Eating Liberally

When Whole Foods CEO John Mackey revealed himself to be a climate change skeptic in a New Yorker profile last month, he drew attention once again to the disconnect between his own libertarian ideology and the sensibilities of the ecologically and ethically-minded eaters who form Whole Foods' core constituency. Coming on the heels of his Wall Street Journal op-ed opposing health care reform, it may have been the proverbial last straw; shortly after the article hit the newstands, Mackey resigned from the chairmanship of Whole Food's board.

Mackey's resignation suggests that carbon footprint-conscious foodies have the power to influence a corporation. Now, it's time for all the lager-lovers who support low-impact living to step up to the plate--or, rather, the bar--to demand better from Anheuser-Busch. .

If you're still drinking Budweiser, Michelob, Rolling Rock, or any other brew marketed by Anheuser-Busch, you're inadvertently bankrolling a company that continues to stand by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce despite its ongoing efforts to thwart any efforts to address global warming. Will Budweiser become the brew of choice for the "Drill, Baby, Drill" crowd?

Progressive beer-drinkers who'd like Anheuser-Busch to rethink its position can flout their clout at the cash register, for a start, but you can also send a message by signing this petition from CREDO and Living Liberally asking Anheuser-Busch to step down from the board of the Chamber of Commerce.

Anheuser-Busch, which currently claims about fifty percent of the beer market in the U.S., proudly touts its record of "environmental stewardship." And yet, the behemoth brewer refuses to use its weight to compel the Chamber of Commerce to stop blocking progress at a critical juncture in the climate crisis.

Rolling Stone has declared U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohoe one of its 17 "Climate Killers," the "polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming." As Al Gore told Rolling Stone:

Not only has the Chamber spent decades denying the existence of the climate crisis, now it is dedicating a significant quantity of resources and money attempting to prevent Congress from taking action.

This stubborn stance has cost the Chamber of Commerce such key supporters as Nike and Apple. Rolling Stone noted that "Even the California utility PG&E resigned from the Chamber, blasting Donohue for his group's "disingenuous attempts to distort" the dangers of climate change."

As historian Doug Brinkley told Living On Earth's Jeff Young last week:

If global warming continues and we don't address it history will wonder, what were these people thinking? They were given every alarm bell. It's like fire bells going off in a theater and everybody kept sitting and watching the movie.

Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce is threatening to sue the Environmental Protection Agency over its stated plan to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. They've already filed a lawsuit against the Yes Men, who held a fake press conference last October to announce that the Chamber of Commerce was ready to reverse course, i.e. stop steering us off the climate change cliff, and instead embrace legislation to curb carbon emissions.

Such pranks help shame the climate change cranks, but there's more we can do. Can Anheuser-Busch really afford to remain aligned with the Chamber of Commerce? The brand may already be in serious trouble, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which notes that "Bud Light and Budweiser -- Anheuser-Busch's No. 1 and No. 2 brands, respectively -- are suffering drops in sales," due, analysts speculate, to "a loss of identity and appeal among cash-strapped drinkers."

It's not even in Anheuser-Busch's own interests to ignore global warming, given the fact that climate change is already hurting hops yields. And as more and more brewers strive to genuinely lower their carbon footprint (as opposed to greenwashing), environmentally conscious beer drinkers now have plenty of other brews from which to choose.

So, maybe it's time to ask yourself whether this Bud is really for you? And ask Anheuser-Busch to step down from the board of the Chamber of Commerce.

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Pet Food Politics, What to Eat and Food Politics:)

Kat: Dog lovers are howling over a new book called Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living. The book claims that "the carbon pawprint of a pet dog is more than double that of a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle," according to a report from the Agence France Presse.

The book's authors, Robert and Brenda Vale, sustainable living experts at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, estimate that a medium-sized dog's annual diet--about 360 pounds of meat and 200 pounds of grains--requires roughly double the resources it would take to drive an SUV 6,200 miles a year.

