Digging into Cheese

by Slow Food USA director of development Kate Krauss

I have the greatest job. While some of my friends attend conventions in windowless hotel ballrooms, I get to go to the international Slow Food festival called “Cheese.” That’s right, it’s actually called Cheese. For 3 days, I sampled goat, sheep and cows-milk cheeses, saw demonstrations about different production techniques, and learned about the traditions of the craft—many of the cheesemakers I met have been working in the same meadows and traditions of generations of family members before them.

Cheese is held every other year in the small Italian town of Bra, where Slow Food got its start 20 years ago. Bra is one of those towns we Americans fantasize about when we think of visiting Italy. It’s surrounded by the rolling hills of the Italian Piedmont and full of charming old buildings and narrow cobblestone streets where local pastry shops sell gianduja, a delicious combination of chocolate and chopped hazelnuts, and where ubiquitous butcher shops offer Salsiccia di Bra, the town’s famous raw veal sausage.

Of course, Bra isn’t quite so sleepy during the Cheese festival, when over 150,000 people descend on the town to taste offerings from all over the world and to attend cheese-themed workshops and lectures. These are people who pack the room for a lecture referred to (with a straight face) as “The Joy of Natural Microflora.” That one was about the use of natural bacteria to turn milk into cheese, as opposed to the freeze-dried, packaged cultures commonly used in industrial cheesemaking. I loved every minute of it.

As a relative newcomer to Slow Food USA, I’ve watched as the organization has struggled with criticism for elitism, for promoting food that’s inaccessible to many people. We’ve worked hard to overcome that rap in the US by undertaking programs to help underserved communities and promote family farmers. And so while I was certainly excited to head to a cheese festival in Italy, I admit I went with a bit of a skeptical eye about the role of Slow Food. Wasn’t this just a fancy wine and cheese festival?

What I encountered was something altogether different. It felt like coming face to face with the soul of the slow food movement. Humble men and women coming together from places like Ethiopia, Argentina, and alpine France and Italy (not to mention Oregon, Wisconsin and California) to trade not only production techniques but also stories for how to preserve their way of life. These were people who gathered together in appreciation of good food, but their appreciation and passion didn’t end with taste. The Cheese attendees had a larger vision – to protect mountain villages and traditional pastoral practices; to preserve centuries-old products, customs and natural landscapes.

It was three days among my people. And the realization that my people are present in villages, languages, and traditions all over the world. What a great way to spend a weekend.

Anybody else out there attend Cheese? Or anything like it you’d like to share? You’re my people too, and I’d love to hear from you.

Books on Food: Art, Science

Part of what I love about “food books” as a genre is that the phrase is entirely non-specific, and covers everything from poetry to science, from art to history, from memoir to fiction.  Today, some more summer reading suggestions, both about our broken food system, but very different from each other.

First, Robyn O’Brien’s the Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It.  Her book is a good companion piece to “Food, Inc.” I think, exploring how food is making our kids sick, and how big business is profiting from that, all from a Mom’s first-hand perspective.  As she explains it, pretty plain and simple: “the recent deregulation of the American food system allowed chemicals and additives into the American food supply that have either been banned or labeled from foods around the world in order to enhance profitability for the food industry.” Click here to read an excellent interview with her on Civil Eats.

Next up, a book I had the pleasure of getting to hear read aloud live (ok, well, parts of it) by the author the other night.  Lisa Hamilton, a photographer and writer has crafted a beautiful triptych--three stories, three farmers, and how they are struggling to keep their way of farming alive in a world pushing towards the industrialization of damn near everything.  Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness is clearly the work of a seasoned photographer; it reads like a giant photograph, with depth of field, and texture, and life bubbling up off the page.

FOOD, Inc. Hits Theatres (and throws a punch at agribusiness, too)

There are a bunch of sustainable food documentaries that have been kicking around our circles for a few years now.  Some of them are very good--enlightening, celebratory, inspiring, damning.  But we all have probably wondered: who sees these but the proverbial choir?

Filmmaker Robert Kenner, along with producers Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, is making a go at hitting the big time,--i.e. lots of viewers, even ones outside the usual circles-- with his movie “Food, Inc.” The movie, which opens in NYC San Fran and LA on June 12th, got some primetime coverage in the New York Times this past weekend.  The Times article will help the word spread, but so can you.  Go see the movie, and while you’re at it, go tell some others to see the movie.

Participant Media is a unique production company in that they release their movies as part of a social action campaign.  Remember “An Inconvenient Truth?” This time around they are focusing on food issues of all shapes and sizes. The movie touches on many issues, including violations of farmworkers’ rights; aggressive litigiousness on the part of large agribusiness; food safety; the role of industrial organic; and some straight up weird stuff like an irradiated fat slurry that goes into most hamburger meat produced in this country. The main theme, as the title suggests, is what goes wrong when corporations control the food system. 

