Your soul resides in your stomach.

Last Sunday morning, I took my mom to the Dupont Circle farmer's market. Amid the splendiferous array greens like purslane and French sorrel and the tables full of locally-made saffron-scented sheepsmilk cheese, we found a table selling real, honest-to-god black raspberries. You see red raspberries all over the place. Every once in a while, even Trader Joe's carries golden raspberries. And I'm not talking about blackberries. Black raspberries are different -- something special.

Personally, I haven't seen any of those little purple guys since I was a very small kid. When I lived on the farm out in West Tennessee, we actually had all three varieties of raspberries in our garden. In truth, I had no idea that raspberries were a luxury until I noted that you pay $5 for a quarter-pint in most grocery stores. As a kid, I ate them by the fistful--such opulent gluttony!

So, when I put the first one in my mouth, the sense memory of the summers when I was 4, 5, 6... was so terribly intense that it pricked tears into my eyes. I'm not exaggerating. I was standing right there on 20th, willing tears away. Tears over a raspberry.

This is the kind of experience that, I'm pretty sure, is unique to the farmer's market milieu. Unique in an urban environment, anyway. My raspberry was organic, grown in neighboring state Pennsylvania and flawlessly mold-free. Probably, it had been picked yesterday--at the very earliest.

And then, feeling freshly virtuous from our locavore's shopping expedition, I took my mom to see the new documentary, Food, Inc. Now, since I began this blog, one of the recurring themes (besides my own narcissism and my desire to have a lot of sex, I mean) is my conviction that the American food supply has long since gone to hell, tipped out of its handbasket and danced around in its own fecal matter once it got there. How many eco-food films have I admonished you, fair readers, to go see? Milk in the Land, Flow, Fast-Food Nation ... I can't even remember all the others. It's not new news that my anxiety about what we all eat and how we choose our foods is ever ratcheting itself higher. And as a result, I feel as though it's not even possible for me to scream loud enough. Especially considering my readership is, you know, modest.

On a day-to-day basis, I am frustrated that I'm not making any headway with even my closest friends and family members. My own dad insists buying organic half-and-half is a waste of money. I had an argument just the other day with a friend who prioritizes saving money in the short term over the exorbitant costs to the planet, to underprivileged peoples, to conventionally raised animals and to our bodies that buying from mainstream corporate venues makes inevitable. And even the friends who I know buy the argument that sustainability, organics and locally grown foods are not just the best way to eat, but the only way to eat, will still swing over to the grungy local Safeway more often than they'll admit aloud to me.

I blame bottlenecks in the information flow. The information that is to be found in a movie like Food, Inc. is simply not available to those who don't pointedly seek it out. Most people haven't seen footage of a feedlot (and probably don't want to). Most people don't have the foggiest clue as to what the inside of a corn refinery looks like. Most people, in fact, hear of a salmonella outbreak caused by contaminated spinach and simply stop eating spinach. They don't understand that spinach should never be contaminated with an animal-borne bacteria, or that the only way spinach could possibly encounter salmonella would be for it to be grown in the path of run-off from a corporate chicken house.

Now, I could go into plenty of detail as to the ecological and dietary carnage that you'll see in this film. Feedlots look like Auschwitz for cows, people. Commericial chicken houses? Chickens, grown too fast and too fat to support their own body weights on their little chicken legs, teem in dusty clouds of dried fecal matter, squawking like banshees. The brevity of their miserable lives is almost a blessing. And corn. I can't even begin to address the giant clusterfuck that compose the corn-producing entities in this country. So, I'm not going to.

I will, however, take this moment to offer a plea: see this film. See all the other films I liked above. Read The Omnovore's Dilemma. Read Fast-Food Nation. Read anything Alice Waters ever wrote. Read Mark Bittman. Read Deborah Madison. And then learn how to eat anew. How to value quality, untainted food over cheap food. How to consider the longterm ramifications of every dollar you spend affect every other single solitary human with whom you currently share the planet -- and all those who'll come after you.

And consider this: in 1950, the average American spent 10% of his or her family's income on food. Today, the average American spends only 3% on food. And bitches constantly about the price of an anti-biotic-free, non-rBGH, organic jug of milk. If these statistics don't show us that our priorities are out of whack, I don't know what might.

