Because 2 days is never enough.

Monsanto, as a large producer of “recombined” milk (the “r” in rBGH), wants to suppress the “rBGH-free” label at the state level so consumers don’t know the milk is recombined.

“Consumption of dairy products from cows treated with rbGH raise a number of health issues,” explained Michael Hansen, a senior scientist for Consumers Union. “That includes increased antibiotic resistance, due to use of antibiotics to treat mastitis and other health problems, as well as increased levels of IGF-1, which has been linked to a range of cancers.”

Canada, Australia, and parts of the EU have already banned Monsanto’s recombined milk outright. In order to stop the same thing from happening in the US, Monstanto aims to change the labels on milk to hide the issue.

“Absolutely nothing good could come from a ban on rBGH-free labeling,” concludes Hansen. “More information is a good thing, and all these state actions are anti-consumer, restrict free speech and interfere with the smooth functioning of free markets.”

Consumers have a right to know what’s in their milk, and dairies have a right to tell them.

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I try to buy organic fruits and vegetables whenever I can. (This includes produce from local farmers who might not have paid for the organic certification even though they practice organic farming.) Unfortunately, this is not always possible, so I’ve wondered which fruits and veggies are the most important to buy organically — in other words, which types of produce are the most susceptible to pesticides (and which are the most resistant). The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has published such a list on its “Food News” web site called “The Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce,” which ranks pesticide contamination for 43 popular fruits and vegetables from 2000-2004.

The six measures of contamination used are:

• Percent of the samples tested with detectable pesticides
• Percent of the samples with two or more pesticides
• Average number of pesticides found on a sample
• Average amount (level in parts per million) of all pesticides found
• Maximum number of pesticides found on a single sample
• Number of pesticides found on the commodity in total

An EWG simulation of thousands of consumers eating high and low pesticide diets shows that people can lower their pesticide exposure by almost 90 percent by avoiding the top twelve most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating the least contaminated instead. Eating the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables will expose a person to about 15 pesticides per day, on average. Eating the 12 least contaminated will expose a person to less than 2 pesticides per day. Less dramatic comparisons will produce less dramatic reductions, but without doubt using the Guide provides people with a way to make choices that lower pesticide exposure in the diet.

The most contaminated include apples, peaches, sweet peppers, celery, spinach, lettuce, and potatoes.

The least contaminated include onions, sweet corn, broccoli, asparagas, avacados, mangos, and papaya.

For the complete list and more information on the study’s methodology and the adverse affects of pesticides go to http://www.foodnews.org/methodology.php.

There is a scary article on BBC.com today titled “What would Old MacDonald say?” that reveals how many British adults, especially those in urban areas, do not realize that bacon and sausage originate from farms. Unfortunately, I think many Americans are in the same boat — equally unaware of the origins of their food.

People who do not know that bacon originates from a farm are “idiots”, according to Mr O’Reilly, who “eats a lot of bacon”. He said: “They must be very naive, or just not interested. They’re not bothered where food comes from so long as they can eat it.” Mr Welch blames convenience food. “If it’s not wrapped up in a bit of plastic then they don’t want to know.”

It reminds me of one of my favorite Simpson’s episodes when Lisa becomes a vegetarian:

Homer: Are you saying you’re never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad, those all come from the same animal.
Homer: Heh heh heh. Ooh, yeah, right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.

Last fall I had a pomegranate sitting on my desk at work and two of my co-workers individually asked me what it was. One of them exclaimed, “Oh, that’s the source of the POM juice my wife makes me drink.” Chalk this up to yet another reason why farmer’s markets, CSAs and the like are beneficial. You get to see the vegetables in their original state, sometimes even with the dirt still clinging on. It’s fun to shell peas and cut brussels sprouts from the stalk, and it reminds us that our food was grown on a farm without being chemically altered or processed. Magical, indeed.

Journalist Kara Zuaro has published a collection of favorite recipes from Indie bands such as Death Cab for Cutie, Belle and Sebastian, Interpol, the Decemberists, Camera Obscura, My Morning Jacket, and nearly 100 others in “I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen with Your Favorite Bands.”

For example, Devendra Banhart’s contribution is for Africanas Ricas:

“RIGHT ON!!!!!!
here is my favorite recipe for:
AFRICANAS RICAS!
you shall require!
many bananas!
a box of graham crackers!!!
two eggs!!!
SOUR CREAM!!
HONEY!”

