Andrew:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t Obama already selected former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack as his Ag Secretary. To select someone who is a proponent of biotechnology and has, in the past, been beholden to industrial agriculture is a major blunder and very bad news for our food system. The problems we face today as far the healthfulness and nutritional quality of the food we consume are getting worse everyday, and the vast majority of the American people, including our elected officials, have very little understanding of the issues. These problems of increased levels of obesity, cardiovascular disease and type-2 diabetes have less to do with that bacon you mentioned and have more to do with how the pig is being raised. Reductionist thinking that breaks food down into various nutrients and vitamins disregards the idea that food is more than the some of its parts. It ignores the entire concept of synergy. When plant cultivars are bred for quantity and not for quality and for shelf life and not for flavor, we abandon the very qualities that make food healthful. In fact, we are practically creating poison. The nutritionists have spent decades telling us what foods to eat and what foods not to eat. The problem is that, for the most part, they don’t understand enough about how plant and animal physiology work in providing us with that nutrition to make sound recommendations. That’s how most of America ended up eating margarine for forty years before it was discovered that hydrogenation creates foods that contribute to cardiovascular disease. To compound that folly, nutritionists declared that we should abandon our consumption of saturated fats. Never mind that both Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids are critical to our health and well being. Further perpetuating this was the advent of industrial agriculture that removed ruminants from their natural diet and placed them on seed grains which succeeded in altering the physiology of those animals and consequently changing the chemical composition of the meat we consume. The result is a change from a 3:1 ratio of Omega-6’s to Omega-3’s in the average American to a ratio of 10:1 which is very unhealthy indeed. Plant cultivars are bred to remove Omega-3’s since they go rancid quickly and thus shorten shelf life. In addition, the introduction of vast amounts of processed foods which contain unnatural amounts of sugar mostly in the form of high fructose corn syrup may be the most egregious contributor to the obesity epidemic. A nerve cell can only absorb so much sugar. Once it has processed what it can into energy, the body transforms the excess sugar into triglycerides which are fat and which contribute to obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. In addition, plants grown in nutrient deficient soils, that is in soils that receive only NPK fertilizers to the exclusion of other vital nutrients, are lacking in nutritional value. This has become such a problem that a so called conventionally grown apple today has one third of the nutritional value of an apple that was grown in 1940. Add to that the fact that in processing foods much if not all of the fiber, along with many nutrients, has been removed and we have a recipe for ill health and long term nutritional deficiencies. The industrial solution has been to replace those nutrients by adding them back in to the processed product. Think Wonder Bread or enriched flour or enriched white rice. The problem, of course, is the ignoring of food’s basic synergy which is a difficult if not nearly impossible formula to understand and to replicate. The real solution is to eat whole foods in reasonable quantities that are mostly plants and that have been naturally raised in a way that predates the advent of the so called Green Revolution. Not only will your food be more nutritious but it will be more flavorful. If we can allow our Calvinist tendencies that suggest that the enjoyment of life’s basic treasures is some how sinful, wasteful or unproductive to take a back seat to our pleasure, we might find that that pleasure we receive from eating tasty and healthful food has an evolutionary purpose. That purpose is to ensure the survival of our species and the health and well being of our environment. Until our elected officials take the time to educate themselves about what real food is and until they begin to legislate in favor of the public health instead of in favor of industrial agriculture and biotechnology, then we will see no improvement in the health and well being of those whom they have pledged to serve.

You think restaurants are having a bad time now wait til they try to impose a "sin" tax on booze, movies, dining out, basically anyhing enjoyable in an effort to get out of our near trillion dollar defecit. I am planning on buying a new car though. Great time since there are a lot of deals on new cars and 0 percent interest

"When plant cultivars are bred for quantity and not for quality and for shelf life and not for flavor, we abandon the very qualities that make food healthful."

Unless you wish to see several billions of people on this planet starve, we will need to continue the emphasis on quantity and shelf life. I suggest that this argument is a complete non-starter. Lenny, as long as you and others continue to frame this issue as "Quantity vs. Quality", or "Local vs. Distance" (and all that silly "locavore" crap), or even "organic/natural vs chemical/bad" you will lose the debate. We simply will not be going back in time to live in some fantasy world that never existed (only in the minds of a bunch of romantics). Bio-tech is here to stay, as are chemical fertilizers and genetic manipulation. What might make for a good restaurant policy (as well as a tasty menu) would be a disaster if elevated to either a national or world level.

If you want to make a difference, and be a productive force for positive change in this world on this issue (as opposed to pissing into the wind and moaning about how bad things are and how no one really understands the issues...), you need to argue that we should figure out ways to harness this science and technology to achieve your goals--to have quantity AND quality. You need to focus on the GOALS--creating large supplies of healthy food. Processing is not in and of itself unhealthy, and it is simplistic and foolish of you to suggest so. We need to change the way food is processed--to process it in ways that make it healthy, that make it possible to feed the earth's population, that make it possible for more people to be fed more food and be more healthy with fewer and fewer resources. That enables economic growth to occur, which will in turn stabilize and reduce population pressures and increase educational levels and enable people to concentrate more on the type and quality of calories that they are consuming rather than trying to get the bare minimum they need to survive.

