Why Green Words Make Me See Red

by Betty Fussell

Long ago, words like “organic,” “fresh,” “local” and “healthy” were hijacked by industry marketers. Today, producers and marketers who should and do know better — upscale producers like Creekstone Farms and upscale marketers like WholeFoods — have turned “natural” and “sustainable” into gobbledygook for the naive.

Alas, in our current Madmen age, labels are made to deceive, and high-end marketers and chefs are as vulnerable as the rest of us to “feel-good” labels from food producers.

Take beef, for example. Eric Brandt, of a mid-size family company in Brawley, Calif., called Brandt Beef, was the cover boy in April of Meating Place. This is the industry’s trade magazine, and they praised him for making “a great sales pitch to high-end chefs.” Some of the best chefs in NYC have succumbed.

His pitch hypes “natural” into “true natural.” But all he means by this is “no hormones, no antibiotics” for a specified period of time. Since that’s become a conventional industry practice for many producers, he adds “true,” which is false.

He uses feedlots and intensive grain diets, but there’s nothing natural about CAFOS and CORN. Nothing at all. And have you noticed how often nowadays corn-fed has been euphemized into “an all-vegetarian diet?”

Brandt’s pitch is particularly deceptive because he uses male Holstein calves (the dairy industry sells them cheap), which from day one have never touched mama’s milk from the udder. To read more about his “corn is true natural” defense, read Amy Westervelt’s story at The Faster Times.

Let the industry praise him for his booming boosterism, but let buyers — chefs and eaters — beware.

Time for an Update: Montana, Kentucky, New York & Beyond

It’s been a busy year for Betty Fussell. A brief re-cap:

* In April, Betty wrote about her first deer hunt for the Lives page of The New York Times Magazine. At age 82, in the foothills of the Swan Mountains in Montana, Betty shot, killed and ate the heart of a young doe. Titled “Earning Her Food: Granny Gets Her Gun and Goes Hunting for the First Time,” the piece drew both praise (“Go, Granny, go!”) and criticism (“Shame on you, Granny”) from Times readers.

* In the March issue of Saveur magazine, spotlighting food in L.A., Betty joined a notorious gang of four, including MFK Fisher, Marion Cunningham and Julia Child. The women were featured under the caption, “Home Grown in L.A: Los Angeles and the Surrounding Region Have Produced Some of Our Most Influential Cooks.” Born in Riverside, Betty is the youngest of these notables by five years.

* In the 10th anniversary issue of Gastronomica (Jan/Feb 2010), Betty was one of 10 distinguished food voices asked to “speak out about food culture today.” Noting the shift from real food to food porn, she writes, “We don’t watch sexy Rachael or Bobby on the boob tube because we’re hungry for food.”

Book readings, panels and lectures so far in 2010 have taken Betty from Boston to Kentucky:

* In Boston she helped Boston University celebrate the 20th anniversary of its Culinary Arts Program with a lecture on American beef. Betty was invited as part of BU’s “MLA in Gastronomy Lecture Series in Food Studies.”

* In Kentucky she was a featured speaker with Gary Nabhan at the annual conference of the American Grassfed Association, held at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. She also led a panel with Nabhan and John van Willingen that put “Meat on the Table: Past, Present and Local.”

* Back home in Manhattan, she joined Monica Bhide, Kathleen Flinn and Mimi Sheraton for a panel at the Roger Smith Food Writers’ Conference on food memoir, “Turning Your Life and Food into a Best Seller.”

* At the Astor Center in Manhattan, she joined Slow Food U’s panel on “Green Beef,” run by Michael Crupain of TheDairyShow.com. After previewing his show on the subject of grass-fed beef from pasture to plate (watch for it this summer), Michael led a lively discussion among audience and panel members: Dan Gibson, owner of Grazing Angus Acres, Jake Dickson of Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in the Chelsea Market and Josephine Proul, executive chef of Local 111 restaurant in Philmont, N.Y.

* Later this spring, Betty’s pursuit of food paths will take her on a culinary trip to Mexico City, Queretaro, Guanajuato and Morelia, led by the grande dame of Mexican cuisine, Patricia Quintana.

Check here for more appearances.

Go, Green, Go

by Betty Fussell

For a hawk’s-eye view of what’s happening in Green Beef, check out Will Harris on a new DVD called “CUD.”

Produced by Southern Foodways Alliance and Whole Foods, the documentary title says it all, but you gotta pronounce it the way Will does, “COULD.”

Will’s accent is thick as red clover in May at White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Ga., where I visited him a couple of weeks ago. Not an easy place to get to — nor to leave. His great-granddaddy brought cows to this spot near the Florida border in 1866, and his family’s grazed them here ever since.