Along with the movie they have released a companion book with the subtitle: “How Industrial Food is Making us Sicker, Fatter and Poorer--And What You Can Do About It.” It includes pieces by many of the faces in the movie, like Eric Schlosser, Gary Hirshberg (of Stonyfield Farm Organic), and farmer Joel Salatin, as well as a few people and organizations who did not have face time in the movie, such as Heifer International and United Farm Workers.

In addition, they are focusing on improving school lunch and the Child Nutrition Act’s Reauthorization--you can check out their “interactive cafeteria” and sign their school lunch petitionhere.

With movies like this, it’s important to head out the first few days they’re open, so run out this weekend and see “FOOD, Inc.” if you haven’t already.

Meat and Morality

The title of Nicolette Hahn Niman’s compelling new book, Righteous Porkchop, is honest, and indicates one of the book’s strengths—its exploration of the moral issues behind our broken food system.  As a vegetarian rancher she is uniquely poised to be even more righteous than most.  Not only has she abstained from eating meat herself since young adulthood, she spends her days sustainably raising cattle for others to eat.  Who can top that?

Of course, this wasn’t always the case. Not even 10 years ago she was a young single gal in the city, recruited by Bobby Kennedy, Jr. to head up the Waterkeeper Alliance’s new industrial hog campaign.  With a background as a lawyer, she set out to take industrial hog farms (primarily in North Carolina) to task via the legal system for their gross environmental transgressions.  She worked crushing hours, giving up her healthy lifestyle and her social life.  But along the way, she won several important legal battles and put the issue of industrial hog farming on the map.  In addition, in a story line you just can’t make up, she met and fell in love with Bill Niman, an older-than-her sustainable cattle rancher and entrepeneur, and her life was changed forever.  P.S. he calls her “porkchop.”

In addition, her work with Waterkeeper led her inside the belly of the beast—or inside the poop lagoons of the beasts, anyway--and the book follows her journey.  The reader makes discoveries alongside her, experiencing her righteous indignation and disbelief upon seeing those farms, as well as her heartbreak over the treatment of the animals she meets.  As she explains, “the assembly lines of industrial systems function well for the mass production of inanimate objects.  But they are complete failures at respecting the individuality, instincts, and needs of living creatures.”

More after the jump

Yes We Can: Change Our Broken Food System

by Slow Food USA

On this day after the election, the staff of Slow Food USA took a moment to talk about how we can build on the momentum of Barack Obama’s historic Presidential win. While we’re hopeful that our new President and all the men and women elected in races across the nation yesterday will put the FOOD back into food policy, we understand that we can’t assume anything. We know that to help make change in our broken food system, much of the work must come from the ground up while we keep our leaders’ feet to the fire. 

Journalist Michael Pollan, a Slow Food Advisory Board member, recently wrote a great letter challenging the next President to improve our nation’s food policy. In an October 23 article in Time Magazine, President Elect Obama responded, saying that our current industrialized food system is “creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs.”

We need to work with the incoming administration to create new green collar jobs; to increase the availability of fresh food in underserved communities and urban food deserts; to fight for small farmers and food producers who supply the thousands of farmers’ markets and CSAs across the country; and to bring healthy food and educational gardens into the public school system so that our children can grow up healthy and understand their connection to the land and the food they eat.

Make a start by signing on and adding your comments to the Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture and the new Call to Action for food system reform organized by the US Working Group on the Food Crisis.

We have a long road ahead. Together, we must ensure that good, clean and fair food is accessible to all Americans. Through our collective voice and hard work around the country, a new food system is possible.

A Taste of the Taste Workshops at Slow Food Nation

Many of us think of wine and cheese as two great tastes that go great together (like pizza and beer, milk and cookies).  At Saturday night’s Taste Workshop celebrating American Raw Milk Cheeses, we were treated to something that was new for many of us—cheese with beer.  Cheese expert (and Slow Food USA Board Member) Jeff Roberts and cheese expert Laura Werlin led us through the tasting of 7 cheeses and 6 craft ales.

The cheeses and their makers hailed from Alabama, Indiana, Oregon, Wisconsin, Vermont, and California; several of the producers were in the room with us and shared their processes, working with their sheep, Guernsey cows, Nubian dwarf goats etc. and crafting and shepherding (as it were) that milk into beautiful artisan cheeses.  Ever seen a cheese that’s been rubbed with paprika?  Hillis Peak Cheese from Pholia Farm Creamery was a first for me and I fell in love with its spicy, rich and creamy flavor.  (n.b. it goes really well with Dogfish’s Midas Touch Golden Elixir).

Most surprising were the ways in which the cheeses changed in combination with the beer, and vice versa. 6 pieces of fantastic farmstead cheese + 7 diverse and delicious craft ales meant several interesting and surprising flavor combinations.

If you are interested in reading more about American Raw Milk cheeses, check out Jeff’s Book The Atlas of American Artisan Cheese, and Laura’s book Cheese Essentials.

The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized

by Slow Food USA staffer Makalé Faber Cullen

This month's Harper's magazine features an excellent article by Nathanael Johnson who takes on the North American black market in raw milk and it's odd bedfellow… high tech "bio-active" dairy.

