Hannah Wallace

Chocolate Milk: Soda in Drag

I've been thinking a lot about public school lunches lately—not just because it's a subject that's perpetually in the news these days. For the past few months, I've been volunteering at Public School 157 in Bed-Stuy, for a grassroots non-profit called Wellness in the Schools. I'm part of the salad bar squad: I slice and chop veggies, prepare bean and pasta salads, and serve the kids both. Though New York City lunchrooms still have a long way to go—we can't get local produce or any olive oil, for instance (using subpar soy oil for salad dressings)—at least these first, second, and third graders of all ethnicities are enthusiastic about eating carrots, cucumbers, and celery.  It's only taken a few months, but now it's the rare student who passes the salad bar by without at least trying something.

So it was with great interest that I listened to this NPR segment on how the milk industry is lashing out at parents at this Boulder, Colorado school for taking chocolate milk off the menu.

"Chocolate milk is soda in drag," one mom (nickname: "the renegade lunch lady") says to NPR reporter Jeff Brady, noting that it has 3.1 grams of sugar per ounce. (Soda has 3.3.)

Apparently, this school isn't the only one to ban chocolate milk. The dairy industry, worried about losing more milk drinkers nationwide, has rather desperately launched a "Raise your hand for chocolate milk" campaign on Facebook including this propaganda-filled video. (Hmmm... I wonder how much these dieticians and actors were paid to say that chocolate milk is just as healthy as regular milk?)

Has it really gotten so bad that parents can't persuade their kids to drink plain whole milk?  Oh—that's right, whole milk is not an option anymore, at least in New York City public schools where city education officials removed it from cafeterias in 2006. At PS 157, the only choices kids have are low-fat or skim milk and low-fat chocolate milk. If I were them, I'd probably choose chocolate milk, too. Who wants to drink blue-ish skim milk or watery-tasting 1% milk?

The truth is, kids are not getting fat from drinking whole milk.  (When was the last time you saw a 3rd grader guzzling whole milk? I think that'd actually be cause for celebration.) I'm with Nina Planck on this subject—you need the saturated fat that's in whole milk to absorb the calcium and fat-soluble vitamins in milk. Whereas sugar (and an early addiction to it) leads to everything from ADD to cavities to diabetes.

As we say at the P.S. 157 cafeteria, one step at a time. We've got the kids eating fresh veggies on a daily basis—maybe next semester we'll figure out how to get some seasonal produce from New York state farms. And maybe, like that Boulder school, we can tackle the chocolate milk issue soon.

Second-grader Ella Lyons says it best, "No one's going to get regular milk if we have chocolate milk, because, I think, they're going to like it better because it tastes better...But it's not good for you, so I think we shouldn't have chocolate milk."

Steven Smith, Tea Shaman

Steve Smith knows a thing or two about tea. Having co-created both Stash and Tazo (two of the best known U.S. tea brands, Stash was acquired by Japanese tea company Yamamotoyama in 1993 and Tazo was bought by Starbucks in 1999), he probably could've retired early.

But instead, he's just launched a new line of meticulously sourced, beautifully crafted teas under his own name: Steven Smith Teamaker. When I visited his Portland, Oregon-based atelier this summer, I was impressed by how small and tightly run the operation is. There are no outside tasters or focus groups, just a team of five tea lovers (including Smith) who sift, taste, and package everything by hand. In his Zenlike headquarters on the northern fringes of the Pearl District, Smith and his crew blend tea by hand in small batches to maintain freshness and seasonality. He sources ingredients from farms he and his wife have visited—from Fayoum, Egypt (chamomile) to India (organic Darjeeling) to nearby Hermiston, Oregon (peppermint). Traceability is key: each artfully designed carton has both its batch number and the date packed printed on the bottom so customers can trace the ingredients down to the exact lot and garden. (You can even find out the week of harvest and farmer's name, should you so desire.) 

This fall, Smith released 12 teas (including white peony with asmanthus from China and a Darjeeling Bungalow or "Bed" tea from India) and though he has just 40 accounts, they're the right ones: Zabar's and Eli's in Manhattan and Portland's New Seasons grocery store. There's also a lovely tea room on site @ 1626 Thurman St., Portland (Phone: 503/719-8752)

I single out Smith in the current issue of Monocle (subscription only) as a "Leader of the Pack" in a story on Companies to Watch. ("Identifying a gap in a market is the easy part; creating a pioneering company to plug that gap requires a bit more skill. We present five firms that have found their niche and done the hard work, too.") 

