Conscious Cook » Everything Else

Food Movement 101: What Is It? (Part 1 of 2)

Paul Cooper — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:07:31 +0000

Those who’ve been following the food beat for personal or professional reasons in the past couple of years probably have a vague, but pretty good idea of what is meant by “the food movement.” The same can’t be said, however, for friends of mine who’ve just started reading one of Michael Pollan’s books or who, more vaguely, have begun to feel the effects of this trend percolating out of the air around them, perhaps in the form of a new farmers’ market pitching its tents in an empty lot nearby.

What is the food movement? It isn’t an easy question to answer, because it’s made up of many different tribes and constituencies. The very attempt to say that all these disparate culinary, political and environmental forces can be corralled into something called a food movement is probably controversial. But let’s give it a try. The attempt might bear useful fruit, not just by clarifying the terms of the debate, but by helping to realize useful partnerships.

So: what do I mean by the food movement? Well, for starters, here are a few key organizations and people who belong to it.

Slow Food. As the name suggests, this international NGO began with an outcry against fast food. In 1986, McDonald’s wanted to open a franchise near the Spanish steps in Rome, and this was regarded by many Italians (quite rightly) as an act of sacrilege and an abomination. “Slow food” became a national and then an international anti-fast-food movement. I don’t have any polling data, but at least among the folks I hang out with, Slow Food seems to enjoy the greatest brand recognition out of all the food movement affiliates.

Michael Pollan. I get the impression that among serious food peeps Michael P. is sometimes regarded as, well, old news. That’s the price of fame and influence. His books, Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food are undeniably part of the food movement canon, and as such, often taken as read. Which means, if you’re interested in food politics, and haven’t read them, you probably should. There are certainly many other excellent food writers, like Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), but Pollan has sold a lot of books lately and reached a lot of people.

[...go to Part 2]

What You Don't Know About Olive Oil

Paul Cooper — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:12:32 +0000

Of all the products on the supermarket shelf, one that has always concerned me very little is olive oil. This, after all, is a straightforward product, unlike so many of the highly processed, food-industry offerings with their long lists of mystery ingredients. Olive oil is simple and wholesome, its healthful properties well known for thousands of years.

Or so I assumed. One of the first things you find when you Google around the subject a bit is Tom Mueller’s excellent article, “Slippery Business: The Trade in Adulterated Olive Oil,” published last year in The New Yorker. An enlightening piece. And not in a good way. Because it turns out the olive oil trade is to Italians what to cocaine trade is to some Columbians: a great way to get rich by flouting the law.

In the last decade there have been several high-profile criminal investigations in Italy, all revolving around the common practice of adulterating olive oil. Many Italian bottlers import cheaper olive oil from countries like Turkey and Tunisia (much to the annoyance of Italian olive farmers). Sometimes the oil being disgorged by tanker ships in Italian ports doesn’t come from olives at all. A simple change to the ship’s manifest mid-voyage transforms a cargo of cheap Turkish hazelnut oil into extra virgin olive oil from Greece. It’s a highly profitable business diluting the real stuff with lower quality olive oils and other kinds of vegetable oil, and unless you have a home chromatography kit, you’re unlikely to be able to detect that you’ve been swindled.

The fraud doesn’t just mean that there’s a decent chance your big-brand olive oil, bottled in Italy, has been adulterated. It also means that honest bottlers are forced out of business, since they can’t compete with the prices offered by bottlers of the adulterated stuff. It’s a good corollary of Gresham’s law: the bad drives out the good. Everybody suffers, except the crooks.

Although there’s definitely such a thing as excellent Italian olive oil, as recently as 2007 less than half of the “extra virgin” olive oil shipped from Italy actually met the necessary standard.

The blossoming Californian olive oil industry, on the other hand, looks like a godsend to lovers of good food in North America. Affordable, single-estate olive oils abound. It is estimated the production of olive oil in California will increase 30-fold over the next 20 years. Adulteration, thus far, is not a problem.

So what’s a shopper to do? Well, first, understand that the supermarket is not your friend. Big chain grocery stores must use big suppliers. The profitable trade in adulterated olive oil flows mostly through these giant supply chains. Most big grocery stores offer only the illusion of choice: many brands of “extra virgin” olive oil all coming from the same network of large-scale producers. “Bottled in Italy” on the label does not mean the olive oil inside is Italian, nor is it a sign of quality. There might be a good, inexpensive olive oil among the many brands, but it’s usually hard to know which is which.

