What’s so good about that yogurt?

Perusing the refrigerator a while back, I noticed Lucy had bought a large container of Nancy’s low-fat “plain” yogurt from Springfield Creamery in Eugene, Oregon.

Why Nancy’s,” I asked her.

“Because,” she replied, “Yami ‘plain’ has gelatin (albeit kosher) in its ingredient list, while Nancy’s does not.”

She didn’t mention any other brands. But considering all of the different labels of yogurt out there, apparently Lucy has weaned herself from the nationally-advertised brands and adopted a semi-niche market brand like Nancy’s. 

A quick visit to the grocery store proved Lucy correct. I guess “kosher” gelatin must be derived from horse or bovine hooves instead of the usual pork ones. And mouth feel must be the corporate justification.

Nancy’s “certified” organic (see October 2009, Backpedaling) plain yogurt contains milk, non-fat milk powder, and a host of bacteria that makes yogurt just what it is, such as L. acidpohilus, S. thermophilus, L. bulgaricus, L. casei, L. rhamnosus, and B. bifidum cultures. And Nancy’s spells its ingredients — and the lack of certain ones — out for you on its label. It’s another reason I love Oregon. 

Okay, I had a problem with the non-fat milk powder, but my Registered Dietitian and yogurt-making mother told me that the powder is an essential ingredient. But how did those original yogurt makers 4,000 years ago de-fat and powder their milk? 

Yami organic, while also a Northwest product, contains pectin, inulin, and agar. Why? Mouth feel, I again suspect. At least, one doesn’t need a chemistry lab to create pectin, inulin, and agar; they’re all natural products. And Yami, doesn’t advertise itself as “certified” organic, or at least I can’t find that it does, and I remain suspicious. 

Continuing down the dairy isle, I come upon mega-corporate Dannon “all natural” plain yogurt. Not bad! Ingredients mirror Nancy’s, although not organic. Congratulations, Dannon! Start feeding those cows some decent grass instead of all that pesticide-laden corn, and you may have a new customer in me. At least for your plain yogurt! 

Then I get to the “individual” serving yogurt section of the dairy case, and this is where it gets scary. There’s Yoplait strawberry flavor; the kind I see consumed daily as a snack by so many people at where I work my day job. Obviously, they don’t read the ingredients list, are too afraid to, or just don’t damned care. Understand, the following ingredients are listed in order of quantity or percentage; parentheticals are mine. Yoplait’s strawberry contains low fat milk, sugar, modified corn starch (sugar — remember high school chemistry), high fructose corn syrup (again, sugar — remember high school chemistry), nonfat milk, kosher gelatin (again, think Kentucky Derby), citric acid, tricalcium phosphate, natural flavor, pectin, colored with carmine (some type of red pigment), and vitamins A&D. 

The ingredient list does not include any of the bacteria that defines yogurt. What?! Oh, there they are, listed on the side of the label away from the FDA-mandated ingredient list. I assume Yoplait doesn’t want to scare its yogurt snackers with foreign-sounding Greek and Latin ingredients. And aren’t we conditioned to regard bacteria as things to avoid anyway?    

A visit to my local “natural” foods market finds better products as far as ingredients go, but brands such as Brown Cow, Stonyfield, and Whole Food’s 365 Organic still toss in ingredients such as tapioca starch, beet juice concentrate, and pectin. Of course, there’s also my nemesis Horizon brand yogurt which I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole (see Backpedaling, September, 2009). 

What the hell, can we no longer eat yogurt unexpurgated, the way it was meant to be eaten? No, we apparently need that “mouth feel.” 

And I might be naive; Nancy’s may be a corporate conglomerate today, doing its best to convince us it’s a small dairy operation with contented cows happy to produce the yogurt we consume. Its website, www.nancysyogurt.com, says I’m wrong, and I hope I am, but if not, then perhaps we ought to cook our own yogurt. Or at least, buy a decent plain yogurt and dollop a tablespoon of a good organic preserve into it for sweetener if we’re so inclined. 

My mother used to make her own back in the 1960s when I was a small child. She got her inspiration from a morning exercise program on television where the host and hostess always plugged Yami. Today, however, mom says it’s too difficult to make one’s own, even with an “official” yogurt cooker. 

“It doesn’t solidify, she says, “I think it’s what they’re doing to the [yogurt] culture.” 

Mom says one needs to buy a pure yogurt enzyme culture to make a good batch, but even she, living on the Southern California coast, hasn’t been able to find one.

How’s That Egg for Breakfast?

A reader of Backpedaling writes, “Diane Rehm of National Public Radio had a great show today. A new egg rule is going into effect to guard against salmonella by making the chicken folks test for it and make sure new hens coming into the flock are not carriers. My question for the Backpedaler is what does that do to our eggs? Will the egg rule effect free range chickens? Do free range chickens have less incidents of salmonella? Are commercial eggs full of things that nullify the benefits of eating the egg? Should we by buying our eggs from free range only?  Does it really matter?” 