As you can see Zuaro has left the musicians’ wording and instructions intact despite the fact that the recipes are thoroughly tested.

The book release is tomorrow in New York followed by a happy hour at Manhattan’s Hi Fi bar (where the Hold Steady’s Galen Polivka is a bartender) on Wednesday, April 25. There will also be an in-store performance release party at the Brooklyn Barnes & Noble on May 17.

Additional info can be found on the cookbook’s MySpace page.

On the train to Philly this weekend, I was binging on old This American Life episodes and I came across a favorite, “Meet the Pros” (#192). This episode profiles various amateurs coming face to face with the professionals they admire. The whole episode is great, but of particular interest to me is the David Rakoff piece, which also appears in a slightly altered form in his hilarious book, Don’t Get Too Comfortable.

Rakoff is a passionate maker (“my salvation lies in time spent alone with an x-acto knife and commercial grade adhesive”) and he makes a pilgrimage to his own personal Mecca: the crafts department at Martha Stewart Living. He is driven by a question that’s been lurking in my mind for several years, but has been getting louder as I have become a-no-doubt-about-it grown up. Rakoff describes the blissful state he enters when making stuff. This state, called flow, was proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe the optimal human mental state that includes a loss of self-consciousness, deep concentration, a distortion of time, and sense of intrinsic reward. Rakoff asks

Is it possible for one’s job to be an exercise in having that feeling or does the act of doing something for money automatically rob you of that feeling?

At Martha Stewart, Rakoff is in awe. My favorite moment is when he squeals to the Crafts Editor, upon seeing her desk “You’re the luckiest person I ever met” and proceeds to describe what he calls “an embarrassment of craft supplies.”

But in the end, among these RISDI hipsters he finds at Martha’s, he learns that, for him at least, going from avocation to vocation just isn’t the same:

Dream over, I can’t work here. I just don’t want to expend that kind of effort to get to a place that I can get to without any work at all. Under that kind of pressure, I’m not even sure I could get there at all. To paraphrase the old saying, ‘don’t flow where you pro.’

The rest of the segment, in which David tracks down friends who have received his wares in the past, is truly hilarious. I highly recommend listening or checking out his book.

I’m still left wondering, though, should I have pursued a more creative career. I care about what I do and I actively chose it for a reason, but I wonder if I’d be more happy spending my workdays doing things I love: cooking, writing, reading, designing, making, traveling. What would that look like? And would I actually like it?

Michael Pollen is a genius. His book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” was the best book I read last year. In fact, I just bored a group of strangers at a party in Philadelphia last night by recapping, oh, well… basically the whole entire book to them. Oops.

His writing about the American food supply, diet, and food culture has given me a has given me a context for understanding the impact of the choices I make. Every decision I make about the food I purchase has health, energy, ecogolical, economic, labor, and ethical implications. Just like Francis Moore Lappe’s “Diet for a Small Planet,” which motivated me to become a vegetarian as a teenager, Pollen’s writing has shifted the way I understand my own impact on the world.

Pollen has a great article in yesterday’s Times Magazine called, “Unhappy Meals.” He writes about “nutritionalism”, the attempt to understand food based on it’s nutrient components. He argues that “food science” decontextualizes nutrients from food, food from diet, and diet from lifestyle and results in shelves full of Frankenstein like foods in the grocery store, much of it claiming to be health food.

Here are a few of his suggestions (greatly abridged) for a healthy, sane way to filter out all the crap.

1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away.

5. Pay more, eat less. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases.

I learned a lot of this as a child. I was lucky to be raised by parents who brought a mix of hippishness, the pragmatism required to raise a family on a student budget, and the footsteps of my grandmother who raised 10 kids on a shoestring by making everything she could herself, just like her mother and grandmother before her. This all filtered down to a DIY attitude about food that included gardening, producing what we could at home, and devoting time each evening to cooking family meals. But Pollen helps me to understand WHY my decisions are some of the more important that I make on a daily basis.

