstream and generally has trouble dealing with this weird substance. Fructose, which used to be advised for diabetics because it did not stimulate insulin production, really does appear to do a lot of fancy footwork with enzymes and other hormones, too. It does not allow the release of the hormone that tells the brain you are full. Hence, you overeat.
[Link]

Fruits, vegetables not as nutritious as 50 years ago, according to Donald Davis:

Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University of Texas, said that of 13 major nutrients in fruits and vegetables tracked by the Agriculture Department from 1950 to 1999, six showed noticeable declines — protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and vitamin C. The declines ranged from 6 percent for protein, 15 percent for iron, 20 percent for vitamin C, and 38 percent for riboflavin.

“It’s an amazing thing,” said Davis, adding that the decline in nutrient content has not been widely noticed.

Davis … suspects the trend in agriculture toward encouraging crops that grow the fastest and biggest is a reason for the decline. The past five decades have been marked by the “Green Revolution,” which has seen a marked increase in U.S. production and yields as farmers have turned to the fastest-growing and greatest-producing plants.

The tradeoff is that the faster-growing plants aren’t able to acquire the nutrients that their slower-growing cousins can, either by synthesis or from the soil. He said there also are differences in the amounts of nutrients lost in differing varieties of wheat and broccoli.
[link]

Via Dave’s Picks

Which remind me: flowers have been losing their fragrance, over decades, because breeder have selected for big color flowers, and color are manufactured by plants from the same precursors which would otherwise go to scent production. Purdue researcher Natalia Dudareva summarizes the problem:

A large number of cut flowers have lost their scent during the selection and breeding processes due to, on the one hand, a focus on maximizing post-harvest shelf-life, shipping characteristics, and visual esthetic values (i.e., color, shape), and on the other hand, to the lack of selection for the scent. trait. This loss of scent has long been recognized as a major problem in the floriculture industry.

[link]

Makes me think of organic fruits and vegetables: small compared to commercial produce, but infinitely richer in flavor. As for organic eggs … compare one with a commercial egg some time, I mean crack them and pour them in a bowl … the comparison has a way of diminishing one’s appetite for commercial eggs.