The Power of Post-its
The mandatory stainless steel 3 section sink is a must for every certified kitchen. You'd think with three sinks you'd be able to wash your hands...
here you go - this is the hand washing sink & to prevent any hand washing confusion there has to be a big bold sticker to clarify the issue.
There's nothing quite like the quiet hum of Victory - this is our four door pass through - it's named after the fact that it has two doors on each side.
So buying a house isn't stressful enough...Like I said… cheap beef kills people.
Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Sometimes not at all. Sometimes it’ll just make you wish you were dead.
But it doesn’t have to be like that.
No it really doesn’t. Like many intelligent people I’m sure that from time to time you take a look at the world and really want to change some things. Maybe things concern you like Global Warming, dependence on foreign oil and the environment. Maybe it really bothers you. Keeps you awake even.
But then you think about it a bit and changing things seems really hard.
Or impossible.
Well if you think of it in a certain way it is impossible.
You can’t single-handedly make the
You can’t make people give up their SUVs for Hybrids.
You can’t build a wind-farm. No-one has voted for you and probably won’t.
But you can make a difference in lots of ways.
Now I’m not about to tell you to be a vegan or weave your own moccasins from your own hair. I am not a hippy and you probably shouldn’t be one either.
But there are some practical solutions. Here are some you can try at home.
Three words. Stop buying garbage. Simple as that. No more factory-produced meat. No more eggs that are not from free-range birds. And definitely no more fast junk food. In fact try to forego anything that has been processed at all.
Buy raw ingredients. Buy whole cuts of meat from reputable sources.
Buy fresh fruit and veggies. Don’t buy food that requires scientists to create it.
Try making your own bread. You know what bread is… flour, water, yeast.
A little salt. That’s it. Stop reading this for a minute and go get a loaf of commercially produced bread from your kitchen. Look at the list of ingredients. Do you know what more than half of them are? Why are they there? Is that for your benefit or for the guys who sell the bread?
Bread-making is easy. Also it’s not time-consuming. No really. It isn’t.
Let me explain. Bread-making is all about very simple recipes and a little technique. Overall it does take some time to produce a loaf but your presence is only required in short energetic bursts interspersed by natural things happening on their own. Imagine the time you spend on any given evening watching some fine American television programming. All the time of yours it takes is the bits when the adverts are on. Not really precious time. In fact it’s time you would prefer not to have. Convert it into something really precious.
Google bread recipes. Bake a little bread. Make your life a little better.
Re-examine your relationship with the food you eat. Like any worthwhile relationship it takes a little effort to really feel the benefit, but to labor the analogy, a little effort is well worth it. So try and get closer.
Get closer to what your food is. Chickens don’t naturally come in nugget-form.
You (or your kids) want nuggets? Buy a decent chicken. Take the breasts off and pop them in a bowl. Next take the legs off, pop them in a bag, put the bag in the freezer. Put the resulting carcass in a pot with some chopped up carrots and onions, cover with water and boil. Take the wings off those breasts. Toss them in a little flour and throw in a hot oven for 15 minutes.
Those are yours. As a treat. Shake a little Hot Sauce over them and crack open a Beer. You see… you are already being rewarded!
Cut the breast meat into nuggety pieces. Toss in the flour you had left over and then into a little beaten egg. Then into some breadcrumbs. Then bake off in that oven of yours that is still hot. 15 minutes later you’ll have your nuggets.
While the nuggets are in the oven, peel and boil some potatoes, make some mash. And the boiling bones? Reduce them, thicken with a little cornstarch and you have some gravy. All from scratch, all pretty tasty home-cooking and all without having to deal with fake colonels with dodgy beards. And best of all, you aren’t buying garbage.
Get closer to where your food is from…
Shop local. Reward the producers near to you who take pride in the goods they sell. It also cuts down on road-trips to the mega-mart. If you have a good local butcher, for the sake of all that is holy please use them. They’ll get to know you and reward you. They may occasionally give you some free meat, but they’ll always give you meat free from fecal coliform.
Walk around a Farmer’s Market. You’ll see fantastic produce that will inspire you. You’ll see vegetables fresh from the field with no more packaging than a little of the earth they grew in. You’ll probably meet the very people who grew or raised the food you’re going to buy and eat. You’ll start to actually enjoy your food shopping.