To get here you fly to Atlanta, drive south for three hours, and watch Piedmont turn into Coastal Plains. Cows love it. And Will loves cows.

Also wildlife. I find him in his office feeding pieces of raw beef heart to an injured red-tail hawk. His office is part of his new processing plant, where he turns his cows into steaks.

Recently I ate some of those at the James Beard House around the corner from me in Manhattan. They’d been cooked by chef Linton Hopkins from Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta. This is why the story “CUD” tells is important. Small-scale processing supplies the missing link in that ever-greening path from farm to table.

Will bet his 1,000-acre farm on the plant, which enables him to sell to the Southern Region of Whole Foods, from Miami, Fla., to Princeton N.J. Small scale means control. Where industrial processors slaughter 5,000 cows an hour, Will does 5,000 a year. Control means not just the mantra of local, organic, humane, safe, sustainable — but the certifiable reality of each of these words.

It’s organic all the way. Zero waste means wash-water is cleaned and piped into the fields. Carcass waste (innards, bones, fat) becomes fertilizer by way of a giant Digester. He’s added chickens to the organicizing process and will soon add the larva of Black Soldier Flies to feed the chicks which feed the grass.

Grass is not just an edible carpet for cows but also for the horses grazing by his house, across the road from the plant, and next to the house he grew up in where his mama lives still. His three daughters will continue the 144 years of this farm’s local sustainable history because they understand their daddy’s vision.

“I began to feel that sending off my calves to the feedlot,” Will says, “was like sending my daughters to a whore-house.”

Watch a short version of “CUD” below, and for a glimpse of real green, visit Will’s website: www.whiteoakpastures.com.

Review: A History of Beef, Times Two

by Betty Fussell

Just came upon a review from the Oct. 22, 2008 Time magazine, “A History of Beef, Times Two,” in which Gilbert Cruz compares Raising Steaks to Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World, by Andrew Rimas & Evan D.G.Fraser (William Morrow).

I was pleased that the reviewer’s verdict was to “skim” Beef but “read” Raising Steaks. For read, I’d say, “Chew on it,” particularly since he praised both books for reminding us “that as tasty as burgers and steak may be, there’s a price to be paid — in oil, land and treasure.”

Check Out Write ‘Em Cowboy for Good Cookin’

by Betty Fussell

My pal Cowboy Jim Hodges, way down there in Texas, has got a new website — Write ‘Em Cowboy! — and if you want to see Emeril on a horse, this is where to go (yes, that’s Jim and Emeril on the left. Jim has a complete slideshow on his site).

This is not the kind of range Emeril is used to. Jim knows how to cook outdoors on a campfire, so check out his recipes under “Cowboy Cookin” if you’ve got a campfire and a horse.

Interviews with Friends and Mimosas Are Best

by Betty Fussell

I recently did a radio interview with Patrick Martins of Heritage Foods and Shanna Pacifico, chef at Back Forty, which aired live Aug. 9 on Heritage Radio Network.

Patrick broadcasts live on Sundays under the rubric “The Main Course” at Roberta’s Pizza, an oasis in the abandoned industrialism of Bushwick, Brooklyn. Patrick, Shanna and I chewed the fat while drinking a pitcher of freshly squeezed Mimosas and eating a brunch of polenta with poached eggs. Under the circumstances, it was real easy to talk.

Heritage Foods inaugurated a new beef program this year, the “Beef Cattle Share Program,” where you can buy online 1/8th of a grass-fed cow that will arrive at your doorstep cut into various prime steaks, stew cubes and ground for hamburger. While it’s not local (this year the program’s cattle were raised in California), it’s quality grass-fed beef, humanely raised, and it’s one way to cut costs by buying the cow on the hoof.

Tsunami Julia

by Betty Fussell

Hurricane Bill was nothing to Tsunami Julia. Julia washed over America this summer like a perfect media storm, the kind usually caused by a Sci-Fi Blockbuster. How soon will we have little action dolls in aprons and cleavers, or interactive TV games for kiddies played out with skillets and ice picks?

Actually, we already do and it’s called Iron Chef. But who could have predicted that real life Julia Child, that big-jawed giant of 6’2”, would morph into one of Hollywood’s most beautiful actresses and become an instant Hollywood star?

We all know the power of imagery but hold on — we’ve been warned by the late Michael Jackson that we ought to ask, What do we see when we look in the mirror? We also ought to ask, Who hung the mirror?

Julie & Julia set up a funhouse mirror. Now every little blogger in the country, who like real life Julie Powell (of the Julie/Julia Project) dreams by night of fame and fortune, will drown by day in oceans of butter while images of Meryl dance in her head. As she whips up one more Sabayon Mousseline and lets out her jeans, she’ll fantasize not just her big-screen career but her big-book career as a best-selling author.

