Chews Wise

3 Steps Toward Sustainable Food

I wrote this piece for the premier issue of Edible Los Angeles, which debuted this summer. It's long but relevant to this weekend's Slow Food Nation celebration in San Francisco. Hope to see you there.

By Samuel Fromartz

It was fall, the weather was turning cool, and I was getting desperate. I called around, quietly looking for a dealer. Then one Sunday, I ran into Eric over at the farmers’ market in Dupont Circle.

“So, you got any good shit?”

“Sure, but you got to come get it.”

The old story. The dealer never came to you. You had to go to the dealer.

But, then again, we’re talking about a lot of shit. A pick-up full, in fact. For if my community garden plot in the city was going to perk up in the spring, if I was going to get those fist-sized Chiogga beets and tender Russian kale, I had to work a pile of well-aged manure into the ground. And yes, this would be good, mind-blowing stuff, not skanky shit in a plastic bag. It was from a real farm, with real animals that ate real grass, and then sat, like fine wine, as it mellowed. Eric had it. In fact, he had so much he was willing to give it away. As long as we could come in a truck and get it.

And the Winning Tomato Is....!

I don’t fess-up to this very often, but being a food-writer really has its perks. This was definitely one of them. I got to squeeze, smell and taste some seriously stellar tomatoes. That big boy up top was an entry in the heaviest category at the 24th Annual Massachusetts Tomato Festival where I was judging.  (The actual winner in that category was a gnarly 3.23 pound Striped German grown by farmer Jim Ward.) 

I love their names almost as much as I love eating them – Black Prince, Striped Germans, Big Zak, Supersweets and Green Zebras. They sound like million-dollar racehorses, and for some local Massachusetts farmers, the bragging rights are nearly as good.

But here in New England, the weather’s been fickle. By now, we’d normally be up to our elbows in flavor packed tomatoes, but it’s been too cool and wet. Farmers I’ve spoken with say there are plenty growing on the vines, but they’re just late to ripen, or worse, are suffering cracks from too much rain. I’m just hoping that this week’s forcast of sun means I’ll be doing some canning by Sunday. If not, I’ve got a couple of recipes on the following page worth trying from Jamie Bissonnette, chef de cuisine at KO Prime here in Boston. 
–Clare Leschin-Hoar

Ceder Rapids Digs Out, After the Flood

On an extended trip to Iowa this summer, we trekked over to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to visit longtime friend, Karen Vander Sanden. Karen also happens to be the spokeswoman for Mercy Medical Center which was evacuated during the city’s devastating June floods.

Five weeks earlier, an estimated 9.2 miles (which is roughly 1,300 city blocks) sat immersed in murky flood water when the Cedar River crested at unprecedented levels. On a sunny Sunday afternoon, we drove slowly through block after block of total wreckage, and our hearts sank with the realization of what flood victims are actually up against. It’s one thing seeing it on television. Quite another when you’re seeing it first-hand.

Different colored placards were tacked to front doors to indicate if a house was safe to enter, and while the river had receded weeks earlier, abandoned homes still sat with clotheslines that sagged with now filthy items that had been hung out to dry the day the flood hit. From the street, we could still see watermarks that stopped at rooflines and devastated lives.

Downtown was heartbreaking too. Electricity had just been restored earlier that week, but it had the feeling distinct feeling of a ghost town.

Andy Deutmeyer, chef and owner of Blend says it was a long eight-days of being shut out of his downtown restaurant. Once inside, he discovered that the water had risen to nearly five feet.

“It was a breathtaking sight. You didn’t know what to say, or where to start, or what to do. We didn’t even know how to start, so we started with the wine rack behind the bar, and after that, just started throwing stuff away,” said Deutmeyer, who hopes to reopen in October.

Fortunately, restored electricity wasn’t the only sign of recovery. An Adopt-A-Business program was launched last month, pairing hard-hit downtown businesses with companies that were less affected by the flood.

Zins, a fine dining restaurant also located downtown, was paired with RuffaloCODY, a company that specializes in fund-raising software. CEO Al Ruffalo says his company has provided Zins with access to his legal department to review their insurance polices, and to his marketing department which has been using email to update Zins’ customer base on the restaurant’s status. The company has also replaced several computers for the restaurant, and employees donated $2,000 and plenty of man-hours cleaning so construction can begin inside.

“They lost their restaurant, but on the positive side, if we do this right, their business will be better than ever,” said Ruffalo.