You've become an expert on the pet food industry in recent years with Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine, and your upcoming book, Feed Your Pet Right. So, what's your take on the Vales' claims? Is Fido really the new Hummer?

Dr. Nestle: Since Mal Nesheim is my co-conspirator on Feed Your Pet Right, this response is from both of us. Hence, “we.”

We ordered this book through Amazon in the U.K. but it is taking its own sweet time getting here. So all we really know about what these authors say is what we read in the October 24 New Scientist, which not only reviewed the book (in an article titled, “How green is your pet”) but also ran an editorial that begins, “If you really want to make a sacrifice to sustainability, consider ditching your pet - its ecological footprint will shock you.”

Oh, please. We don’t think so for two reasons, one quantitative, one qualitative. First, the quantitative:

The New Scientist review says:

To measure the ecological paw, claw and fin-prints of the family pet, the Vales analysed the ingredients of common brands of pet food. They calculated, for example, that a medium-sized dog would consume 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food. At its pre-dried weight, that equates to 450 grams of fresh meat and 260 grams of cereal. That means that over the course of a year, Fido wolfs down about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals.

We don’t really have all the facts at hand. We have not seen the book, we don’t know what assumptions the authors made, and we can’t be certain that the review quotes the book accurately. Still, we are puzzled by these figures.

By our estimates, an average dog does indeed need about 300 grams of dry dog food a day; this much provides close to 1,000 calories. Fresh meat supplies about 2 calories per gram, so 450 grams would yield about 900 calories. Cereals have less water so they are more caloric; they provide nearly 4 calories per gram. The 260 grams of cereals would provide nearly 1,000 calories. If New Scientist got it right, the authors of the book are overestimating the amount of food needed by dogs by a factor of two.

On the qualitative side: Most dogs don’t eat the same meat humans do. They eat meat by-products—the parts of food animals that we wouldn’t dream of eating. These are organs, intestines, scraps, cuttings, and other disgusting-to-humans animal parts.

We think pet food performs a huge public service. If pets didn’t eat all that stuff, we would have to find a means of getting rid of it: landfills, burning, fertilizer, or converting it to fuel, all of which have serious environmental consequences. If dogs and cats ate the same food we do, we estimate that just on the basis of calories, the 172 million dogs and cats in American would consume as much food as 42 million people.

But they don’t. They eat the by-products of human food production. If we want to do something to help reverse climate change, we should be worrying much more about the amount of meat that we ourselves are eating--and the amount of cereals we are growing to feed food animals--than blaming house pets for a problem that we created.

Get rich quick! Lose weight fast! We squander billions each year on scams that promise easy money and effortless weight loss. Still, the pounds pile up, the money doesn't, and our tanking bank balances and spiking weight distract us from the more remote, abstract problem of climate change.

But we could find true prosperity, improve our health, and fight global warming all at once. How? By transforming the way we produce, distribute, consume and dispose of our food.

Of course, you'll never hear this from the climate change skeptics. On the contrary, they'll tell you that we can't reduce our greenhouse gas emissions without destroying our economy and our quality of life. These fossil fueled foot-draggers are being rightfully skewered at swifthack.com, but they're doing their damnedest to derail the negotiations at the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, where the world's leaders are struggling to hammer out a consensus on how to reduce our collective carbon footprint.

I'm not investing all my hope in Copenhagen. I don't have to, and neither do you. Because this Saturday, we've got our own climate summit here in New York City, where our politicians are laying the groundwork for real progress on climate change by rethinking our food chain. Hosted by NYU, the NYC Food and Climate Summit is a collaboration between Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer's food policy team and the non-profit powerhouse Just Food, which promotes CSAs (community supported agriculture), urban food production and greater access to healthy food.

You don't hear much about it, but the production, distribution and disposal of food all generate a tremendous amount of greenhouse gases. Changing the way we do these things is not only one of the most effective ways to fight global warming, it has the potential to provide us with healthier food and a revitalized economy as well.

