Awesome High School Teacher - Food, Land, and You

Article from the NY Times. Omg, I should really get started on my nonprofit project.

Learning What Food Looks Like Before It Goes Into the Package

By HANNAH WALLACE

Published: February 5, 2010

About 20 high school students stood behind the butcher counter, staring at a 160-pound piece of meat from a recently slaughtered cow.

“All of our meat comes from local farms, and we get it all whole,” said Tom Mylan, 33, one of three butchers at the Meat Hook, a new butcher shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that buys its meat locally and prizes nose-to-tail eating. “We don’t just buy steaks or pork chops or whatever.”

“How much does the whole cow cost?” one boy in a white hoodie had asked moments before. Answer: about $3.25 a pound. “Do you slaughter here?” asked another. Short answer: no—most slaughterhouses are upstate. “What is chorizo?” asked a girl. Answer: a spicy Spanish sausage.

These curious students, all juniors and seniors at Automotive High School in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, are taking a class called “Food, Land, and You.” Introduced by Jenny Kessler, a teacher at the school, three years ago, this elective English course is a primer about food broadly defined — its social, political and economic aspects. While dozens of New York City public schools have edible gardens, or offer student-grown food on the cafeteria menu, Ms. Kessler’s class is unusual in the wider perspective it takes.

“Food justice is a huge issue,” Ms. Kessler, 31, said. “But we study and talk blatantly about it — who has access to this food and why.”

Ms. Kessler’s pupils study factory farming and corn subsidies, read articles by Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry and watch documentaries like “Food, Inc.,” a dark look at the nation’s industrialized food system. They also tend a 2,500-square-foot organic vegetable garden that borders their school, financing it with funds they raise and with support from the New York chapter of Slow Food U.S.A. In season, their plot teems with cucumbers, eggplant, okra, peas, red cabbage, spinach, tomatoes and many herbs. The teenagers can take the food home free, and they sell the rest at an after-school farm stand.

But the popularity of Ms. Kessler’s class — it is one of the most sought-after at the school, according to Mary Brouder, the principal — may be due to the frequent trips, like the one to the Meat Hook.

In the fall, for example, Ms. Kessler took her charges to the Queens County Farm Museum, where they collected eggs, worked with compost and helped clear garden beds. She also secured a stand for her students at the Union Square Greenmarket, where they ran cooking demonstrations, and she organized a volunteer stint for them at the Bowery Mission, where they made lunch for the homeless.

Twice a year, Ms. Kessler also takes her students to Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, N.Y., where they make apple cider and apple pies from scratch, feed the pigs and sweep up cow manure. For many of these students, who hail from gritty neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and East New York, that excursion marks their first visit to a farm.

Back at the Meat Hook, another butcher, Brent Young, 27, was displaying the tools of his trade.

“Ninety percent of our work is done with our knives, most importantly this five-inch European-style breaking knife,” Mr. Young said, pulling the tool out of his scabbard for all to see. He then pointed out the band saw (used for cutting through thick bones), the three-horsepower meat grinder (for sausages and ground beef) and a hand saw (for cutting through muscle and bone). When a student asked if there were ever any accidents, Mr. Mylan produced a chain-mail vest, which he said the butchers use “when we’re doing really serious work.”

“Sometimes,” he added, “the dense bone and hard muscle is not exactly where you thought it was and that knife will just come through and you can really hurt yourself.”

When it came time to sampling some raw meat — something these butchers do every day to ensure the meat is of high quality — the students hesitated.

“If it’s nasty, I’m not going to try it again,” said Denzel Conze, 18.

Ben Turley, 29, another of the Meat Hook butchers, cut a raw flatiron steak into thin slices, sprinkling each with some salt.

“It tastes like salty gummy bears,” Jamie Colon, 16, said after a bite of the meat.