Thank you! Now that those of us who care have more or less straightened out our choices for dairy products — provided we’re diligent — we can turn our attention to poultry and eggs, another commercially mass-farmed food. Rehm’s program cited a United Press International (UPI) report from July 7, 2009 about U.S. Food and Drug Administration “new egg safety rules aimed at preventing an annual average of 79,000 cases of Salmonella poisoning.“ 

The FDA’s new rules include preventative measures (whatever they are; UPI declined to elaborate) during “production” of shell eggs and refrigeration during storage and transportation. And the agency expects its measures to reduce Salmonella infections from eggs by nearly 60 percent. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten Salmonella poisoning from eggs, although there was one time when a very expensive seafood restaurant’s menu had me vomiting for 24 hours probably because some assistant chef filleted the halibut on the same board as the salad was chopped. Still, nearly 60 percent is a start.

 What I found most shocking in UPI’s story about the FDA rule was, “The rules require producers with at least 3,000, but fewer than 50,000, laying hens to comply within 36 months after the rules’ publication in the Federal Register. Producers with 50,000 or more laying hens must be in compliance within 12 months after publication.”

 50,000! Obviously, we’re not eating Farmer Jones’s eggs layed by contented chickens leisurely plucking bugs and grain in some barnyard in the next county.

 Let’s see, in my refrigerator I have one dozen Eggland’s Best “Cage Free” Grade AA large brown eggs, produced from “vegetarian fed hens.” The label on the back of the carton says “produced and distributed under license from Egglands Best, Inc., packed by Morning Star Farms, Inc. . . .“

Then, inside the carton, is a glowing testimonial about what great eggs I’ve just bought. Reading between the lines, I see Eggland doesn’t tell me much nor does Morning Star, especially about the term “cage free.”

 “Cage free” is an unregulated label, you see!

 According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “this label on poultry products has virtually no relevance to animal welfare. The label can be helpful to consumers when it is placed on egg cartons, as most conventionally raised laying hens are kept in cages; however, the label does not guarantee that the bird had access to the outdoors. In addition, this term is not regulated by USDA, and the label does not require third-party certification.”

 Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma has a great couple of paragraphs on “cage-free.” For example, “A grassy yard may be fifteen feet wide, not nearly big enough to accommodate all twenty thousand birds inside [the chicken coop] should the group ever decide to take the air en masse. Which truth be told, is the last thing the farm managers want to see happen. . . The chickens apparently see no reason to venture out into what must seem to them an unfamiliar and terrifying world.”

 The Cornucopia Institute concurs with an article published Oct. 15, 2009, “Current organic standards lack strong language to address animal welfare on farms; as a result, factory farms are producing certified organic meat, eggs and milk. Some poultry operations, for example, house tens of thousands of chickens in buildings with tiny concrete porches — so small that they often accommodate less than 1% of the building’s chickens, and often accessible by one single small door in the corner of the house — and that supposedly counts as legally required “access to the outdoors.”

 I don’t mean to pick on Eggland; it may be a good company. But after reading The Cornucopia Institute’s milk ratings (see “How Difficult Is It?,” Backpedaling, Sept. 4, 2009) I remain suspicious.

 Do I have an alternative? Not really! I can tell you to raise your own hens, but I can’t do that myself. My small inner-city backyard, and my two sporting dogs and one bird-hungry cat limit my options. I’m stuck with buying at the local market.

 But . . . years ago, my former father-in-law raised his own organic hens. The yolks were bright orange from the carotene in the hens’ diets. And the eggs’ Haugh unit, a measurement of the height of the egg albumen, was extraordinary. Hard boiling those eggs, one couldn’t peel them because most of the egg white would adhere to the shell. My former mother-in-law had to store fresh eggs at least a month before Easter so egg-hunting children could peal them properly.

 That’s what you may be eating, at least month-old “fresh” eggs, and from a factory farm of possibly 50,000 factory-cloistered hens. Yum!

Organic vs. “Certified Organic”

Are you eating or using organic products, or are you eating or using certified organic products? “What’s the difference?” you may ask. Do you know the difference?

I grow tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, lettuce, zucchini, several kinds of peppers, peaches, and a number of herbs in my garden without using pesticides or commercial fertilizers. Compost and nitrogen-bearing rain provide my fertilizer. Ladybugs and praying mantises are my pesticides, plus two of my fingers keep snails at bay. My motley lot of fruits and vegetables aren’t enough to sell at market, but if they were, I could only advertise them as organic. And as the buyer, you’d have to trust my designation. I’m honest; am I not? But define organic. Caveat emptor! 

Certified organic, on the other hand, brings government into the picture — bureaucracy that tends to spell mistrust in many states west of the Mississippi, but stay with me here.