Craft projects come and go, but reading has been the only abiding passion in my time on the planet. I’ve had my head in a book since before I could read them.
When I had roommates, we’d swap books and end up talking about them and for the past few years, I’ve been in book clubs. These are both great ways to make reading a more shared experience. But, living in New York the last few years has added a new layer to my community of readers: the subway. I love watching what New Yorkers are reading on the train: Russian and Spanish newspapers, manuscripts, classics, “urban lit”, the ubiquitous New Yorker, the Tanakh, everything.

My commute affords me about two full hours of reading time a day and I am usually transported (figuratively, away from the literal transporting). I’ve missed stops and looked up from my book to find myself in strange stations.

This morning on the train, while I was reading The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (a Christmas gift from the lovely Alison) a woman walked over to me on her way to the door and said,

That book is the most compelling thing I read all last year. It is such a pastiche of voices, a mélange of genres. Don’t you find it just so compelling?

I do. And I got to have a little mini book club on the train with a woman who effortlessly uses the words pastiche and mélange in the same sentence!

My ReadyMade mag subscription has officially expired. And I’m not renewing it. I was an early subscriber to the Bay Area zine and I’m sad to give it up. I gave gift subscriptions to friends and squealed with delight when a new issue arrived in the mail. Erik even tried to read each issue before I finished leading to competitions. I attended the first anniversary party in San Francisco, oohing and aahing at all the creative decorations such as colorful lights made from empty liquid laundry detergent bottles. I even giggled when I noticed the crusts of bread that were cut off from the hors d’oevre finger sandwiches were being sold as pigeon feed. Yes, everything and everyone looked crafty and clever. There was inspiration everywhere.

Well, no more. Unfortunately the magic has died. I haven’t been inspired with an issue in quite some time. Now instead of throwing myself into multiple ideas from each issue, I’m faced with projects that are unrealistically large and complicated or down right goofy. I like the design-y aspect of the magazine, but I don’t subscribe for design info – I subscribe for craft ideas. Grrrr.

[I did dig up the holiday issue from a year or two ago because I'm interested in making coffee liquor due to my limoncello success. I'll post the results up here if I try it out.]

I bought the first issue of Craft, but I’m not in a rush to subscribe to that either. It has a slick design, but many of the projects were more informational than practical (embroider a skateboard, for example). I haven’t actually *made* anything from the issue, if that says anything. I do like the website, though.

I guess Martha is queen of the scene for a reason.

In this week’s New Yorker, James Surowiecki explains how the American sugar industry encourages “bad economic policy, bad energy policy and bad foreign policy”:

The government guarantees producers a fixed price for domestic sugar and sets strict quotas and tariffs for foreign sugar. Economicall speaking, this has many obvious bad results. It keeps sugar prices in the U.S. at least twice as high as the world average. It makes it harder fo companies that use lots of sugar to do business here—in the past decade, an exodus of candy manufacturers from the U.S. has eliminate thousands of jobs. And import restrictions make Third World countries poorer than they’d otherwise be. But protecting sugar also has surprising consequence: it’s hurting America’s efforts to become more energy-efficient…

The favors granted to the sugar industry keep the price of domestic sugar so high that it’s not cost-effective to use it for ethanol. And the tariffs and quotas for imported sugar mean that no one can afford to import foreign sugar and turn it into ethanol, the way that oil refiners import crude from the Middle East to make gasoline. Americans now import eighty per cent less sugar than they did thirty years ago. So the prospects for a domestic-sugar ethanol industry are dim at best…

Our current policy is absurd even by Washington standards: Congress is paying billions in subsidies to get us to use more ethanol, while keeping in place tariffs and quotas that guarantee that we’ll use less. And while most of the time tariffs just mean higher prices and reduced competition, in the case of ethanol the negative effects are considerably greater, leaving us saddled with an inferior and less energy-efficient technology and as dependent as ever on oil-producing countries. Because of the ethanol tariffs, we’re imposing taxes on fuel from countries that are friendly to the U.S., but no tax at all on fuel from countries that are among our most vehement opponents…

I’m already imagining a jointly authored book by Michael Pollen and James Surowiecki. How powerful would that be?

Why did it take an impending energy crisis to make Surowiecki write about these issues? Regardless of the timing, I’m just glad it’s out there.

I’m not sure I could read an entire book about the psychology of food, but the Salon interview with the author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink, is a great primer on the subject. It contains a few simple tricks to help yourself eat less.

I might not be able to look at a bowl of soup the same way again.

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