So while economists and scientists debate the merits and perils of cap and trade, Stringer and New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn have been busy working with food policy experts and others (like me) to craft cutting edge initiatives to curb New York City's carbon "foodprint" by relocalizing our food chain, supporting urban agriculture, converting food waste to compost instead of sending it to the landfills, and so on.

Last Friday, Stringer unveiled a New York City Food Charter, with "10 Principles For a Sustainable Food System." On Monday, Quinn announced "Foodworks New York," an ambitious five-point plan to overhaul New York City's food system to create green jobs, improve access to healthy food, and preserve our environment.

Stringer and Quinn recognize that a relocalized New York City food system would provide a model of sustainability for other cities in the US and around the world. Mayor Bloomberg, who's off to Copenhagen next week to meet with 100 other mayors from around the world to discuss the critical role that cities play in reducing the world's carbon footprint, is committed to a greener Big Apple. But when he launched his sustainability initiative, PlaNYC, he left our food system out of the equation, as my fellow good food advocate Alexa Van de Walle pointed out on Huffington Post.

So a group of advocates, scholars, farmers, nutritionists, chefs, labor leaders, community gardeners, students and others--myself and Alexa included--have spent the last several years campaigning to put food issues on the table. Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of many dedicated and passionate people, and responsive, visionary politicians like Stringer and Quinn, sustainable agriculture's potential to help solve climate change is becoming more widely known. This, as much as anything that might happen in Copenhagen, gives me hope.

On Saturday, nearly a thousand folks will gather for the NYC Food and Climate Summit and learn more about the link between food and climate change from good food luminaries, legendary locavores, and a wide range of experts who'll be conducting skills-building workshops and policy sessions. Speakers include Scott Stringer, Marion Nestle, Anna Lappé, Joan Gussow, and Colin Beavan (aka No Impact Man). Seats for the summit, which is free, were "sold out" a day and a half after registration opened, indicating the tremendous interest in this subject.

As 350.org founder and longtime climate change activist Bill McKibben wrote the other day, we are at a critical juncture in the climate crisis now. McKibben warns that "politics-as-usual may mean the end of civilization."

You have three choices: you can be a denier, a defeatist, or a doer. Deniers may or may not admit that the climate is changing, but they flatly reject the notion that we're contributing to it; defeatists recognize that global warming is real and we're part of the problem, but feel helpless to do anything about it. The doers? Thousands of us are congregating in Copenhagen right now, but there are thousands more right here in New York, and all over the world. We're tackling climate change, supporting healthy food, and revitalizing our communities. Why be a doubter, or a downer, when you could be a doer?

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.

Guest Blogger Gisele Perez Reviews John Besh's My New Orleans

(note from kat: Gisele Perez was born in New Orleans and was part of the mass migration westward from there in the 1950's and 60's. She writes, as the LA2LAChef, about her experiences as an expatriate New Orleanian, and her life as a professional chef now living in Los Angeles at painperdu. She is also the owner of small pleasures catering in Los Angeles, and co-host of the Drinking Liberally chapter there.)

John Besh dedicates his newly released cookbook, My New Orleans, to the people of New Orleans, and to those who hold the city close to their hearts.

“After Katrina, being from New Orleans became the focus of my identity,” he writes in his introduction. I hear ya, brother! I had just begun to write about my early life in New Orleans when Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. I remember e-mailing a fellow writing workshop member that it seemed trivial to be writing about backyard family parties, and okra and shrimp and gumbo at a time like this. He wisely responded, “that’s precisely what you should be writing at a time like this. Food is a means of preserving culture.” And so, Katrina was the impetus for beginning my blog, pain perdu. Likewise, Mr. Besh felt the urgent call to preserve the culture of New Orleans, using food as his window.

