kitchenmage

Followup: freckled bananas, cheap!

Some days a rant is just a rant and some days it is actually a wee bit useful. I recently wrote about a vignette from a grocery store in which I saw an employee trashing perfectly good bananas - the ones that were just speckled enough to make bread from - and asked him about it. His response: nobody would buy those!

Fortunately, I also heard from a nice person from their corporate office and a store manager, who assured me that they would not be wasting perfectly edible food any more. Well, here's the proof, captured on my cell phone last time I was in the store. Cheap bananas, just right for baking.

Enjoy your banana bread!

The clueless feeding the blind

Everywhere you look there is a new horror about food consuming the mainstream media 24/7 showing up at a site like Grist, The Ethicurean or any of a thousand other excellent web sites that talk about food.My outrage for today is this article, Meat Wagon: Cow-feed misdeeds, in which Tom Philpott explores the use of distillers  grains, generated as waste when making ethanol from corn, as livestock feed.

Apparently distillers grains shares the bounty of problems it brings: it can increase the risk of e. coli 0157 (bad for us), cause sulfur toxicity (bad for the cows), and dramatically increase levels of phosphorous in the ground and water (bad for the environment). It's not a small problem either, the US ethanol industry created 10 million tons of distillers grains last year, with most (75-80%) being fed to cows. That number is expected to continue rising, especially since without selling the spent grain as feed, ethanol seems to be unprofitable. Even with all the subsidies.

vignette from a grocery store

Yesterday, while perusing the produce in a major grocery store chain in Western WA, I remembered we were about out of bananas. As I approached the almost empty display of bananas, I noticed an employee throwing hands of bananas into a trash box. Bananas that were fresher than the ones becoming banana bread fodder on my counter.

Each cluster of fruit hit the cardboard box with a muffled thump and I cringed in response. Thump, cringe. Thump, cringe. Thump, cringe.

Hallmark Meat: Not so total recall

...in which the Hallmark Meat 'recall' gets watered down. Even more.

I am really trying to wrap my brain around something and not having much luck. Read this and tell me what I am missing.

"If a processor or grinder has records demonstrating that products were produced using less than 100% of recalled Westland meat for the meat component, then there is no need...to retrieve that 'commingled' product,"  Beef Industry Presses For Reduced Recall - WSJ.com

NAIS Informational meeting

(grok'd from the Gray's River Grange site)

There's been a bit of information floating around lately about the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), a new program of the USDA.From the USDA website:   

“As part of its ongoing efforts to safeguard U.S. animal health, USDA initiated the implementation of the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) in 2004. NAIS is a cooperative State-Federal-industry partnership to standardize and expand animal identification programs and practices to all livestock species and poultry. NAIS is being developed through the integration of three components—premises identification, animal identification, and animal tracking. The long-term goal of the NAIS is to provide animal health officials with the capability to identify all livestock and premises that have had direct contact with a disease of concern within 48 hours after discovery.”

It sounds good on paper, but it raises some significant red flags in my mind, seeming to place a huge logistical and financial burden on small farmers. Farmgirl has been talking to me about it in mail recently and she pointed me at NONAIS, a portal for all things NAIS (Yes, they have a position, but you could tell that from the name, right?)

Carrie Kennedy, our local WSU Extension Agent, will be hosting a meeting at the Grays River Grange on May 9th at 7:30 pm to talk about NAIS and answer questions that you may have about how it will impact you. The grange hall is at the west end of the hamlet of Grays River on SR 4. Hope to see you there.