So, in lieu of a full-on review (in hopes that my guilt trip and paucity of my characteristic spoilers will lead you to the theater), I offer three takeaways:

• Our mainstream food supply chain was designed by Heironymous Bosch. Everything we eat may as well be coated in petroleum, then shit, then money. That's not a metaphor. At least not the oil and shit parts.
• Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser are the prophets of our age. If you're not listening to them, not reading them, not taking their wisdom to the bosom, you are tolling the death knell for middle class, comfortable American life as we know it. Clean the fucking cobwebs from your eyes. They know the light and are desperate to bring it to you.
• Activistic consumerism is the most viable, valuable, powerful tool for social change we've got. Engage your soul when you spend. If your money is going in the opposite direction of your personal code of ethics, you're either underinformed or a hypocrite. More than likely, you're the former. Fix that. Educate yourself about the companies from which you buy. Do they mistreat their work force? Do they raise sick animals that are bound to make your family sick as well? Are they contaminating the water tables with their putrid run-off? Will their practices make this planet uninhabitable in under two generations? If the answer to any of these question is yes, show them you don't believe in their practices by not buying their products. The demand for organic foodstuffs is growing by 20% every year. That's consumer, not corporate, power, folks. And 20% remarkably high number--one of which we should be proud. It's us--not the corporations--who control where we spend our money. We are in control of the food industry because if they aren't making products we'll buy, they'll start making ones we will. We're witnessing a sea change, my friends. On which side will you be when the tide comes in?

Because I mean to put my own efforts and money where my mouth is, I've renewed my commitment to the locavore life. Because it is my strongest of convictions that every person's individual sense of responsibility with regard to ethical consumerism is the very thing that need reach the proverbial critical mass in order to turn this heavy boat around, I mean to make a tangible adjustment in my own life. I'm putting it in print because I hope telling you, a handful of strangers I may never meet and a slightly bigger handful of friends and family members, of my resolution will help hold me accountable. And also... well, maybe because I secretly hope that I can motivate at least a handful of you into changing your buying habits alongside me. Ultimately, though, I can't, in good conscience, spend another dollar on food without considering the effect that dollar will have on the global community.

So here you go:

Every weekend, I'm gonna haul myself out of bed at a very early o'clock and buy as much of my weekly rations as I can at one farmer's market or another. DC is full of farmer's markets, with representatives mostly from farms all over Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The variety of products is certainly ample enough to support the most omnivorous diet. For any local readers, check out the DC Harvest blog (their tweets are plenty informative as well) for some great tips on what's good where. Everyone else? Your research is only a google away.

This morning, I went back to the Dupont Circle market. It was a glorious morning. Healthy farm boys handed out apricot samples. Pretty women pushed strollers or flicked ponytails. Everyone had on a maxi-dress. And I found grass-fed lamb summer sausage and beer-washed sheepsmilk cheese. I bought some pitch-perfect cucumber mint vodka gelato. The tomatoes--dear goddess, I would have sold my firstborn for those tomatoes. And apricots that boy handed me were flavorful like you just can't get, not even at Whole Foods. It's expensive to do this, no doubt. But I don't think I've ever felt so happy forking it over.

So, because all this puts me in a good mood, how about a recipe for a salad I just made up?

A Mid-Summer's Night's Salad

For the salad:
2 small fennel bulbs, chopped
1 bell pepper, chopped (I found purple ones--gorgeous--but any color will do.)
3 small new carrots, chopped into rounds
1 luscious summer tomato, chopped
5 or 6 radishes, sliced
2 tbsp chopped fresh tarragon leaves

For the dressing:
1 1/2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
1 clove garlic, minced
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp cumin
cayenne pepper to taste

Pour the dressing over the salad and toss. This would probably serve up to 3 people, but I just ate the whole thing for dinner. It was a lot of vegetables, but it felt so virtuous (after all the sheep cheese I ate earlier) that I couldn't stop.

Bon appetite!

Bugged: Marjorie's PSA against HFCS

According to my informal survey, roughly 80% of Washington, DC's red line Metro drivers pronounce the word "judiciary," as in"Next stop, Judiciary Square!" as "judi-shoo-ary." I've already come to dread that stop on my route. And that's ONLY because the mispronunciation has roughly the same aural effect on me as would chewing aluminum foil. *shudder* I just can't take it.

But this is the least of things bugging me lately.

I don't know if it's a national campaign or not, but perhaps some of you have seen the new television spots advocating for high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)? Truly, I'm galled by the intrusion of these half-truth-filled advertisements into my peaceful television-viewing time. Just to share the joy-- in case all my readers haven't seen them-- I'm going to embed them both here:




Now, do your brains feel as sullied as mine did when I first saw these?