The unlikely fact that Julia’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking hit the #1 spot on The New York Times’ Bestseller List in August, after a delay of a mere 50 years, gives the fantasy some teeth.

So what’s wrong with this picture and why shouldn’t we cheer on a Julia resurgence? Because a nation deserves the fantasies it lives by, and ours have become as dangerous as Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. The bookend to the escapist fantasy of Julie & Julia is the documentary Food, Inc., which made a few ripples but not a tsunami.

How could it be otherwise? It’s not a fluffy romance about making it. It’s a monster movie about making everything Big. Who wants to see the ugliness of an industrial food chain that thrives by making people fat? Who wants to look at fat people at all? Or at billions of beheaded chickens or at characters named Diabetes and E.col. 0157? Puhleeze, give me James Bond 007.

A Stonyfields Farm truck delivering at WalMart / Food Inc.

For millions of people, the realities of the Recession are depressing enough without a bunch of talking heads undermining our faith in the American belief that cheap is good. In a culture queasy with fear, we don’t want to know where something as basic as food comes from. One of Food, Inc.’s stars, Michael Pollan, got famous by doing just that when his book In Defense of Food became a best seller last year. He made clear that what we’re eating everyday as food — fast, cheap, synthetic — is not real.

But to get really famous, Pollan would have to become a big-screen action hero played by Bruce Willis in rimless glasses. The message of today’s multiplex media is not information but escape. Neither the tsunami about Julia nor the little wave about industrial food is really about food. Both movies are about what we see in the mirror and what we want to see, and how we confuse those two images all the time.

Holding a mirror up to the nature of the American food scene is just too much for millions of us to stomach. We’d so much rather feed our hunger with images of Julia/Meryl’s joy. And while we’re watching, how about sharing that bag of Jumbo Popcorn — don’t hold the ersatz butter.

(cross-posted at Huffington Post)

Does Rich Mean Fat or Flavor?

Photo by Rolando Jones

by Betty Fussell

In his recent review of Peter Hoffman’s Savoy Restaurant in New York City, Frank Bruni of The New York Times complains that the grass-fed beef that the Chef serves “doesn’t have the richness of the best grain-fed beef” and so isn’t worth the price.

Give me a break. Grain-fed means fat, both inside the muscle and out. Grain is not about flavor. The best grain-fed beef is aged post-mortem to give it the flavor it lacks from the feed. Grass-fed beef is a different sort of beast entirely, not only in what the steers are fed but in how we expect greened beef to taste. Taste is in the head before it’s on the tongue.

We don’t expect a wild duck to taste like a farm-raised White Pekin, nor a duck breast of any kind to taste like foie gras. Those French words mean “fat liver,” and it’s the unnatural amount of fat that gives that liver its superb buttery texture. I’ve always thought of it as duck butter. Since I love ordinary dairy-cow butter, I also love duck butter.

I also love beef butter. That’s what you get from highly marbled Wagyu/Kobe beef, whether purebred or crossed with Angus. Wagyu/Kobe costs a super amount of money because it is superfat. This is one reason why Bruni, along with most Americans and certainly the American beef industry, equates “richness” with high fat and high prices.

But if “richness” means flavor and intensity instead of fat, a whole new world opens. Fat can be a carrier of flavor but in itself its sensuous quality is texture not flavor. True flavor profiles, on the other hand, are as complicated with meats as they are with wines. One of the criticisms of the grain-fed beef industry about grass-feed beef is that it tastes “gamey.” Unfortunately, most of us Americans have lost the taste of what true game is — “wild” — because wild game cannot be legally sold in most states.

The application of USDA rules are so complicated on this issue that it does bear inspection (see Michaela York’s “Where Are the Wild Things?” in the May 2009 issue of Food Arts). The result is that for decades Americans who neither hunt nor have friends who hunt do not know what the taste of any wild thing is.

Most game sold as “wild” in restaurants is farm-raised (and grain-fed). Genuinely wild game feeds on all kinds of grasses and forage plants. The “richness” of wild game, which is notably lean rather than fat, depends not just on breed but on its intense flavors from all that foraging. While any game or beef flavor is deepened by aging, the flavors of grass-fed cattle are closer to the flavor spectrum of game than that of any corn-fed beast.

But why narrow our flavor range with beef by setting up a price/pleasure index that says high pleasure means high fat means high cost? Contrary to Wally Simpson, you can be too rich and too thin: too rich in mere fat and too thin in real flavor. Restaurant reviewers are no exception to the need to retrain the conditioned American palate.