Karen Slaughter of the Cedar Rapids Chamber of Commerce says more than 600 businesses were damaged by the flood. While the Adopt-A-Business program can help, there’s a long waiting list for assistance. The news cycle has moved on, but they’re still accepting donations at the Job & Small Business Recovery Fund. 
– Clare Leschin-Hoar

The Bad Taste of Tainted Meat

“My promise to our customers has always been the same: to consistently provide the industry’s highest quality, best tasting beef with a commitment to environmentally sound practices, humane animal treatment and personal integrity. I stand behind this commitment the best way I know — by putting my name on everything we sell.”
- Robert E. Meyer, Founder and Owner, Meyer Natural Angus

So did Meyer Natural Angus live up to those words?

The company has been at the center of a hamburger recall at Whole Foods Markets. The beef in question was sold under the Coleman Natural brand -- a storied name that pioneered the natural meat business in this country but which has been sold at least twice and now is associated with tainted meat.

Coleman, to my knowledge, never had an e coli recall under its previous ownership. I interviewed Mel Coleman Jr. -- son of the founder -- and my impression was that food safety, as with no antibiotics and hormones, was at the forefront of its concerns.

So what happened? Meyer Natural Angus bought Coleman's beef business in April, leaving the Coleman company with its other meat and poultry operations. Just a few months earlier, Meyer Natural Angus had bought Laura's Lean Beef Co., another natural beef company in the East.

Meyer then switched slaughtering operations to the infamous Nebraska Beef plant that had received multiple citations from the Agriculture Department and which has had two recalls of ground beef this summer. (More background on the plant and what happened in a Washington Post article here.)

The Times pointed out that "most of the beef was sold at grocers other than Whole Foods and recalled this summer. An additional 1.2 million pounds were recalled on Friday by the processor after illnesses in several states were tentatively linked to ground beef sold at Whole Foods and other stores."

What's surprising is that Whole Foods didn't know Meyer Natural Angus had switched processing plants. This isn't a simple oversight, since Whole Foods has long audited the slaughterhouse facilities from which it is supplied. To switch plants without being informed would undermine its quality control system (and potentially its protocols on humane animal treatment). As the Times said:

Whole Foods acknowledged that a code stamped on beef packages arriving at its stores accurately reflected the change in processing plants. But the grocery chain said it had no procedures in place to watch the codes on arriving meat packages, and therefore failed to notice it was getting beef from a packing plant it had never approved.

Whole Foods will immediately institute new procedures to detect such a change in the future, the chain said.

The recall comes at a particularly bad time for the natural and organic retailer, which is facing a double-whammy of slower growth and a renewed FTC investigation into its purchase of Wild Oats. It also comes just as Whole Foods rolls out of its humane meat  ratings program -- on which it has been working for at least five years.

Past food safety incidents have shown that concentration increases the risk of tainted food -- in this case, in a processing plant with a known history of e. coli recalls and at a fast-growing meat company integrating multiple acquisitions. Indeed, it's difficult to see how Meyer Natural Angus could have hoped to stay true to its words while relying on Nebraska Beef for processing.

Will the Economic Bust Stifle Organic Food?

By Samuel Fromartz

When the commodity boom and rising food prices took hold last year, optimists argued that this might cause people to switch to organic and sustainable foods, because the premium was no longer so high compared with mass market fare.

I was skeptical of the argument then, and even more so now. There are ample signs that consumers are cutting back in the face of a slumping economy and if anything, downsizing to discount retailers that skew towards cheaper food. Sales of Spam are growing. The more committed organic food shoppers will always be there, but much larger number of dabblers are scaling back, unable to see the real value above the cost. 

At Whole Foods, which has built a business on sustainable, organic and high quality perishable foods, sales growth is at a historic low, leading the company to cut back on new store openings and eliminate its quarterly dividend. Executives are emphasizing its value products, many sold under the 365 store brand, and trying to shake its Whole Paycheck image.

I can see why they are concerned. I was shopping in the Whole Foods store in Denver last Sunday in the middle of the day, before heading up to the mountains with the family. Last year, when I was in the same store in Cherry Creek on the exact same weekend, I recall it was bustling. This year, there were fewer shoppers, the aisles sparse.

Impressions of a Cooperative Grocer

The first couple of minutes of this video is hilarious -- kids discussing food and explaining issues like fair trade. It was produced by the Syracuse Real Food Coop in New York state.