Buy local. (There is a difference) Think about what it takes in order for your food to get to the point of sale. There’s little credit to your vegetarianism if all your veggies are being flown halfway round the world to you. I believe the moral high-ground is mine if I buy a Lamb Chop from a farm a mile down the road while your guacamole is made from avocados who clock up more air-miles than Richard Branson. If you make the decision to buy local you can enjoy the changing seasons and you’ll end up with a much more varied diet instead of just eating stir-fried Chilean mange-tout all the time. Which is boring.
And while you are at it, stop creating so much garbage too. Of course you should re-cycle but go a step further. Or rather go a step smarter. Think about the amount of trash you are creating. Buy products that have minimal packaging or none at all. Re-use shopping bags. Stores will actually give you money for doing this!
Oh and while you enjoy your tasty burger, made by you from steak you ground in your own kitchen from beef reared by a committed artisan farmer on a low-intensity farm, give yourself a pat on the back with the other hand.
Allow yourself few pats. A well-deserved pat for your humane attitude toward animal husbandry, another for not contributing to the rampant obesity clogging
Americans love meat.
Actually I would go so far as to suggest that even more American than the proverbial Apple Pie would be a nice thick juicy steak.
However, I have to go one further and suggest that sadly it isn’t a lovely, marbled piece of well-aged Beef that most defines
It’s a Burger.
And what a burger it is. What a piece of work.
A huge amount of money, time and energy have gone into the business of producing burgers. The business of transforming a noble protein into garbage. The business of taking a simple, classic and satisfying dish and turning it into what amounts to a weapon of mass-destruction. Now this may sound like alarmist nonsense to some of you. However, consider some of the facts.
Whether you know it or not factory farming produces nearly all of the animal products (I hesitate to call a lot of it food) in the
Fact. It can be proved and it has been. It could even destroy the planet.
Factory-reared livestock no longer stroll and graze on rolling green pastures. They are intensively raised in sheds, cages or pens and fed (mostly) GM grain and soy. Cattle alone account for 70% of annual
Methane is another ‘greenhouse gas’, for those clueless throwbacks who don’t know (or Republicans in Congress, but I repeat myself) these are the emissions which hang around in the atmosphere soaking up the heat from the Sun and thereby causing Global Warming. CO2 is pretty bad for this but Methane is a monster! Methane is regarded as "20 to 30 times more effective at absorbing infrared radiation" than Carbon Dioxide. In total, an estimated 104 million tons of methane is released annually by cattle alone.
That could equate to the ecological nastiness of 24 YEARS of CO2 damage, caused in a single year, EVERY YEAR. For burgers. And not even tasty ones.
"The voluminous evidence now strongly suggests that unless we act boldly and quickly to deal with the underlying causes of global warming, our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes including more and stronger storms like Hurricane Katrina, in both the Atlantic and the Pacific."
(Al Gore – An inconvenient truth)
Wouldn’t a straightforward way to tackle one of the underlying sources be to reject factory-produced meat and meat products? This involves a simple decision to eat less meat, pay more for it, but to eat better as a result.
But these are long-term issues that might not kill anyone for ages…..
Forget the big, planet-size problems. What about the really tiny virus-sized ones?
In the scientific study, ‘The effect of commercial production and product formulation stresses on the heat resistance of Escherichia coli O157:H7 (NCTC 12900) in beef burgers’ the production method of processing, storing and cooking burgers was replicated under laboratory conditions.
This study found that commercial processing and product formulation have profound effects on the heat resistance of E. coli O157:H7 in beef burgers.
Put in simple terms it shows that the way burgers are made, stored and served commercially, actually makes this killer bug stronger.
So how bad can E. coli be? Well, in May 2000, 1,300 cases of gastroenteritis were reported and six people died as the result of E. coli contaminating drinking water in
Manure from dairy cows is also thought to have contributed to the disastrous Cryptosporidium contamination of
This should tell you something about commercial food processing. Not only are the products unpalatable, they are dangerous. The food that results from these processes is unappetizing, unhealthy and unnecessary. And as a completely unforeseen by-product they are ‘beefing-up’ E. coli (sorry, couldn’t resist)
So there you have it. Cheap beef kills people. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Sometimes not at all. Sometimes it’ll just make you wish you were dead. But it doesn’t have to be like that.