-PM

Lenny--

Have you ever heard of using paragraphs?

--Dee Wayne

In response to PM, I will attempt to do something that is not easy for me. I will try to be succinct. In fact, I’ll even use paragraph breaks so that my points are easier to understand.

PM, your argument is a valid one. Although, it would appear more thoughtful if you lost the insults and stuck to the facts. Just because you disagree with me doesn’t make my opinions “crap’ or “foolish” as you suggest.

First off, my post had nothing at all to do with my restaurant or its policies. I didn’t even mention Heartland. The fact that we choose not to participate in or contribute to a food system that we don’t support is not a marketing tool or a profit stimulator. It is simply a business philosophy that is consistent with our personal beliefs.

Second, despite what you claim there once was a food system that was not the current model that we have today and that I contend worked better at delivering healthful food to the world’s population. The current system that has been supported by the IMF among others encourages countries to no longer rely upon their own resources to feed their populations, but instead suggest that they will be better off relying upon imports and industrial technologies supplied almost exclusively by a handful of agribusiness behemoths. Consider that three decades ago Haiti was self-sufficient in rice production before it opened up its markets to cheap U.S. rice that undercut local production and caused a decline in their domestically produced supply to the point that Haitians are now reliant upon imports to survive. When prices escalate in such a system, nations with large populations of impoverished people are extremely vulnerable. Meanwhile, large companies such as Cargill and ADM control the means of production and are reaping windfall profits in the midst of an international food crisis by driving up the cost of said means by reducing their own production of the GMO seeds and chemical fertilizers needed to maintain the industrial agricultural system they have convinced the world to adopt. So not only is industrial agriculture partly responsible for the current food crisis but it is also exacerbating it as part of its profit driven policies. Iowa, which has some of the richest farmland in the world, exports 80% of its food primarily in the form of feed corn and soy beans grown in vast monocultures. If Iowa didn’t import the food it needs to feed itself, everyone there would starve. There is something fundamentally wrong with that.

Third, it just goes to reason that nutritionally deficient cultivars grown in nutrient deficient soil will in turn lack necessary nutrients. When animals consume these nutrient deficient plants, they do not receive what they need to be healthy. So livestock fed on a nutrient deficient diet cannot provide meat that is nutritionally complete. Consequently, those of us of at the end of this food chain are being deprived of healthful food. For the first time in human history, a large portion of our population is overfed and malnourished. That is a crime.

This goes to my fourth point which you not only seemed to dismiss but failed to even comprehend. We cannot rely on science and technology to repair the damage that science and technology have created. As I stated before, living things are more than just the sum of their parts. There exists a synergy in living things that is almost impossible to decipher. Consequently, reductionist thinking that attempts to break living things down to their individual parts and then reassemble them in some other form does not work. Simply returning the lacking nutrients and other vital elements of a food source to a scientifically altered imitation of itself does not restore it to its original make up. Insisting that we can somehow perfect nature, bend it to our will and subjugate it through science and technology is pure, misguided hubris.

This is what happens when food is highly processed. You claim that “processing [food] is not in and of itself unhealthy (sic).” I beg to differ. It is true that minimally processing food does not do enormous harm to the nutritional qualities of said food, but it does do some harm. That is the basis for those who subscribe to a diet of raw foods. Obviously, some foods need to be processed, that is cooked, in order to be transformed into a state that allows for nutrition to be better delivered to the one consuming it. You wouldn’t want to eat a raw chicken for instance. However, when I turn ripe tomatoes into purée I remove some vital nutrients and fiber when both the skin and the seeds are removed. So processing food does change it to a greater or lesser degree depending on the level of processing and the methods by which that processing is done. We seem to relish in the exercise of creating problems for ourselves through so called scientific advancement so that we can create solutions to these problems using the same reductionist science that was responsible for the problems in the first place.

Your last claim about how industrial agriculture is necessary to spur economic growth and population stabilization is a gross overstatement. If the $417,000 an hour that Cargill reaps in profits on the backs of the impoverished, the over 17,000 new processed foods that are introduced to our supermarkets each year at the expense of whole foods and the perverse state of a health care system that works in response to the health crises we have created by our own hands is the economic growth you recommend, then you can keep it. There are plenty of ways to encourage economic growth without putting our food supply in the hands of a few, without feeding poison to the world’s population and without destroying the environment in the process. I don’t pretend to know the solutions to the world food crisis, but I believe that more industrialization of our food supply is not the answer.

And that is ultimately the point I was I trying to make. All I ask is that federal, state and local governments legislate for a better, healthier world rather than against it. I don’t think it is too much to ask the FDA and the USDA to take the health and well being of the people and the environment into account before creating policies and standards instead of disregarding it in favor of agribusiness profits and imitation foods.