OK, let's parse their claims and see what we come up with.

It's made from corn. True!
Wanna know how it's made from corn? Here's what Michael Pollan, my omnivorous heartthrob, says in The Omnivore's Dilemma:

"I remember an elementary school science experiment in which we were instructed to chew--and chew and chew--a cracker until the slurry of starch turned suddenly sweet on our tongues. the teacher explained that the enzymes in our saliva had broken the long starch molecules into shorter molecules of glucose. Much the same process--it's called 'enzyme hydrolysis'--revolutionized corn refining in the 1940s. as enzymes replaced acids, refiners were able to produce progressively sweeter sweeteners [this is why HFSC is not at all the same thing as Caro corn syrup you can buy in the grocery store-- that stuff is far less refined and therefore less sweet] from corn. Yet none were quite as sweet as sugar (or, to be more precise, sucrose). That threshold wasn't crossed until the late 1960s, when Japanese chemists 'broke the sweetness barrier,' in the words of the Corn Refiners Association's [the lying liars who lie officious lies in the ads you see above] official history of high-fructose corn sweetener. They discovered that an enzyme called glucose isomerase could transform glucose into the much sweeter sugar molecule called fructose. By the 1970s the process of refining corn into fructose had been perfected, and high-fructose corn syrup-- which is a blend of 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose that tastes exactly as sweet as sucrose--came on the market. Today it is the most valuable food product refined from corn, accounting for 530 million bushels every year. (A bushel of corn yields thirty-three pounds of fructose.)

"But if the pipe marked 'HFCS' leads to the fattest spigot at the far end of a corn refinery's bewildering tangle of pipes and valves, it is by no means the only spigot you'll find back there. There are dozens of other 'output streams.' At various points along its way through the mill some portion of the thick white slurry of starch is diverted to another purpose or, in the refiner's jargon, another 'fraction.' The starch itself is capable of being modified into spherical, crystalline, or highly branched molecules, each suitable for a different use: adhesives, coatings, sizings, and plastics for industry; stabilizers, thickeners, gels, and 'viscosity-control agents' for food.

"What remains in the slurry is 'saccharified'--treated with enzymes that turn it into dextrose syrup. A portion of this dextrose is siphoned off for use in corn syrup; other fraction are recruited to become sugars like maltodextrin and maltose. The largest portion of the corn syrup stream is piped into a tank where it is exposed to glucose isomerase enzymes and then passed through ion exchange filters, merging eventually as fructose. Now what's left of the dextrose stream is piped into a fermentation tank, where yeasts and amino acids go to work eating the sugars, in several hours yielding an alcoholic brew. This itself is fractionated into various alcohols, ethanol chief among them, our gas tanks being the ultimate destination of a tenth of the corn crop. The fermented brew can also be refined into a dozen different organic and amino acids for use in food processing or the manufacture of plastic."

So, yes, sure, absolutely. The junk is made from corn. Via a very complicated process that produces an unnerving number of other substances that are in no way edible. That HFCS is only an atom or two different from these other substances-- namely plastic and glue -- gives me pause. I don't know about you guys, though.



It contains no artificial ingredients. True!...kinda.
It is true that HFCS doesn't contain a single solitary artificial ingredient. That's because it is an artificial ingredient unto itself. Artificial ingredients are those things that we might add to food that do not naturally occur. As Mr. Pollan so carefully explained to us in the excerpt above, no how, no way does HFCS occur in nature. Now, of course, by this definition, one could argue that, say, meatloaf or homemade chocolate chip cookies are artificial as they do not occur without the help of human hands. And that's true of course, but if you make meatloaf and chocolate chip cookies at all like I do, you can, at the very least, trace all of your ingredients back to their natural sources without running into handfuls of dubious chemicals and questionable enzyme-y substances in the process. (Mmmmm, isomerase enzymes! Yuh-mmy!) Can't say the same thing for HFSC. It's doesn't need to have Frankenfood added to it when it already is Frankenfood! Therefore, although the TV spot isn't actually espousing an untruth, it's certainly saying something that is very misleading indeed. But then, the ad was devised by the industry that is anathema to public-consciousness-raising-- the one run by people with advanced degrees in marketing, aka., professional liars and manipulators. So, I shouldn't be surprised that there is utter poppycock to be found in such ads, eh?