 The National Organic Standards Board regulates the term organic. It defined organic in 1995 as “Organic agriculture is an ecological production management system that promotes and enhances biodiversity, biological cycles and soil biological activity. It is based on minimal use of off-farm inputs and on management practices that restore, maintain and enhance ecological harmony.” 

Using this definition of organic, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has developed a system of standards for use in the United States that defines four levels of organic labeling. 

First of all, there’s 100% Organic. These products must contain 100% organically-produced ingredients, and must include a seal with the phrase “certified organic by [a certifying agent]“ or something similar. “Also, if there is more than one ingredient in the product, there must be a full ingredient list on the label, as well as information to let the consumer know where it was packaged. This is certainly the most stringent of the organic certification standards. Products with this label are allowed to use the USDA Organic seal.”* In addition, certified organic for produce means that fields have to be fertilized organic for three years.*

 Then, there is the Organic label. This term on a label requires that the product contains at least 95% organically-produced ingredients, and the product cannot contain any added sulfites. “There must be an ingredient list in which organic ingredients are labeled as organic. The label must also contain the information about the certifying agent and packaging location mentioned in the above standard.”* Products with this label are also allowed to use the USDA Organic seal.

Coming in as the show, or third-place, standard is Made With/Contains Organic Ingredients. These products must contain “at least 70% organically-produced ingredients and may not contain any added sulfites (excluding the addition of sulfur dioxide to wines). This standard has the same ingredient list, certifying agent, and packaging location disclosure requirements as the first two standards. Products with this label cannot use the USDA Organic seal.”*

Finally, running out of the money is Product has some organic ingredients. “These products may contain less than 70% organically-produced ingredients. The label may display the percentage of organic ingredients and it must identify the organic ingredients in the mandatory ingredient list, however these products may not use the term organic in any other way on the label, and they cannot display any certifying agent information, including the certifier’s seal. They also cannot display the USDA organic seal.”*

Government regulation has made organic choices simpler, but it’s still up to us read the labels, discern the differences, and determine if there is any tooth to the regulatory bite.

* Thanks to www.sustainablescoop.com and to Eleonore Johnson, RD for assistance in producing this edition of “Backpedaling.”

How Difficult Is It?

 Several days ago, a coupon arrived with my local newspaper offering to save me $1.00 off of the price of one-gallon or two-half-gallons of iced tea. “Celebrate with the natural choice,” the ad trumpeted, “no preservatives and no high-fructose corn syrup.” Three flavors were featured: “Natural Green Tea with Ginseng and Honey,” “Sweetened Iced Tea with Lemon Flavor,” and “Diet Iced Tea with Lemon Flavor (0 calories).” 

In small print, the ad ended with “Find [it] in the refrigerated section.” You mean to tell me, major national iced tea brand, that your product does not have a never-ending shelf life like the colas and other sodas in our grocery stores? I was astonished. 

Removing my progressive bifocals and pressing my nose against the ad to read the miniscule print on the coupon, I discovered that this iced tea brand was a subsidiary of Dean Foods, located in Dallas, TX. “Our products are only a refrigerator door away — delicious healthy foods and beverages for the entire family,” it boasts. Dean Foods owns a lot of products. 

Having lived west of the North American Continental Divide almost my entire life, I’m most familiar with Dean Foods brands Alta Dena, Horizon, and Land O’Lakes, all dairy-based products. Growing up in Southern California, my mother, one of the great anachronisms of nutrition in the 1960‘s and 1970’s, used to forcibly pump Alta Dena raw (unpasteurized) milk, along with copious amounts of some vile substance called “protein powder” down my throat. Every now and then Alta Dena would get busted by what I then assumed were dairy inspectors in cahoots with the major milk brands, but after a couple of weeks and freshly cleansed, Alta Dena labels would return to grocery stores. 

Without Alta Dena in my local markets, I began to buy Horizon when the price wasn’t prohibitive — Lucy likes it. Then along comes MaryJane Butters, editor of MaryJanesFarm magazine, who pointed me to organic dairy products ratings at www.cornucopia.org/dairysurvey/index.html. Dean Foods Horizon brand and my beloved Alta Dena both rated a big fat zero, meaning Dean’s is factory-farmed milk, and it and other zero-star producers refused to participate in the ratings survey. Granted the five-star dairies were small and almost exclusively located in the Northeast and Midwest, but even some large corporate dairies such as Organic Choice and Whole Foods’ 365 Organic brand were given a four-star Excellent rating. Much as I also dislike Whole Foods’ corporate culture, I’ll be eschewing Horizon from now on in favor of 365 Organic. 