Government agencies aren’t going to help you out either. They’ve got their hands full worrying about melamine and tainted peanut butter. Adulteration of olive oil is a rip-off, but it isn’t a critical health threat, so the government ignores it. The rule is caveat emptor.

The best way to score the good stuff is to find one of those specialty food boutiques where wealthy socialites hang out, or maybe a European cafe with a little corner full of goodies from the homeland. Or you can order online from a Californian artisanal producer. The stuff I got from Bariani in the mail was very high quality and reasonably priced too.

Warning: once an olive oil snob, always an olive oil snob. You’ll never be happy paying top dollar for the thin stuff again. As it should be.

Radical Conservatives Versus Conservative Radicals in the Great Salmon Debate

Paul Cooper — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:00:49 +0000

Salmon researchers are not a bunch of tweed-clad academics politely arguing over a cup of tea. Think sailors engaged in a bar fight instead.

The scientists who study wild salmon populations are locked in a fierce debate over salmon farms, the sea lice that thrive in them, and the destructive effect of those sea lice on wild salmon. Are the farms a threat? How much of a threat compared to other threats, such as logging and climate change?

Counting fish in a big ocean is hard work. It’s not easy to track wild salmon, and it’s even harder to isolate the causes of a decline in population once you have established that a population is in decline. The difficulties inherent in salmon research allow bias to creep in. There’s plenty of acrimony and the gray areas create an atmosphere of doubt that generally strengthens the status quo, i.e., current salmon farming practices.

Yesterday I ran across an article (Science, Scientists and Salmon Farming) recently published in the Courier-Islander here in British Columbia about how the messiness of the scientific process helps those who have a financial interest in avoiding inconvenient and expensive truths. It got me thinking. Just as creationists love to willfully misunderstand the term, “theory,” when talking about the theory of evolution, global-warming deniers and the salmon-farming industry alike have become convenient champions of the refinable nature of science. The research is inconclusive, they say. Doubt still hangs in the air, goes the refrain.

It’s an ugly kettle of fish for journalists and bloggers, who have to try to evaluate claims based on articles published in scientific journals–highly technical articles larded with weird jargon. Who’s right, and how do you sort out all the messy research? The haggling over scientific reports goes on and not much changes.

But why, I wonder, wasn’t the burden of proof placed on the salmon farming industry in the first place? That is to say, in a truly conservative regulatory environment, maybe salmon farms should have been licensed only on the condition that they continue to prove every year that they are doing no harm to the far more valuable wild fish stocks. Instead, it seems as though all the salmon farming industry has to do to keep things more or less as they are is to keep on sprinkling doubt on a bewildered public.

Sea Lice

Maybe the burden of proof should be on the aquaculture industry, but, of course, that’s not the way the system works. Not by a long shot. Instead, we have the very unconservative, brave new world of aquaculture innovation, a lesser cousin of the radical financial innovation that conservatives were so confident would not wreck the world economy. It’s hard to avoid seeing that some conservatives are only conservative when it’s profitable. Maybe instead we ought to embrace real conservatism and go about conserving this tremendously important natural resource as carefully and cautiously as we know how, a resource that has been feeding British Columbians and holding together the food chain for thousands of years.

The argument of the article in the Courier-Islander is that the leading researchers have democratically come to a consensus, despite the challenges involved: the salmon farms are a threat to wild salmon. For consumers that means that if you like having wild salmon around, you should probably not buy farmed. You might choose to hold off on wild, as well, if that isn’t too much of a hardship. Personally, I love the stuff and not eating it is a hardship for me. As far as I know, the only truly flourishing West Coast salmon fishery is in Alaska, but you know, if you buy fresh Alaskan salmon, you’re paying to have that fresh fish put on a plane and flown down to Vancouver. Extravagant and not very green.

You can’t win. You can’t do much except daydream about the good old days, when you could practically walk across the backs of the millions of salmon in the Fraser River to the other side, when they used to trap a thousand fish at one cast of the net, and throw back everything but the sockeye as bycatch. Those days are long gone.