The defense of the fresh stuff (aka "green top milk") has been a steady, under-the-radar activity and a 20-year Slow Food campaign since the US Food and Drug Administration banned interstate sales of unpasteurized milk in the 1980s. Most of us, in fact, have been raised to believe pasteurization is a good thing. It protects us from salmonella and E-coli poisoning. It prolongs the shelf life of dairy products, which means more people in more places have access to them.

But as Johnson explains, it's not the fresh milk from a Holstein grazing on grass that's producing health threats. It's the other way around. To put it simply, grass-grazing cows eat in a way that allows them to produce milk containing enzymes that are often beneficial to us humans. "Dirty milk," an insider's phrase, comes from modern dairies which, in their clamor for high volume and high profit, use pasteurization as license to be unsanitary, to feed inappropriate food to cattle and engage in other unsavory activities. Ever colorful, Johnson says, "After a century of pasteurization, modern dairies, to put it bluntly, are covered in shit. Most have a viscous lagoon full of fit. Cows lie in it." And with that, Johnson navigates us through the public health thicket of industrial milk production and the volatility of raw milk markets, with regular tours through the anatomy of cattle and how we try to alter it.

The issue is far, far more complex than I've described above and Johnson remains respectably objective. Please read the article. Johnson is an entertaining writer. His piece is reference quality and yet doesn't compromise a bit on good storytelling.

I support the idea of people's right to sell and buy raw milk and raw milk products—often of finer quality since the proteins and sugars haven't been altered by heat. To reference Gil Scott Heron's potent and poignant 1971 release, The Revolution will not be Televised is to commit to taking the investigation and the story a bit further. Slow Food USA's Raw Milk Cheese Producers Association is trying to do just that –change by the producer for the producer.

While thinking about Gil Scott and the fight for justice, I'm reminded of a February post about the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. debacle. Industrial food workers, whether they're in dairies or meat packing plants deserve humane treatment as much as animals do. What's the story on dairy workers forced to put in 19-hour days in these "lagoons?"

Your Ice cream Fix is in Jeopardy

As I and many others have pointed out, the loss of as much as 70-80% of the US honeybee population to Colony Collapse Disorder is a far greater concern than missing that spot of honey in your lavender soy chai.

Premium ice cream maker Haagen-Dazs has joined in to sound the alarm about CCD and the impact it could have on our food supply

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Haagen-Dazs is warning that a creature as small as a honeybee could become a big problem for the premium ice cream maker's business.

At issue is the disappearing bee colonies in the United States, a situation that continue to mystify scientists and frighten foodmakers.

That's because, according to Haagen-Dazs, one-third of the U.S. food supply - including a variety of fruits, vegetables and even nuts - depends on pollination from bees.

Haagen-Dazs, which is owned by Nestle, said bees are actually responsible for 40% of its 60 flavors - such as strawberry, toasted pecan and banana split.

Now as we all know Nestle is not exactly world renowned for its feats of environmental heroics, but when major corporations who are not "on our side" - as it were - begin to notice what environmentalists have been saying and sometimes shouting about for a long time, it means that our message is finally getting through.

Perhaps the Chicken Little accusations will subside now that the corporate apologists wives' supply of white chocolate raspberry truffle could be interrupted

Dairy Updates

Milk can't seem to stay out of the news these past few weeks. The big stories?

Starbucks, after recently agreeing to use only rbGH-free milk, has discontinued offering organic milk. Apparently once there was no more rbGH in the milk, the primary reason for their customers to order organic had been eliminated.

Pennsylvania citizens succeeded in securing that local milk labels can identify the product as "hormone free." After Pennsylvania's October ban on letting consumers know what's what in their milk, the public spoke up. The governor ultimately had this to say: "The public has a right to complete information about how the milk they buy is produced." And based on Starbucks' feedback from customers (rbGH is gross), seems like a good idea.

California raw milk producers are upset about legislation being pushed through that puts strict — and unnecessary, they say– limits on the number of coliform per milleliter in raw milk. Likely an attempt on the part of the legislature, some think, to work towards outlawing raw milk.

Milk, and seltzer, and knives, oh my!

An article in the business section of the NY Times earlier this week, about the revival of home milk delivery, got us thinking about the lost art of door-to-door guys. Interesting to note that in one of the photographs for the article, you can see that the milk is in plastic jugs, not the old fashioned (and sometimes quite beautiful) glass ones. A great example of old meets new–the revival of the old tradition, but with the accessories of new, disposable, fast life. One of the smart things about milk delivery is the recycling of the glass bottles, no?

Seltzer delivery services, on the other hand, nearly extinct, are still done in the old glass bottles with the silver nozzles. Did some searching around to see if anyone is still doing this and found two notable examples: the Seltzer Sisters in the Bay Area, and Walter Backerman, the seltzer man, of the New York Beverage Co. He is featured in this interesting piece from NPR on New York's vanishing professions.

And what about the knife sharpening guys? Who used to travel around on a truck? We've seen one here in New York City, parked around town now and then. Do you have knife sharpening guys where you live? Seltzer delivery? Glass milk bottle delivery? Let us know…