And I have a problem with Dean’s iced tea. Why buy a pre-made gallon, when it’s almost too easy to make one’s own? Because it’s not easy enough? Come on, you buy the sun tea jar and the tea, fill the jar with water, and let the tea steep outside for four or five hours. What’s so difficult about that? Well, along comes snopes.com and dashes your expectations, www.snopes.com/food/prepare/suntea.asp . Okay, you just have to be careful, be sanitary, and follow proper refrigeration practices. It’s much easier than making your own beer, another task that requires care and sanitation. I don’t drink much iced tea, preferring to somewhat poison myself each summer with a particular diet soft drink instead, but writing this story had me place a sun tea jar and tea on this week’s grocery list. 

Reading that ad again. I think I get Dean’s iced tea’s appeal. First, today’s caffeinated children want that extra-sweet taste with the over-powering lemon flavor to mask the natural taste of the tea. Mom, proud that she’s not serving her children soft drinks,  just can’t get that bottled iced tea formula right for the kids, and it’s easier for her to buy the “good” stuff pre-made by the gallon. Second, mom, a size seven in college and still a size seven now that size sevens are what used to be size elevens, can guzzle her “diet” iced tea without spending irreplaceable kitchen time making it. Time equates to dollars, doesn’t it mom? Finally, anyone who drinks tea with ginseng and honey ought to be making their own, but according to Dean Foods, they don’t. I don’t get it.  

I drink iced tea black, like coffee, with no sugar, cream, or lemon. That’s how I was raised. Bottled iced tea gives me an unpleasant rush and a winced pucker. I’m not suggesting you do likewise, just simplify your iced tea regimen. Make your own.  

Like iced tea in a plastic container, if it comes in a can, it must be difficult to make yourself, right? I used to think that about one of my favorite fast foods, canned refried beans, until I read the label on a can one day. It was the 23% recommended daily allowance (RDA) sodium percentage per small serving. That’s 23% per serving (4½ oz.), not per can! That and the suspicious “vegetarian refried beans” label made me research alternatives. 

Salt used to be the spice of kings so many centuries ago — as gout was the disease of kings — but today, salt is the commoner’s spice. It has become such a staple of our diet, and thus accounts for so many cases of hypertension that the RDA value is almost ludicrous to so many, considering how much salt the nutritionally uncaring ingest. Ask a Cardiologist or a Registered Dietitian about the amount of salt you intake, if you dare. 

Years ago, I bought a Mexican cuisine cookbook, Mexican Cookery, by Barbara Hansen, Fisher Publishing, 1980, that taught me how to cook refried beans the way I wanted to; the amount of salt I added — and why salt is added in the first place — was at my own discretion. I quickly learned about delicious variances such as black beans instead of the standard pinto beans, and how minimal amounts of salt can still enhance the beans’ flavor. Hansen also solved the “vegetarian” mystery for me since your standard canned refried beans usually contain lard. Vegetarian beans use corn, canola, etc. oils. And your own home-cooked beans use whatever oils you choose; not what the corporate giants dictate to you. Understand there’s nothing wrong with lard if you toil long hours in a field or a construction site. Desk jockeys, plus those equestrians and casual bicyclists who get their exercise with an hour on a horse or a bicycle a few times each week, should take note. 

Update for You Sprouters: 

In the May, 2009 premier issue of Backpedaling, I groused at length about the difficulty of finding a perforated lid for a seed sprouting jar. If you remember, I made my own with an electric drill. Then, the other day at a neighborhood farmers’ market, I found a vendor who actually sold slotted sprouting lids. You can order them for $3.50 at www.kgardener.com. If you happen to stumble upon her at your local farmers’ market, she’ll sell you one for $3, and her daikon seeds are delicious when sprouted. The proprietor is a sprouting aficionado and has her lids custom made. They fit a wide-mouth Mason jar.

Writers Have It Easy Compared to Farmers

EatingWell magazine’s backpage story of its August 2009 issue, “Living Off The Land,” by Ben Hewitt, placidly describes the idyllic self-subsistent life of a farm family in northern Vermont. Hewitt has almost gotten away from it all, relying on barter with neighbors to supplement what he doesn’t grow. Almost, because he does admit to spending no more than $30 a week for groceries for his family of four, which includes two growing boys.

His boys are home-schooled. He built his home himself, paying for plumbing and sheetrock over the years as budget allowed. Today, his 40-acre farm includes cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens for milk, eggs, and meat. Three large gardens provide just about all of the vegetables I myself, would grow, although Hewitt makes no mention of brussels sprouts. He makes his own yogurt — more in next month’s Backpedaling — and most of his maple syrup.

Farming is hard work, yet Hewitt revels in the ache of his shoulders after a day of splitting firewood, the warm smell of cows as he milks them, and the sunny afternoons tending his gardens. His is a lifestyle worthy of praise, and one that brought pangs of jealousy to me upon first read. But one also has to read between the lines.