This high-tech Japanese machine magically fuses the cornsilk tea bags together without glue (it has to do with ultrasonic waves).

Larry King Show on E. Coli Misses the Mark

This story originally appeared on The Faster Times.

This weekend, I finally got around to watching this Larry King segment (which aired on October 13th), featuring foodborne illness lawyer Bill Marler and the mothers and grandmothers of several children who have been victims of E. coli 0157: H7, including Barbara Kowalcyk, the outspoken mother from Food, Inc. who has gone on to found the Center for Foodborne Illness.

The show also contains a strange medley of pro and anti-meat figures from biochemist T. Colin Campbell (anti) to star chef Anthony Bourdain (very much pro). Nutritionist Nancy Rodriguez is vehemently in favor of eating meat in moderation; novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who has just written a book about being a vegetarian, Eating Animals, weighs in, too. (I told you it was an odd melee.)

Aside from the squirm-inducing questions from King himself—at one point he pointedly asks the grandmother of Kevin, a healthy two-year-old who died of gangrene of the small intestines after eating E. coli-tainted ground beef, if his death was painful. Looking dumbfounded, the woman answers, “Yes, Larry, it was very painful”—the show was disappointing on many levels. I know talking heads go through media training that tell them to inflexibly hammer home their points, but the back and forth between Campbell and Rodriguez was circular and skirted around the (to me) crucial distinction between factory-farmed beef and beef that’s been raised humanely and safely by small-scale farms.

Campbell’s argument is that the caseins in protein help “turn on” cancer growth—his book the China Study details the results of a large-scale study that Campbell directed in the 70’s and 80’s which surveyed death rates for twelve different kinds of cancer for more 65 rural counties in China. (The outcome, according to the book’s web site was “People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic diseases…”) Rodriguez respectfully disagrees, pointing out that animal protein is a more efficient way to get essential nutrients and vitamins such as amino acids, iron and B vitamins. She concedes that “diligent” vegans can get enough zinc and amino acids but says meat is a more practical source for most Americans. The average American is not going to start consuming large quantities of lentils and Brewer’s Yeast (or fortified soy milk), for example.

What neither of them delve into is what type of meat they’re talking about here. When Campbell carried out his research in China, was the meat that the Chinese ate from pastured animals? (Disclaimer: I have not read the China Study, so have no idea, but I’m guessing the answer is no.) Were they doused with antibiotics the way most cattle raised for consumption are here in the U.S.?  And when Rodriguez talks about feeling absolutely safe serving her son hamburgers off the grill, is she serving him Cargill burgers or those from Niman Ranch?

The person who gets closest to raising this issue is Bourdain, an adventurous traveler and eater who loves meat—but who does not love the industrial system that raises it here in the U.S. His succinct rant was a gem, and elicited a simple “Wow” from Larry King:

If you look at our basic design…we have eyes in the front of our head. We have fingernails. We have high teeth and long legs…we have evolved so that we can chase down smaller, stupider creatures, kill them and eat them.  That said, we may be designed to eat meat—we are not designed to eat fecal coliform bacteria. And I think the standard practices of outfits like Cargill and some of the larger meat processors and grinders in this country are unconscionable and border on the criminal.

Yet Bourdain didn’t single out the type of meat he prefers to eat, presumably the kind that does not come from gargantuan meat processors such as Cargill. This would’ve been an excellent opportunity to give a shout-out to a small family-run farm whose meat is of such superior quality that it probably never tests positive for this dangerous strain of E. coli.

Safran Foer, too, notes that 99% of the meat that’s raised in this country comes from factory farms. Right, but we CAN choose that 1% that is not factory farmed, no? (Especially in Brooklyn, I yelled through my computer screen to Safran Foer, who lives in the foodie borough, too.) But really, all over the country…in rural Utah. In fast-food restaurants in Oregon and Washington. Even in Missouri. But instead, Foer seems to be saying, being a vegetarian is the only practical choice to this practically inescapable industrial food system.

Foer briefly touches on his ethical reasons for spurning meat, arguing with Bourdain’s logic that eating animals is somehow “natural”: “The entirety of human progress is defying what is natural. If we were so concerned with what is natural, we wouldn’t obviously be in this studio right now, having this conversation.” (He expands on the ethical side of his reasoning in an excerpt from his soon-to-be-published book in the food issue of the New York Times Magazine.)

