I have been saving a can of WHOOP ASS! for a while, just because I was a bit hesitant to use it (with great power comes great responsibility). But I think the time is right as many of my fellow citizens have just started beating the drum for Trader Joe's here in Walla Walla. The problem is no one realizes that slick marketing is the tacky veneer that is covering an ugly truth about many "specialty markets".
Super stores have stripped away the old ways. The term Super Market, we have forgotten the root words here, literally was a SUPER-market with your butcher, baker, green grocer, general store all under one roof. This changed the way we all shopped, and related to our food. As more and more Super Markets were added, prices became competitive. Cheaper food was needed, so the food industry responded with cheaper food. There are only a few ways to make things cheaper, reducing the quality and increasing the quantity is the easiest. This is also a great way to reduce hunger, making food cheaper, that is the upside.
The downside is that in order to compete, companies that produced food needed to make it EVEN MORE cheaper. How do you reduce the cost, spend less. Feed cows, corn (which is cheap and increases weight quickly) or even better, use the leftovers from other slaughtered cows! Yes, this was being done until the "outbreak" of mad cow disease just a few years ago. Go figure, feeding cow brains to other cows might be bad (remembering that cows are herbivores). Hmmm, who would have thunk it? And when you can't make it cheaper by feeding them poorly, export, export, export, or as the new term goes, outsource.
There is a new program that is airing on the PlanetGreen channel. Now I am not one to suggest ANY TV to anyone, but this is something we all should watch. Six young adults from the UK are sent abroad to various places to learn about where our food comes from. This is MUST SEE TV. Monday nights at 7P, PlanetGreen channel. Learn about what it takes to produce food cheaply. What the human cost is. Your $.99 Big Mac is so cheap because it is made with cheap labor and inferior ingredients. Ever wonder why Americans have such a high obesity rate?
Most of the food production in the US is done by under skilled and poorly educated workers who's lives are regularly in danger every day. Don't take my word for it, read Fast Food nation and Pig Perfect. These two books are as seminal as the Jungle was. The facts have not changed, the system is still broken. Almost every day there are meat recalls in the US and almost every day a worker is injured or killed in an accident that could have been prevented.
I will not eat "factory" pork, or what you find at the grocery store and you shouldn't either. On these "family" pig farms, they are more covered stalls (10,000 pigs under a roof) where the pigs are fattened. They are kept in horrid conditions, and no pigs do not like being dirty. They like mud, because they do not sweat, but no animal likes to be in their own filth, it's not natural. Disease is rampant. Urine and feces are dozed into "evaporating" pods that leach ammonia into the atmosphere and poison the local water supply. Many streams and rivers in the mid Atlantic states regularly experience a mass death of fish, whole populations just die over a week. Because the water is poisoned from the hog farms. And there are companies trying to sell you this stuff and you are eating it. For information on food recalls please see this link:
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Fsis_Recalls/Open_Federal_Cases/index.asp
This is something that should be checked weekly, it will scare you. Oh and remember product recall is voluntary, stores don't HAVE to pull product. . .
Big companies, global companies care about profit margins not people. Did you know that Trader Joe's is owned by a German company so cheap that Wal Mart can't compete with them! Seriously. Read this:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/do-you-know-who-owns-trader-joes/
and this:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123180518793975423.html
Think Whole Foods is looking out for you and providing better food? Think again:
http://www.slate.com/id/2138176/
There are many many things we need to realize about our food chain. The first is that in order to make things cheap, sacrifices will be made. Sacrifices that could be increased use of antibiotics because animals are kept so close together that disease is inevitable. Sacrifices like using genetically modified, disease and pestilence resistant seeds to grow larger yield crops. Sacrifices that could lead to possible health risks, like ecoli, cancer, heart disease and diabetes.
Now, having said that, I am also going to say that "perfection is not the enemy of the good" (see here: http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-calcook6-2010jan06,0,6888223.story) I think that sums up my thoughts on things pretty well.
Bigger is not always better. Cheaper is not always better. Quantity is not better than quantity. These are the basic fundamentals that need to be fixed in the system, and WE are the ones that need to be fixed. Whole foods is not as wholesome as it seems. Trader Joe's is NOT your neighborhood grocery store, at least it shouldn't be. Do your own research. Find out where your food comes from and at what cost. Unless you don't care about what you put into your body. But don't ask me to do the same. Cheers.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Friday, January 8, 2010
Monday, January 4, 2010
Happy New Year. . .Now bring on the heat!
Many of you may not know this but I like spicy food. Eggs are not breakfast without hot sauce. Tacos, be they west Texas style or traditional al carbon, cannot be truly savored without the appropriate condiment, hot sauce.
So a friend and customer recently brought me a bottle of hot sauce. Not the kind I usually enjoy but one of the fancier, home made type hot sauce in a bottle. Chunky and kinda reddish brown. This usually means over the top, garlicky flavour, with very little heat and an upset tummy later on. Read, disappointment.
So when I opened this bottle, I was instantly amazed at the smoky spicy aromas. Ok, so it smells pretty good, I still have doubts. Well long story short this stuff rocked. REALLY ROCKED. Flavour was complex and deep. Rich and flavourful with a great balance. Mikey likes it. This is THE best bottled sauce of this type I have ever tasted, and believe me I have tasted a lot.
So we are proud to announce that we will soon be receiving our first shipment of Boulder Hot Sauce Company's Smoky Serrano and Harry's Habanero hot sauces. They are making a fresh batch this Friday so it will be shipping to us next week. Samples will be available to those who are brave enough. If you like spice like I do, you'll want to get a bottle of each, one for the kids, one for you. Cheers.
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