When asked what he does, although wanting to tell people that he’s a farmer, he instead says he’s a writer because people have a difficult time relating to what a subsistence farmer actually does. I guess writing is where he gets that $30 a week grocery money, and writers, unless they’re hands-on beat reporters or editors of a local newspaper needn’t sit in a city office each day pounding a keyboard. I think of Diane Keaton in that movie a few years ago, “Something’s Gotta Give,” who sat in her tony Hamptons beach house writing best-selling novels. Hewitt writes, I suspect, in his Vermont farmhouse and ships his work electronically to his editors.

That’s the dichotomy between living Hewitt’s lifestyle, and the urban career requirements too many of the rest of us have. I’ve mentioned before that I work with a large mainframe computer. Many computer programmers telecommute for months at a time, and could without too much difficulty transition to Hewitt’s farm life over time. But my job also requires a degree of computer hardware interaction so I have to be able to physically get my hands on that mainframe. I’ll bet not too many mainframes live in rural areas, preferring instead large cities like New York and Los Angeles. My wife Lucy works for a large inner-city law firm, and her practice requires a tremendous amount of paper-shuffling, legal pleading preparation, and hard-copy research. She has to live near the courthouse.

I think of the large number of factory workers and other time clock punchers who, while they don’t have to live near the plant or office, at least better punch in by 8 a.m. if they want to keep their jobs. That’s not easy to do if you live 50 miles away out in the country. Or of the secretary or payroll clerk with two children and a sporadic, if at all, child support check from her ex-husband, who desperately wants to feed her children fresh milk and organic vegetables, yet the thought of buying a tranquil farm is at best only a dream at 2 a.m.

Sure, the rest of us can easily find another job, you might say. I’m trying, but then I certainly don’t expect you to pay to read this or one of my other two blogs. I admire Hewitt for what he’s been able to do, but I’m also quite jealous.

I’ve only lived on a farm for a couple weeks during transitions between cities. Farmers make interesting use of things we city-slickers tend to throw away. For example, we take our used motor oil to the local auto parts store for disposal, if we even bother to change our cars’ oil at all. I’d bet most of us let FastAssLube™ deal with it when we drive in for a 15-minute oil change special. A farmer, on the other hand, saves crankcase oil and uses it to coat plowshares and other implements for weather protection when harvest is over and winter begins to set in.

Like that lowly, used crankcase oil, many common household items no longer have much place in a city lifestyle, and are becoming more difficult to find in local supermarkets. Food-grade mineral oil is one. I know what you’re thinking. I don’t ingest mineral oil myself and I have no argument against modern pharmaceuticals outside of their incessant direct market advertising. But Lucy and I use mineral oil to coat and protect our large bamboo cutting board, a bamboo mixing spoon, and a superb R.H. Forschner chef’s knife’s wooden handle.

I’d exhausted my supply of mineral oil the other day, and drove to the large supermarket downtown to buy some more. I was unable to find any and asked a clerk — rather, an “associate” — for help. With a shrug, she showed me a box of gimmicky oil-soaked disposable paper “towelettes.”

“No, I just need a bottle of the stuff,” I countered. I wanted only mineral oil for my valuable wood utensils, not whatever additives those disposables included. Her eyes almost crossed — difficult customer here, she probably thought — and apologizing, she said the store did not carry mineral oil.

I returned to my small eclectic neighborhood grocery store where dreadlocks and batik dresses are not uncommon, and found a bottle of generic brand mineral oil. I should have known better. My bamboo and Forschner are happy, and I’ll bet the local grocer where Ben Hewitt spends his weekly $30 dollars also carries mineral oil.

Shop Your Yard

Why not? We shop at grocers at least weekly, often daily for perishable necessities. Or we shop at restaurants, fast food places, convenience stores, etc. But how many of us shop in our own yards? We’re not ruminants so we can’t digest our lawns. So what else is there to buy in our yards? Unfortunately, if you favor the Augusta National type of yard with lush fairways and tightly cropped greens, you won’t find much, if at all, of an inventory of edibles.

However, according to many of the popular media, more of us are growing fruits and vegetables in our yards now than since before the 1940s when J.I. Rodale began publishing
Organic Gardening and Farming. I remember reading Rodale’s magazines in the 1970s, and considered him an offbeat, slightly kooky, messianic type whose divine duty was to throw the money changers, or rather, the machine agriculturists, out of the food temple. Today, Rodale’s then somewhat crackpot ideas have become sexy.

Growing up in Southern California, my wife Lucy and I took Valencia orange trees for granted in our yards. They didn’t call the area Orange County because of the bright sunsets. Many Orange County subdivisions were built upon plowed over orange groves, and for those of us living in the northern part of the county, who didn’t have at least one tree in their yard? Come harvest time, overripe oranges were always scattered about the ground because no one could eat all of the fruit that came off of a tree, and well, they were just oranges, they were plentiful, and they were everywhere you looked. One of my chores as a child was to pick up the moldy oranges from the ground and toss them into the trash. Still, we ate and drank our fill of oranges and freshly squeezed juice.

