Edible News

Friday, March 16, 2007
My moment in the Tang

Like so many children of the 60s I grew up wanting to be an astronaut and this week I may have come as close as I’ll ever get.

At 1730 UTC Monday the 12th, I entered a small studio in Atlanta and had a video chat (via NASA Mission Control in Houston) with International Space Station Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria who was about 175 nautical miles over my head at the time. 

Besides holding the record for American EVAs (that’s space walks dontcha know) turns out Commander Lopez-Alegria, is quite a Good Eats fan not to mention an accomplished cook.

www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/lopez-al.html

Although he’s lived in the US most of his life he was born in Madrid and maintains a deep affection for the flavors of the Iberian pennensula which he gets to gaze upon 15.79 times a day.   During out chat Cmdr. Lopez-Alegria filled me in on space station chow including freeze-dried delicacies like tofu in mustard sauce, various Russian canned offerings, and that his family sends him Swiss chocolates and anchovies which none of his station mates seem interested in sharing.  Various beverages are produced by adding water to powder-filled vessels through an orifice the Commander referred to as a “septum”, a word I had never associated with culinary matters before. 

Having been aloft since September, Lopez-Alegria will soon return to Earth, landing in Star City Russia aboard a Soyuz space craft.  He’s looking forward to hugging his wife and son and having a nice glass of wine.  I’m looking forward to his having it. 

We lost our com-link after about 20 minutes of conversation.  It took another 2 hours for my heart to slow down. 

Let me say here and now that I feel that space exploration is one of the last great human ventures.  Despite the problems on Earth, in 1969 we landed on the moon and I don’t think we’ve had a better collective moment since that day.  Thanks to guys like Michael Lopez-Alegria we still have those moments.  I hope we have more.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006
E. coli 0157:H7

It’s 11:30 pm on Monday night and as of 1pm today 114 persons are infected with E. coli 0157:H7 in 21 states.  According to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention here’s the breakdown:

California (1)
Connecticut(2)
Idaho (4)
Illinois (1)
Indiana (8)
Kentucky (6)
Maine (2)
Michigan (4)
Minnesota (2)
Nebraska (1)
New Mexico (5)
Nevada (1)
New York (7)
Ohio (10)
Oregon (5)
Pennsylvania (4)
Utah (15)
Virginia (1)
Washington (2)
Wisconsin (32)
Wyoming (1)

In short, a lot of people are sick and one person has died in Wisconsin.  This is a bad thing.  And yet, it was going to happen.  It was bound to happen. 

I don’t want to sound like some crazy, anti-establishment bio-terrorist but maybe, just maybe this is a wakeup call.  Truth is our food system has major flaws which point to one reoccurring theme: too much of our food is produced by centralized, industrial concerns.  At this hour the continued suspicion is that the spinach, which may have been infected by irrigation water in a field, incorrectly composted manure used as fertilizer on organic crops, or by water used in processing.  It may be quite a while before we know. 

Now look at the states listed above.  21 states affected by spinach grown not only in one state but in one region of one state.  Had the spinach stayed near home odds are good this would have been caught sooner.  But packaging and trucking just gave the 0157:H7 time to grow. (For some reason I’m reminded of Charlie Sheen in Apocalypse Now talking about “…every minute Charlie squats in the bush he gets stronger…”.)  What’s my point?  Had the big chain grocers and restaurant suppliers purchased locally grown produce, this wouldn’t have happened.  But don’t blame them.  Nope. Blame us.  By demanding fresh spinach year round (or anything else for that matter) we create  the monster.  It’s like Dan Akroyd thinking of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghost Busters.  Our own unnatural desires and our refusal to consume locally grown foods have brought us to this sorry state. 

And to make matters worse, our ever-wise government has told us to eat no fresh spinach at all. They could have advised us to eat only locally grown spinach but Noooooooo.  Let’s shoot every poor farmer in America that’s doing his or her job in the foot.  And why?  Because we can’t sort out what went there when and how and what it might have touched or been near.  Here’s the news kids: when the system gets this big and out of whack, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men (and the USDA and the CDC, and the FDA) cannot keep us safe.  I want you to think about that a minute.  It’s not their fault.  it simply cannot be done.  It should not be done. 

Right now everyone is doing what they have to do and by the looks of it they’re doing it right.  I’m hoping that ground zero for this outbreak will be discovered and that something will be learned.  But I still hold that until we diversify and decentralize our food growing system and learn to eat locally and seasonally, we only open up ourselves for more of the same. 

And let that be a lesson to us all.

Friday, May 19, 2006
Omega Pigs

The New York Times reports on March 27th that a flock of university researchers at Harvard, U. of MO and U. of Pittsburgh Med schools Have created cloned pigs that produce omega-3 fatty acids.   Why would one wish to do such a thing?  Because it is generally believed that Omega-3s are so good for your heart that consuming them can improve your chances of not dropping dead of heart disease, that is unless other mitigating factors such as never exercising, eating lots of yummy saturated fats and possessing a doomed genetic code don’t get in the way.   Omega 3 fatty acids seem to possess anti-inflammatory, anti-arrhythmic (prevent funny heart activity), and thrombogenic (prevent blood clots) powers which combined act as a bodyguard for the heart. Omega 3’s enter our diet primarily through cold, slimy things with scales, that is fish, especially oily, cold-water dwellers like salmon.  I believe this may have something to do with the fact that eating fish is generally considered a good thing to do.

The good (and obviously very smart) folks who are developing these swine clearly believe that what they are doing is good.  Here are some possible reasons:

Some people just can’t choke down fish, any fish and it doesn’t seem fair that they should be robbed of their chance to get a grip on the chemical life-saver that is Omega-3.  Of course Omega-3s are available in dietary supplements so that’s probably not it.

Perhaps they feel that more people would feel good about eating pork if they knew it was good for their heart.  Can you imagine doctors prescribing baby back ribs, double cut pork chops and entire butts of smoked hog?  Man that would be nice, but why stop there.

Here’s why I’m going to be shifting all my food research donation money to help find an Omega-3 producing clonal porcine: maybe, just maybe, this will get us a step closer to producing an Omega-3 baring, low saturated fat, no sugar, zero carb, macrobiotic girl scout cookie.  I mean there’s a goal worth supporting.  If I could just get everything I need, and none of what I don’t from a tube of thin mints, then all this science would not have been in vain.

I’m joking only because the idea of an Omega-3 bearing pig makes me so mad I could snort. I bet if I could get some of these guys on the phone, which I can’t, they would tell me that this could be a break through that would make life-giving Omega-3s available to more people, and without taxing the supplies of the sea life that actually, naturally make the stuff.  Well then, maybe, just maybe we should be putting our science behind saving the fish!  Maybe then we wouldn’t need Omega-3 producing pigs.  If we put all our nutrients into one menu item, then even more kids will head off to college not eating more than about 6 items, which by the way isn’t something I made up.  Those people are out there and in a few years they’ll be deciding whether or not you get a home loan.

I realize I’m not hip to all the scientific possibilities of these amazing days, but I do have a deep suspicion that putting fish parts, no matter how small, into pigs is…stupid.

Besides, if science wanted to do us a favor, it would stick those Omega-3s in French Fries, or as previously stated…Girl Scout cookies.