Thankfully, Marler gets the last word in, though, asking the Beef Manufacturers Association to be more transparent with the public. Private companies should, for example, post the results of the USDA’s inspections on their web sites. (Not surprisingly, Patrick Boyle from the American Meat Institute did not think this was a good idea.)

Note: Author Jonathan Safran Foer responded to this article on The Faster Times here.

Friday Round-up (Urban foraging & School Lunch Reform)

This column originally appeared in the Faster Times on Oct. 16th.

These days, it’s not easy keeping up on the latest in Food Politics. That’s why I decided to start a regular “Friday Round-Up” column, supplying you with links to the latest stories and blogs on everything from school lunch reform to urban foraging.

Speaking of which:

• Urban Foraging. You hear a lot of people complaining these days about how expensive it is to eat a nutritious, local diet. If you’re sick of shelling out $5 for organic salad greens (and haven’t figured out the perks of a CSA yet), get some tips from two of my Faster Times colleagues, Rachel Wharton and Sarah Karnasiewicz, both of whom have recently written about foragers. Rachel’s story on Wildman Steve Brill, who is still leading his popular tours in New York’s Central Park is in this month’s Edible Manhattan; Sarah interviews Langdon Cook, author of the new book Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager, in Salon. Cook, who worked for corporate America for many years (where he’d scarf down lunch in 20 minutes at his desk—sound familiar?), forages in the mountains and waterways of the Puget Sound. Brill, on the other hand, is an urban forager: he picks dandelions and purslane from the cracks between the sidewalk and snags mushrooms such as hen-of-the-woods from oak trees in Central Park.

• School Lunch Reform. This week is National School Lunch Week, which seems appropriate judging by the amount of ink spilled lately on efforts around the country to reform lunches at public schools. It’s not clear to me what, if anything, happened this past week to commemorate it, but President Obama’s proclamation (as quoted on Obamafoodarama) makes it sound as though he’s got something up his sleeve:

In the coming months, my Administration will continue our partnership with Federal, State, and local leaders to strengthen the National School Lunch Program. We must work together to remove barriers that prevent some eligible children from receiving meals, and update nutrition standards to reflect the latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Let’s just hope things don’t go haywire, as they have in New York City, where misguided attempts to banish unhealthy food from the schools has led to the banning of bake sales. Getting rid of soda and vending machines I can understand—but bake sales?  Really folks. Removing whole milk and home-made cookies from our schools overlooks the true culprits of childhood obesity: processed snack foods and sugary sodas. (Not to mention the horrible canned and frozen/reheated grub that passes as food at most school cafeterias. Oh, yeah, and the fact that gym is being cut at many schools.) And what are sports teams going to do to raise money, now?

Meanwhile, also in Edible Manhattan was an excellent story by Jan Greenberg about Chef Bill Telepan and a group called Wellness in the Schools. Telepan, like others in this country, realize that much can be done to improve the quality of cafeteria food at the local level. He volunteers one day a week at his daughter’s school, P.S. 87, and has been instrumental in creating themed-food days such as Salad Day, Hormone-Free Milk Day, and even Grass-Fed Beef Day. (School officials put the kibosh on this last one; apparently no raw meat is allowed to cross the threshold of public school kitchens in NYC.)

Finally, the profile on Naked Chef Jamie Oliver in the New York Times Magazine’s food issue, while not solely about Oliver’s efforts to reform school lunch programs in Huntington, West Virginia, is all about the young chef’s next T.V. show: “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” in which he challenges middle-and-low income Americans to eat and cook healthy food. (Oliver has chosen Huntington as the site of his next “Jamie Oliver Challenge” based on stats from the CDC that showed that half of the adults in the Huntington-Ashland metro area are obese and that the area has the dubious distinction of leading the country in rates of heart disease and diabetes.)  It will be remarkable if Oliver can achieve in the U.S. what he did in the U.K., with his program “Jamie’s School Dinners.”: “When he eventually succeeded in getting them to abandon their processed poultry and fries and eat his food, the teachers reported a decrease in manic behavior and an increase in concentration,” says journalist Alex Witchel. “The school nurses noted a reduction in the number of asthma attacks. Those findings…were the impetus for the British government to invest more than a billion dollars to overhaul school lunches.”

Know Your Butcher

This post originally appeared on the Faster Times.

Last week, I wrote up a quick summary of Michael Moss’s chilling article about this country’s byzantine network of slaughterhouses and meat processing facilities, where no-one takes accountability for the safety of our food supply.