He threw himself into feeding people, returning to New Orleans quickly to feed “policemen and national guard troops, evacuees and refugees, doctors and nurse, all who were hungry...” It didn’t stop there. He writes that he “became obsessed with finding ingredients with the flavor of here,” and began raising his own cattle, hogs and chickens, and working closely with local farmers to supply his restaurants, believing that New Orleans is “a true national treasure”, and that it’s “important to come from somewhere”. I couldn’t agree more.

While Besh’s New Orleans is not exactly the same as mine, and I found myself quibbling over the details of recipes for basic dishes like gumbo and jambalaya (New Orleanians can be very proprietary about their recipes), I realize that the wonderful thing about this city is that it's like Rashomon. We all see different sides of New Orleans, and defend our view. Yet unlike other cities, there is so much commonality that is essential to life as a New Orleanian- like the extraordinary love of food (“In New Orleans, folks live to eat; they don’t just eat to live”) and festivity (“there’s a Mardi Gras taking place in every household and every neighborhood of New Orleans on Fat Tuesday”)- that binds us together. And our fierce love of New Orleans binds us further together.

Besh acknowledges, and his book embodies “...a tension in New Orleans cooking between preserving the classics and modernizing them for today’s palates, between home cooking and restaurant food.” He offers some updates of classic dishes which reflect NOLA’s evolving demography, like Shrimp Creole infused with lemon grass to reflect the arrival of the Vietnamese and their imprint on the city and its cuisine. And because he trained as a chef at the Culinary Institute of America, and apprenticed in Europe, he also offers us some modern reinterpretations of classic ingredients, like Grilled Watermelon, Tomato and Goat Cheese Salad, with a knowing aside, “where I grew up, grown men did not eat grilled figs with baby greens and artisanal goats’ milk cheese.”

Besh’s book is not just another cookbook. While it contains 200 recipes, it’s also a beautiful coffee table book with gorgeous archival and present day pictures of NOLA, and its families and characters at work and play, at Mardi Gras, on the waterways, and at the table. Its contents are not organized in traditional cookbook “appetizer to dessert” order, but rather by ingredients, seasons and feast days- some of those days meriting their own chapter- like Mardi Gras and Thanksgiving. Speaking of ingredients, the book is also full of sidebars with background notes on the glorious ingredients available to New Orleans cooks-i.e. Creole tomatoes, Ponchatoula strawberries, and mirlitons, and speckled trout and Gulf oysters.

My New Orleans is a “must add” to the library of anyone who loves New Orleans, or anyone who has flirted with the possibility of falling in love with the city. At a retail price of $45, it seems a bargain to me, and will, no doubt, to every one who holds the city in its heart.

Shrimp Creole

5 pounds jumbo Louisiana or wild American shrimp
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 T. minced fresh lemongrass
1/2 C. olive oil
3 medium onions, diced
10 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 stalk celery, diced
1 bell pepper, red, green or yellow, seeded and diced
5 pounds very ripe Brandywine or other heirloom tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped
1 bay leaf
1/4 t. ground allspice
1 T. crushed red pepper flakes
Leaves from 2 branches of fresh basil
Leaves from 1 sprig of fresh mint
Sugar

1. Put shrimp into a large bowl, season with salt and pepper, then mix in the lemongrass. Heat 1/4 C. of the oil in a large deep skillet over moderate heat. Add the shrimp, stirring and tossing them with a spatula, until they turn pink, about 2 minutes. Remove the shrimp from the pan and set aside.
2. Into the same skillet with the oil and and shrimp juices, put the remaining 1/4 C. oil, and the onions, garlic, celery, and bell peppers and cook, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, for about 2 minutes.
3. Add the tomatoes. Reduce the heat to medium low, and when the sauce comes to a simmer, add the bayleaf.allspice, and red pepper flakes. Simmer for 10 minutes.
4. Add the shrimp back to the skillet, along with the basil and mint. Cook for a minute or two. Season with salt and pepper. If the sauce is a little too tart, add a little sugar to balance the flavors. Serve over steamed white rice.