Most of Ms. Kessler’s students live in “food deserts”—neighborhoods with lots of fast food but little fresh produce or other healthy fare. Automotive High School’s students are predominantly low income, too, with 75 percent of them qualifying for a free lunch, according to Ms. Brouder.

Though the students may not return to the Meat Hook to buy the homemade sausages ($10.99 a pound), or even the grass-fed beef ($6 a pound), that’s not really the point. “The purpose of going there is just for them to know it’s out there,” Ms. Kessler said. “It’s really hard to cement in their heads that there are other options to industrial food.”

Dairy Diary

This week in Dairy Diary, I deviate slightly from the established format to (1) answer a question I posed in Entry 1 and (2) discuss that more frequently produced waste product: URINE.

Dairy Diary: Homeless Defecation and Urine

1. What do homeless people do when they get diarrhea? While I do not have an answer to homeless diarrhea, I am now the privileged owner of an answer to homeless defecation. Much to my dismay, it seems other homeless people have not yet gotten wise to the utility of a plastic bag-cum-toilet. On my way out of the Lexington Avenue station of the E train the other day, I peeped a homeless squatting on the edge of the platform dropping feces directly onto the floor. Tsk tsk!

Aside: If homeless people had dogs, they would soon learn the beneficial uses of plastic bags, and maybe then we could avoid getting fecal matter onto subway platforms. Plus, area animal shelters are overburdened as is. Providing each homeless person in NYC with a dog could therefore be a cost-effective route to enhancing the quality of life of all New Yorkers.

2. Urine. I have taken to guzzling R.W. Knudsen's Just Cranberry juice of late. Though it leaves a disappointing aftertaste that is not unlike that which is left in the mouth after an episode of vomiting, its rapid and salutary impact on the bladder and urinary tract absolutely cannot be denied. Two snaps up.

Dairy Diary

My loss is your gain!

I ate 2-goblets worth of chocolate pudding in a hurry today, only to find myself, 30 minutes later, shuttling back and forth between the bathroom and my office for the next 2 hours in a cold sweat. At times, I was in the stall so long that the motion-sensor lights shut off, forgetting all about the presence of my sentient being. I haven't jacked my system up like that in a while.

I must admit--at first, I thought it might have been that old mushy salmon I ate for lunch. What was I thinking?! It was so obviously the chocolate pudding. And so arrives the debut of . . .

Dairy Diary: Triggers for Toilet Time in the Dark

Entry 1: loads of chocolate pudding eaten quickly in one sitting.

And just because I want to add a "homeless" tag to this entry, I pose the following rumination: what do homeless people do when they get diarrhea? Surely they get sick all of the time eating food out of the garbage. Is the sidewalk the answer? Aside: Now that I'm a dog-owner, I realize how easily a plastic bag can turn into a portable toilet. If/when I am homeless, I plan to excrete my solid waste into plastic bags.

beefcake

What you are looking at is a disgustingly large number of cows at feeding time in a feed lot in CA. This picture accompanied the New York Times article mentioned below.
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All these years of not eating much meat for selfish reasons, and it turns out I was conserving energy for the world to boot! Also, reading this article reminds me that meat is for plebs. Ever the snob, I find myself wanting to avoid meat even more now.

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Excerpt from "Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler"*(NY Times)