After college, I moved into a home in south Los Angeles County. The previous owner had to have been at least an amateur horticulturist; the backyard had such fertile soil. Exotic plants, even for Southern California, covered the backyard. I remember a compact flowering tree native to South America that exuded an overwhelming perfume during the summer months. That backyard in Santa Fe Springs was my first “official” garden. I planted zucchini seedlings a foot apart and watched them overcrowd each other less than a month later. Tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers grew from early March until late October; peas grew in the winter. Watermelon seeds spit from the mouths of houseguests sprouted and bore fruit a few weeks thereafter.

By the time I was 30, I’d moved north, out of semi-tropical orange growing country. Still, I continued to plant tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and eventually added apple trees and asparagus. Thanks to the local grocer, I still was able to purchase enough food to kick my calorie count above what my meager little garden could supply, but at least I knew where a small percentage of my food was coming from.

Later, Lucy and I moved to our present home on a tiny one-tenth acre lot in the middle of the city that had plenty of Thompson seedless and scarlet wine grapes, plus one sickly and soon to die shot borer-infested cherry tree. We replaced the cherry with a peach tree, added an apple tree in the backyard — it has yet to produce fruit — and supplemented our two lovely flower gardens with cucumbers, lettuce, peppers, potatoes, spinach, strawberries, tomatoes, and an herb garden of basil, chives, garlic — oh, the best garlic — oregano, parsley, rosemary, sage, tarragon, and thyme. No, it’s not enough to subsist on, but it’s a start. And we have enough fresh dried herbs to get us through the year along with a little salt and pepper, and perhaps some fiery hot sauces — store bought (and, arguably, organic) salt, pepper, and hot sauces, but I’m working on that. Next year, we plant corn

How many people buy a suburban fifth- or quarter-acre home and plant, or have someone else plant, that Augusta National yard, but plant nothing edible for non-ruminants? Or who buy a condominium with the lame excuse that a fourth floor patio has no room to plant a potted tomato or a small herb garden. I find that odd! Are our lives so filled with careers, dinners out, social engagements, etc., that we can’t find time to look after our physical selves? The other day I read a story in the newspaper about several suburban dwellers who relocated to a crime-weary section of my city after purchasing large one-acre lots with the intent to grow gardens. And in a short time, they’ve become successful at it. Eighteen holes and a golf cart may be relaxing for some of you suburbanites, but laboring in and savoring the taste and nutrition from a one-acre garden has to be better for you. If you won’t switch, at least skip the golf cart and walk, okay? Show the pros up and carry your own bag.

Lucy wagers that people in Third World countries who scratch at the ground and pray for rain can’t believe how lazy and wasteful we are. We city dwellers don’t even have to get off our rears to water our gardens. For us, at least in arid climates, it’s all automated sprinklers. It takes more work to plant a vegetable garden, but to plant a tree? She’s amazed at how many people move into our subdivisions and can’t plant a shade tree, let alone a fruit tree. In hard times, cutting a bit of fruit just outside your door is such a given. But for too many, food comes from a corporate store not from your “yard store.”

Labels

A few years ago, having had it with concentrates, I began buying Odwalla orange juice after Lucy told me about the rags to riches story of these Santa Cruz surfer types who bought a second-hand commercial juicer and boxes of California oranges, then began selling their juice to the Santa Cruz locals. Odwalla’s not cheap, but it’s tasty. My parents’ home in Orange County, California had two Valencia orange trees in the front yard — the subdivision used to be an orange grove; just about every house had a tree — and we often squeezed our own juice. Once you drink the real stuff, it’s hard to go back to frozen concentrate unless you are forced to. Then I read Odwalla’s fine print and learned the surfers had sold out to Coca-Cola. I’m sure they are now rich with Coca-Cola stock beyond their 20-years-ago wildest dreams, but Odwalla began to taste “corporate” to me. It’s still delicious, however, provided you can afford it.

I started researching alternatives, and because I’m rapidly becoming “cheap,” found a very major brand of “fresh-squeezed” that seemed like a great deal at my local grocer. I — a grocery label reader since I was probably 14 when my mother used to drag me to the grocery store, telling me to “look low, look high, don’t look eye-level” to find the best prices — without reading any labels, assumed I’d discovered a great deal. What a mistake! Once I arrived home with my “find,” I discovered the OJ I’d bought had added water, plus the carton size was reduced from a half gallon to a metric 1.75 liters, or 1.8 quarts. Even more tenuous, the “major brand” marketing whizzes took this 1.75 liters and poured it into a taller, albeit slimmer, container so that, at first glance, it appears one is getting more juice than before, while actually getting less.