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from a New York City market called the New Amsterdam Market reminding me that there is an alternative to the industrial model.  Founded in 2005, the New Amsterdam Market is a monthly venue (located down at Manhattan’s South Street Seaport) that showcases local produce, cheese, and meat as well as regionally-made prepared food such as porchetta sandwiches, popsicles, and Mexican-style chocolate. But what distinguishes New Amsterdam from most farmers’ markets is that it is comprised of purveyors—i.e. the cheesemongers and shop owners who sell regionally-made food for regional farmers (who often don’t have the time or desire to sit at a stand for six + hours on the weekend).

“Two Master Butchers Take on a Half Pig Under the Brooklyn Bridge,” the press release announced.

Intrigued, I read on.

On October 25th, the market “will feature farmers and meat ranchers, regional distributors, butchers, and purveyors who can trace and identify the source of every pound of meat sold to the public, even to the specific head of cattle.” In addition to purveyors and farmers selling sustainably raised meat, there would be a meat cutting demonstration by fourth-generation butcher Josh Applestone (whose Kingston, NY meat store, Fleisher’s Grassfed and Organic Meats helped reintroduce the concept of local sourcing and a revival of the art of butchering) and Tom Mylan, erstwhile butcher from [Brooklyn foodie destination] Marlow & Sons. (Mylan also helped open the nearby sustainable butcher shop Marlow & Daughters and is now working on launching another butcher shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.)

Yes, but would the Market be selling sustainably-raised, grassfed hamburger meat? And if so, would the local purveyors and farmers be able to “trace and identify every pound” of that ground beef? Could they ensure me that there would be no ammonia-doused “filler” from Uruguay or enormous squalid slaughterhouses in Omaha?

I called up New Amsterdam Market director Robert LaValva to find out.

LaValva was sure there’d be no “filler” from Uruguay, but he put me on to Jake Dickson, owner of the new Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in New York’s Chelsea Market to answer the rest of my questions. Dickson will have a stand at the New Amsterdam Market on October 25th. I immediately went to his web site and read up on his philosophy:

But most of the meat available to the US consumer leaves much to be desired. It embodies the worst of our industrial agriculture practices and what is widely available is of poor quality. It doesn’t have to be this way! There are small scale, environmentally conscientious farmers producing healthy, delicious, artisanal meats right here in New York State! These are farmers who care about the animals and the land on which they are raised. These are the people I wanted to work with and whom I continue to seek out on your behalf.

I like this guy! Furthermore, if you click on “Our Farms,” you can see the eight or so local farms Dickson buys his meat from. (There are short blurbs on each farmer, too, so you can find out how each farm produces its meat. The cows at Herondale Farm, for instance, graze the fields as long as the grass grows, after which they enjoy the alfalfa baleage and hay that is put up for the winter. A little map shows you how many miles it is from farm to market: 250.) Talk about traceability.

So I called Dickson to find out where he sources his grass-fed beef. I caught him driving back from Double L Ranch, a small facility near Albany that slaughters his meat. (He was driving the carcasses back to NYC where he butchers them on location at his Chelsea Market shop.)

“Right now I have three-and-a-half steers and eight lambs in the back of my truck,” he said.  I asked him about his process for making hamburger meat.

“We try to use one steer at a time,” Dickson told me. “We never mix farms—always single farms. And 98% of the time it is a single animal as well. Our general rule is single farm, single animal.”

Dickson went on to tell me about the inconsistent quality of grass-fed beef. “Most of the grass-fed beef out there is of very low quality,” he said. “The variation in grass-fed is much wider than it is with corn-fed. It’s much harder to do well.” He cautioned that “grass-fed” has become such a buzzword these days that many producers and purveyors (and restaurants) throw it around without defining the term. To Dickson, grass-fed cow meat means the cows were “100% grass-fed and grass-finished.” Dickson is not one to believe that grass-fed cows are inherently better than corn fed, though. “They have a different flavor and a different texture,” he said. “There are good and bad variations of both.” Indeed, he sells an organic grain-finished beef from Wrighteous Organics in Schoharie, NY.

LaValva had said something earlier in the morning that stuck with me. “You read about the E. coli scares and all they [the USDA] do is talk about increasing inspections. They don’t think, ‘Maybe this whole system needs to be thrown out.’  If the meat is that cheap, it means you’re compromising something along the way. Should meat be cheap? Why not have that debate?”

What do you think?  Should meat be cheap?

And how many of you have a relationship with your neighborhood butcher?  (No, not that kind of relationship…)