Okay, so I wasn't very succinct, but at least I used paragraph breaks which should make Dee Wayne very happy.

First off, this will be nowhere near as detailed and fact filled as Lenny. This is a more day to day look at what is going on. I got into this business very late, but I realize that this is a continuation of where I grew up. Winona = Fantasy, romantic, dark ages kind of place where people grow their own food, or buy from butcher shops, and produce co-ops.
I buy food from farms, but I also use a distribution company in town to get produce from other parts of the country. I do not try and just live in a hemp tent and piss in the wind crying at why people don’t eat this way. (I do ask the question a lot) What I find is that this is really about choices. We all have the choice to buy what we want. The problem I see is that over the last 30 years, it has become more and more difficult for people to buy food directly from farms and growers. I am not going to go into the reasons why I believe this to be true, everyone has a very debatable opinion. But, the reality is that more and more this country is being directed to buy food from Big Box operations. Just in the last couple of years have we seen the “Localvore” concept really come to life again. I say again, because this is just a continuation of what happened with the Victory garden movement back in the 40’s.

WE can be self sufficient; we can grow our own food. I don’t mean that we all dig a whole and eat what grows in it. But we can support a number of things that are happening in the metro that support “growth” in our food system. Farmers markets, restaurants, co-ops, buying clubs, CSA’s.

The point is that no one is right or wrong. As far as we know right now. The jury is still out. Some history on both sides of the fence will let you and you alone draw your conclusions. But, as long as I have the opportunity to run my business and make my choices, and speak my mind, I am good with anyone else not doing this my way. I would love to have the discussion with anyone about these ideas. In fact, much to my surprise I was asked last year to attend the chef’s conference at Cargill. REALLY, That as my response. I don’t know why I should have gone, other than to listen and have the conversation. It was very eye opening. There were a number of chef’s in the room, men and women that spent years in kitchens “making their bones”. Now they are trying to assist in feeding millions of people around the world. (Remember that Cargill is a family owned local company http://www.cargill.com/files/historysummary.pdf) There are a number of challenges ahead of that company, but one thing they are aware of is this romantic idea of buying locally.

As far as processing being bad or good, think about this. There is a distribution company in town, that will process a lot of food. But the list of food that they will cut and process is about 90 percent commodity food. They have access to local food and have just started to process local food. But, that is just the beginning. There is also processed food on the market. Do we really need a “food” that can’t be labeled food? It has to be labeled “food product” Really, is this how we want our nutrition? I really think that you are on the right track when it comes to processing. But why do we have to re-invent the wheel. It is called cooking from real food. Just put produce and raw product in people’s hands and let them process it in their kitchen. Oh, wait, that would involve people learning how to cook, not just put something in the microwave and heat it up.

So, some of us, including Lenny, are doing something every day to act on our goals. Act on ways of helping, we are trying to inform people of how we do this, and how we all can be more self sufficient. If you want to talk about how to make an economic impact, think about all the restaurants like ours that buy locally, think of all the jobs that are kept because we continue to live this “romantic” life. If we just went and bought our food from a large scale distributor that bought food on the commodity market, there would be more farms that would find it harder and harder to operate, more small towns that unemployment would increase, family’s having to sell farm land that had been in their possession for generations. There already is a craft that is being lost, that is buttering. There are fewer and fewer people that know how to do this. It has been taken over by the large scale shops and mechanical process. If that is the way of Quantity and Quality, I will side on the side of quality.

There are a number of other things that need to be addressed as well, but at this point, I will end this post and comment on the recycling work at restaurants in another post.

I know, I am going way back on this one, however, reading this article from a NATIONAL publication on the trend of sourcing local, made me remember this quote about how one or two little restaurants are not going to make a difference. I am going to go with the thoughts of " I think I can, I think I can, I think I can" Bottom line is that Lenny was ahead of the curve on buying local, and buying local for a large operation (Cue) and people thought he was nuts. Look if the national chains are doing it, it can't be all bad, right?

This was the quote I thought of in relation to buying locally:

Unless you wish to see several billions of people on this planet starve, we will need to continue the emphasis on quantity and shelf life. I suggest that this argument is a complete non-starter. Lenny, as long as you and others continue to frame this issue as "Quantity vs. Quality", or "Local vs. Distance" (and all that silly "locavore" crap), or even "organic/natural vs chemical/bad" you will lose the debate. We simply will not be going back in time to live in some fantasy world that never existed (only in the minds of a bunch of romantics). Bio-tech is here to stay, as are chemical fertilizers and genetic manipulation. What might make for a good restaurant policy (as well as a tasty menu) would be a disaster if elevated to either a national or world level.

Read the article.

http://www.chainleader.com/article/CA6639981.html

Keep up the good work fellow romantic-dreamland-hippies. If we build it they will come. Ok, I am done with the cliche's.

Scott