I’ve “stretched,” or added water, to OJ before to save when money was tight, but I question a large corporate entity “stretching” it for me, then reducing the quantity sold, along with adding “healthier” packaging nonsense on the label in an attempt to make me overlook what it’s done, and then doing it all at a greater cost to the consumer. What’s “healthier” about diluting what nature herself serves up? I’ll dilute it myself, thank you, if need be, but certainly not to fool myself by inflating it back up to a full half gallon. I thank the Federal government for requiring the labeling that reveals these fabrications. And I continue to kick myself for forgetting to read that orange juice label.

Alright, I openly mentioned Odwalla, but only hinted at the other “major” corporate brand. The Odwalla guys may have sold out, but their recipe hasn’t appeared to change, and I would have probably done the same, considering my retirement fund would have increased geometrically, and provided that my recipe also wasn’t messed with. I didn’t name the watered-down, size-impacted transgressor, because it sold out in the name of profits using thinly-disguised deception to lure the average grocery shopper. You can figure that out easily enough by just reading food labels.

Who reads labels? I used to, but soon I’d get a preconceived notion about particular foods and I’d stop reading them. Then I learned most people don’t read them either, which — me never being one to fit in comfortably with the crowd — made me begin reading them again.
“Warehouse” retailer Costco always seemed to me to have a dichotomous philosophy toward its food items for sale. Its “fresh” food department usually passed muster as far as avoiding preservatives and chemical additives in its ingredients, but its major-brand frozen and packaged foods section seemed rife with preservatives, corn sweeteners, trans fats, etc. I normally have a limited inventory of items I buy at Costco, having learned which foods are acceptable and which ones tend to ply our bodies with things we wouldn’t feed our dogs.

Aahh, Costco, where you can buy 50-lb. bags of sugar when it’s time to make a fresh batch of home-distilled whiskey. I went to Costco today with a notepad to record the differences between the two departments, and came away pleasantly surprised. Apparently, Costco has evolved and I have been too lazy to notice. With a caveat (see later in this blog), I offer my apologies, Costco.

Beginning in the fresh food section, I selected several items at random, and studied their ingredients labels. Costco’s name brand “Kirkland” predominates in this department, and the store’s chefs and dietitians do a pretty good job of delivering food you aren’t too afraid to feed your family. Kirkland’s chicken alfredo, for example, contained sodium phosphates and generic “enzymes,” but both ingredients were in the “less than two percent” range. The rest of the dish contained what you’d expect to find in your own chicken alfredo recipe. Better was Kirkland’s “Cibo Naturals Pesto,” containing nothing that requires a high school chemistry education to recognize. Real Foods Spinach Gemelli Salad also had nice simple ingredients. Finally, La Terra Fina’s Egg–white Quiche looked very appealing, particularly with the use of cholesterol-free egg-whites, but it failed my saturated fat test due to the palm oil in it.

Then I headed to the frozen foods section. Wow, I hadn’t been reading labels. Many packages bragged “no trans fats.” I pulled several of the usual suspects such as taquitos, potstickers, and potato wedges. Again, ingredients consisted of what you’d find in your own kitchen, plus trans fats had been replaced with canola oil, and high fructose corn syrup with evaporated cane juice, or — surprise — actual sugar.

The Kirkland brand has become heavy with organic labeling, I suspect due to its corporate location on the West Coast in Washington. Even so, many of its organics contain ingredients, while legally termed “organic,” may require a chemist to produce and stabilize. Still, now that the “Feds” regulate “organic” labeling, I’m a lot more comfortable with the term than not. Understand, however, that a lot of “organic” labeling may mean “at least 70% organic.” Caveat emptor.

Still, Costco leans heavily on “hurried mother” and “starving college student” fair such as Nissin Cup-A-Noodles and Top Ramen (51% and 32% RDA sodium, respectively), Rosarita Refried Beans (23% RDA sodium), and Chef Boyardee Ravioli (38% RDA sodium). Based on a 2,000 calorie per day diet, it’s hard to understand how dietitians can set sodium RDA’s so low, considering how much salt makes it into our foods, but consider that salt used to be a preservative and a sparingly-used spice of kings long ago, not a dietary staple. Wouldn’t you rather add your own salt?

And even the “yummy,” healthy-sounding foods at Costco can be dangerous if you have a large mouth and a deep stomach, and don’t read labels. Kirkland’s Fruit and Nut Medley (what’s better than fruits and nuts?) is especially delicious. Last summer, my mother and I drove across the United States eating a large bag of Kirkland’s Fruit and Nut Medley. Mom, a Registered Dietitian, loved the stuff and couldn’t stop eating it until it was my turn to drive, and she read the package’s label — 140 calories per quarter-ounce (about a good handful) serving, with 60 calories coming from the fat in the nuts. Needless to say, the rest of the package was now mine, but I couldn’t eat it either, what with a guilt-ridden dietitian who happened to be my mother staring at me the entire rest of the trip. Read food labels, no matter what!