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A SEA change in the consumption of a resource that Americans take for granted may be in store — something cheap, plentiful, widely enjoyed and a part of daily life. And it isn’t oil.
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It’s meat.
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The two commodities share a great deal: Like oil, meat is subsidized by the federal government. Like oil, meat is subject to accelerating demand as nations become wealthier, and this, in turn, sends prices higher. Finally — like oil — meat is something people are encouraged to consume less of, as the toll exacted by industrial production increases, and becomes increasingly visible.
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Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.
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Just this week, the president of Brazil announced emergency measures to halt the burning and cutting of the country’s rain forests for crop and grazing land. In the last five months alone, the government says, 1,250 square miles were lost.
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The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, which one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, says is resulting in a “relentless growth in livestock production.”
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Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.
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Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.
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To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.
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Grain, meat and even energy are roped together in a way that could have dire results. More meat means a corresponding increase in demand for feed, especially corn and soy, which some experts say will contribute to higher prices.
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This will be inconvenient for citizens of wealthier nations, but it could have tragic consequences for those of poorer ones, especially if higher prices for feed divert production away from food crops. The demand for ethanol is already pushing up prices, and explains, in part, the 40 percent rise last year in the food price index calculated by the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization.
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Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.
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The environmental impact of growing so much grain for animal feed is profound. Agriculture in the United States — much of which now serves the demand for meat — contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the Evironmental Protection Agency.
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Because the stomachs of cattle are meant to digest grass, not grain, cattle raised industrially thrive only in the sense that they gain weight quickly. This diet made it possible to remove cattle from their natural environment and encourage the efficiency of mass confinement and slaughter. But it causes enough health problems that administration of antibiotics is routine, so much so that it can result in antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten the usefulness of medicines that treat people.
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Those grain-fed animals, in turn, are contributing to health problems among the world’s wealthier citizens — heart disease, some types of cancer, diabetes. The argument that meat provides useful protein makes sense, if the quantities are small. But the “you gotta eat meat” claim collapses at American levels. Even if the amount of meat we eat weren’t harmful, it’s way more than enough.
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Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year (dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago. We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources .

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*By the way, Mark Bittman wrote this article. He is the author of some reknown cookbooks, both meat and non. I've looked at his renderings of vegetarian cooking in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, though, and the dishes suck. Oh, bother, I say! Because if this meat-eater is going to write a meat-bashing expose, should not there be an offering of tasty non-meat alternatives at the ready?

mmmm

my sister sent me a care package last month. check out the bounty!

in addition to delectable foodstuffs, li'l puff got herself a fancy necklace (that's what the "monopet" box contained).

Old Faithful

Chili!

This particular batch was meant for a biofuel potluck. Unfortunately, we had to ix-nay the biofuel event from the intinerarr. Fortunately, we still ate the bean extravaganza, which enabled us to make some biofuel of our own.

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Black beans, kidney beans, meatless faux-grilled ground beef, corn, diced tomatoes, and garlic simmered in a dark bouquet of spices. Garnished with hand-cut provolone cheese. Medium Spicy. $6 cup/$8 bowl.

Lately, Itzo Notzo Crowded

Yesterday and today, it's been quiet at the workplace, and the subways have been waay less crowded during rush hour. Everyone's observing Rosh Hashanah! For largely inexplicable reasons, it gives me great pleasure to see how much impact a Jewish holiday can have on the pulse of life here. In celebration of my pleasure, I think I'll make use of some of the grocery items I trucked all the way from home and make a big pot of matzo ball soup this weekend.

Darkness as Creativity Coxswain

you may have noticed that i am writing entries like i have the idiomatic nothing better to do. this is both true and false. i have a great deal of unpacking to do, which is a something better (i.e., more productive and urgent) to do--indeed, i'd made a to-do list just hours ago today (see earlier entry). but, while i did try to find lighting solutions, i did not succeed in finding even an acceptable temporary one. and so my room is dark. and it is 10pm EST. and i am a recluse. and so i write senseless entries here.

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besides tirelessly documenting my life, my other current distraction from unpacking is dis seduction-in-a-bag rightchere:

Trader Joe's Papadums chips

apparently, fingers covered in fava bean powder, yogurt, and dill do not a diligent workerbee make.

Soyrizo Tofu Scramble Night

As wacky as meals get: breakfast food. for dinner.On the menu this mid-August evening was:

• Soyrizo tofu scramble (soyrizo and seasoned tofu, crumbled and sauteed with onions, garlic, and fresh tomatoes)
• Hot buttered toast (one slice of sprouted grain sesame bread topped with melted European butter)
• Cup of fresh seasonal fruit