Like sugar, it's fine in moderation. Not really true at all.
First of all, it's not really all that much like sugar. Now, sugar itself isn't really all that great for you, but a couple tablespoons a day isn't going to make you fat or kill you in the short term. In the long term, well, those couple of tablespoons might contribute to either or both fatness and death (the latter is a particular risk if you are diabetic) but that's neither here nor there in this argument. My point here is that the body doesn't react to HFCS the same way it reacts to sugar. It foments the growth of certain bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract, thus aggravating-- if not outright causing-- diseases like Irritable Bowel Syndrome and other gaseous maladies. Also, your blood absorbs glucose (remember, glucose constitutes 45% of HFCS) much faster than it does sucrose. That means you burn through it faster, making you crash harder once you use up the (empty) calories. And because you burn the calories so quickly, your body doesn't register fullness in the same way that it does if you're eating a merely sugar-sweetened confection. Thus, you are prompted to eat more, making that "in moderation" bit much more difficult. Unless, of course, you are equipped with super-human will power. (Allow me to confess that I, for one, am not.)

And I haven't even mentioned the fact that products that contain HFCS do so in much larger quantities than would constitute "moderation." A serving size of Kool-Aid is about 4 ounces. That's little more than an overflowing Dixie cup. A normal 12-ounce glass of Poison Punch is going to give a 10 year old kid-- who might weigh about half as much as a grown-up-- six times a moderate amount of HFCS. Now, if that same kid just happens to be diabetic, well, HFCS has been shown to cause much more erratic and thunderous spikes in bloodsugars than sucrose does. Hence, that death thing ain't so far off after all. So, HFCS is fine in moderation? Maybe. If only it weren't engineered to help us override our satiation sensors. Oh, and did I mention that there is some evidence that this stuff is actually mildly addictive? (There are so many articles verifying this stance on the internet that I couldn't pick just one to link here (I highly recommend doing your own research. Please. Don't just take my word for all this.)), but the bottom line is that all sugars react within the brain in a slightly addictive capacity-- we're hardwired in such a way that simple-carb seeking is essentially a survival mechanism-- but artificially heightened sweetness is even more addictive than plain sucrose, as might be extracted from cane or beets.) In the end, the very nature of the stuff, coupled with the way it is used in commercially processed foods, makes moderate consumption thereof not particularly feasible. Therefore, minimal, not moderate, intake should be the goal.

And good luck with that. It's in well over 40% of the products found in mainstream grocery stores. Over 40%! Is anyone beginning to see why I think it's worth the money to shop at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods? No Trader Joe's brandname product uses HFCS, to the best of my knowledge. I've been reading their ingredient labels for years-- and sometimes I do find stuff I don't like in there. But I've yet to find any HFCS. And there are items at Whole Foods that contain it, to be sure, but far fewer than what would make up 40% of their inventory. Quality, organic, whole foods are worth the money. They're worth it in the short term, in terms of flavor. And they're worth it in the long term in terms of personal health benefits, as well as reduced impact on the environment. 50 years ago, the average American spend 10% of his or her income on food. Today, we spend closer to 3%, and yet we still bitch and moan about the rising costs of groceries. My priorities are such that I probably do spend closer to 10% of what I net on food... and far less than 10% on things like gas for my car. I realize my lifestyle choices are not possible for everyone. But I also can't help but wonder why spending a significant chunk on a weekly grocery bill was normal in 1955 but is perceived as a luxury now. Something to think about. I'm certainly thinking about it.

By the way, have I mentioned what your liver thinks of HFCS? Yeah, it doesn't like it. If you are a frequent HFCS-user, you might as well be consuming a fifth of Jack every couple of days.

But that's merely tangential. Allow me to return to my PSA:

It has the same calories as sugar. True! But irrelevant.
Equal measurements of refined sucrose and HFCS do, indeed, have an equal number of calories. But I've already discussed how our bodies process and digest those two different calorie sources very differently. Therefore, the comparison isn't really a fair one. And it's not like eating regular ol' white granulated sugar is all that terrific for us in the first damn place.



Now, had I the capital, I would sue this Corn Refiners' Association, the entity behind these spurious advertisements, for as large a portion of their government-subsidy-bloated bank accounts as I could swing. I mean, the real tragedy of these ads is that the majority of people who see them will take them at face value and not bother to look into any of the cornucopia of internet-available research about HFCS. And those folks will continue to poison themselves and their kids with that goopy sludge. And feel vindicated in doing so.

Thanks for the social and public health foresight, CRA! No really. Thanks.