Now here’s The Standard Disclaimer:

I don’t work, nor ever have worked, for Costco, nor any other grocery retailer. And of the food items I’ve described above, you can make all of them — or reasonable facsimiles —yourself if you have the time. Make the time, unless you’ve “just had one of those days.” Websites are out there that offer similar recipes and hints, and I’ll describe one or two in a future issue.

Finally, I have begun to post this monthly (hopefully) newsletter as a blog on WordPress. Visit http://backpedaling.wordpress.com from now on to read this on the web.

Kneading and Sprouting

Several months ago, amazed at the amount of additives and preservatives in them, I stopped buying packaged commercial dog biscuits for Chief and Nina. I figured my dogs could easily survive without salt, Dicalcium Phosphate, Sodium Metabisulfite (a dough conditioner, whatever that is), and a host of other ingredients only an organic chemist could appreciate. A quick search found a simple recipe of flour, yeast, garlic, chicken broth, parsley, honey, etc., and with some adaptation, I began making my own biscuits for them. Supposedly they’re cheaper than the store brand, something I’m not yet convinced of considering I use King Arthur whole wheat flour and organic chicken broth, but I know they are healthier.
 
The recipe requires about ten minutes of kneading, which quickly teaches one to appreciate the labor our grandmothers and their forbearers toiled on a daily basis. Me, I sit slack-jawed watching an IBM mainframe all day, cursing the ten minutes each week I spend kneading dog biscuits. I know, I should buy a bread machine, you might say, but then I’m still trying to figure out if the recipe is cheaper than pre-boxed milky bones. A bread machine would quickly negate that. Plus, kneading is cool once you begin building up those biceps.
 
Interestingly, the recipe said to freeze all resulting biscuits but a few days worth since they spoil rather easily. Now you can take a box of grocery store biscuits, and I’d bet that they’d last well into the next century on a cupboard shelf, sort of like the bottle of Thomas Jefferson’s wine that sold for a small fortune a couple of years ago. The President’s bottle lasted that long because of the preservative alcohol; commercial dog biscuits last because of “better living through chemistry” preservatives. I’ve stopped pickling my dogs.
 
Granted, I’m still pickling myself. So with Lucy’s encouragement, I pulled out her copy of Laurel’s Kitchen and made my own loaf of bread. Of course, my beautiful little loaf of King Arthur whole wheat collapsed the second I placed it into the oven. Laurel has some saving grace suggestions, and it may take me three or four more attempts to produce the perfect loaf, but I’ll soon be turning out my own bread. I bless Lucy for continuing to eat that first brick I baked. Yes, I know that if one is willing to pay four dollars, one can get a reasonably decent natural loaf of bread. My current favorite is Prairie Grain. But the loaf made with your own hands just tastes better, doesn’t it? It’s the labor of kneading; I know it is.
 
Speaking of making food, it’s springtime — God’s cooking school! The perennial herb garden has thawn, time to plant our lettuce and potatoes, with tomatoes, cucumber, and basil soon to follow. We were talking about bean sprouts the other night, and I’ve decided to grow my own — mung beans to start with. There’s this toothy Aussie couple somewhere out on the internet who give an exuberant YouTube lesson on growing sprouts. Google “growing bean sprouts;” you’ll find them. They suggest you buy this plastic slotted jar lid to screw atop your jar of sprout seed for drainage, plastic so it won’t rust like a standard metal jar lid punched full of holes will. Excuse my Australian accent, but “You can buy one of these at any health food store,” they promise.

That’s not so, I quickly learned. A manager-type at Whole Foods looked at me quizzically for a minute, said he didn’t sell them, but I’d be sure to find it at the Smith’s grocery store across the street. The checker and the garden “expert” at Smith’s looked at me like I was asking for a souvenir from Mars. They sent me to Wasatch Gardens. There, the seed and soil guy said he’d heard of them, but hadn’t ever actually seen one. Are plastic jar lids chock full of holes exclusively Australian? Come on, do I have to import one from Perth? Not willing to accept defeat, I drove home, emptied the contents of a plastic quart jar full of couscous into a Rubbermaid container, thoroughly washed the jar, drilled a couple of dozen holes into the jar lid, and now have a spouting jar.

Lucy says I can’t find the aforementioned lid because people these days just buy plastic containers of sprouts already grown at whatever grocery store is close to home. That’s a damn shame! The bean sprouts one buys at the local Safeway Store are most likely mung beans like the ones I’m growing, and I can honestly say the store-bought sprouts can’t hold a candle to the taste of mine. Home growns don’t get slimy after a couple of days either, probably because mine were nothing more than ova three or four days ago and hadn’t been sitting on a grocery store shelf for a couple of weeks. Those of you who remember Willard and his farm eggs compared to Kroger and its store-bought eggs will understand.