A trip to Argentina (except for the governor of South Carolina) might be in order to discover the richness of exclusively grass-fed beef that the Argentines have delighted in from the first cow on the pampas. Or maybe a side trip to Australia and New Zealand. We don’t have to be parochial about our corn-fed idea that fat is the only thing that counts.

How Mavericks Became Zombies

by Betty Fussell

Names matter, as the marketer of any brand name knows well. But let’s separate living brands from dead ones. Dead ones are zombie brands that pretend to be live ones, that suggest the practices of the originating company but conceal the changes executed by new owners who hide behind the old familiar name. Are we still saving the rainforests when we eat Ben & Jerry’s ice cream? Not since it was bought by Unilever.

From the current marketing of brands you’d never know that the word “branding” comes from the practice of burning a mark with a hot iron into a hide, bovine or human, to claim ownership. It might be a cow, it might be a slave. A burned-in brand was supposed to mean “my property.”

That equation did not suit Samuel Augustus Maverick, who had both slaves and cows in the 19th century, when he acquired most of West Texas. His attitude was, “If I own it, I don’t need to brand it.”

During the time of cattle drives and roundups, before industrialization ended all the fun, the rule of the range was that any calf which became separated from its mother belonged to the first person to brand it. As we know, that allowed rogues, rustlers and cattle barons leeway to discover a remarkable number of unbranded calves (who became known as “mavericks”) and of already branded ones that they could alter the mark of right quick.

Outside the cattle world, “maverick” came to mean someone who didn’t play by the rules — an outsider, a loner, a cowboy like James Garner in the original Maverick of 1957. Today a genuine maverick company in the conglomerated food industry is one that keeps ownership of its good name. That is increasingly hard to do.

The gaps between brand name and ownership widen even as I write. Since the power of a brand depends entirely on a consumer’s associations with a particular name, it behooves the big boys to keep quiet when they buy up the little boys.

I learned this decades ago when Kraft Foods bought up a little hippie group in Colorado, which sold “natural herb tea” under the name “Celestial Seasonings.” The name and the packaging — especially the idyll of peace, love, dove evoked by a girl on a swing in a nature wonderland of butterflies and swans — have remained the same as the owners changed and changed again. News flash: The current owner has just announced on CelestialSeasonings.com a change of packaging at last: “A New Look Outside … the Same Celestial Magic Inside!” Nature’s still there but the girl is gone.

I did not learn enough, however, to keep from being gulled when I agreed for a brief time to be a spokesperson for Entenmann’s Baked Goods. Only near the end of my tour did I discover that the local Brooklyn bakery had been bought out by Warner-Lambert and then General Foods, a subsidiary of Philip Morris. I should have suspected something was afoot when Entenmann’s was advertising its doughnuts as good for you because they were “fat-free.”

Caveat emptor, buyer beware, still warns against being fooled by deceptions like zombie brands. Take two examples in the meat world: Coleman’s beef and Niman’s pork. Coleman’s Natural Beef is owned by Meyer Natural Angus, Niman Ranch by Hilco. Both companies are in the commodity biz, but the brand marketing is all about the standards of excellence of the original owners.

This deception harms small independent companies like Heritage Foods and Ranch Foods Direct that have to compete with zombie brands. Even Shakespeare warned against trusting those who would brandish their names to conceal their true identities and motives. Two of his most dangerous villains, Iago and Shylock, each defended himself by declaring the virtue of “my good name.”

Here are a few websites that help track the corporate parent companies of  “organic natural” brands that began as “mavericks” in the industrial chain: Nutrition Wonderland, Endgame.org and the Organic Consumers Association. Of course the parents may be owned or controlled by other parents, like Hains-Celestial Group by Heinz. Corporate family trees are designed to discourage consumer trackers.

“My Kitchen Wars” and Other Battles

by Betty Fussell

I never really thought of the Freudian possibilities of the fork until I saw the cover design by Bison Press of their new paperback edition of My Kitchen Wars.

That little female figurine with that big big fork, suggestively positioned for attack, not only made me laugh aloud but condensed into an image the lucidity of Laura Shapiro’s introduction: “Her coming-of-age takes place in the kitchen, a historically feminine environment reconceived as a site for armed combat.”

And to think that I just saw a one-woman show performed by Brigid Moynahan, the daughter of one of my oldest friends from the 1950s, called Doll Wars (Why Mom Wouldn’t Buy Me a Barbie), in which she uses her mother’s refusal to buy her a Barbie Doll as a symbol for the generational conflict between women trying to figure out who they are and want to be.

Forks at the ready, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters do not go easy into that on-going battle.

Here’s an excerpt from My Kitchen Wars.