Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Freaking out
. . . over this melamine scare.
From horsesass.org (gotta love a website like that):
Months after dogs and cats started dropping dead of renal failure from melamine-tainted pet food, American consumers are beginning to learn how long and how wide this contaminant has also poisoned the human food supply. Last week, as California officials revealed that at least 45 people are known to have eaten tainted pork, the USDA announced that it would pay farmers millions of dollars to destroy and dispose of thousands of hogs fed “salvaged†pet food.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Through the salvaging practice, melamine-tainted pet food has likely contaminated America’s livestock for as long as it has been killing and sickening America’s pets — as far back as August of 2006, or even earlier. And while it may seem alarmist to suggest without absolute proof that Americans have been eating melamine-tainted pork, chicken and farm-raised fish for the better part of a year, the FDA and USDA seem to be preparing to brace Americans for the worst. In an unusual, Saturday afternoon joint press release, the regulators tasked with protecting the safety of our nation’s food supply go to convoluted lengths to reassure the public that eating melamine-tainted pork is perfectly safe.
Which leaves me asking my readers one simple question:
Can you recommend a good vegetarian cookbook?
D.
I’ll need to know the upper and lower bounds of ‘good’, first.
If you’re a vegetarian (part or full time), let me know the name of your favorite vegie cookbook.
Thanks.
I’m not particularly worried about it, my kidneys are already dead.
Ew! Why melamine? I don’t understand that one bit.
I will be forcing the family onto more marinated tofu from now on – it’s good for the body!
I don’t own it, but I’ve had some tasty meals prepared by others from the Moosewood Cookbooks.
Dude.
You can still eat meat if you buy only from suppliers which feed their animals “Human Quality Feed.”
The small suppliers are there–some of them specialize in organic, but not all.
The meat producers which feed “Human Quality Feed” DO NOT ACCEPT factory waste (Which is what the recalled pet food is classified as: “sweepings”. Sweepings also include chicken feathers, blood, skin, animal fat, etc. Great stuff to feed your average cow.)
If you email me at quinebarge@yahoo.com, I’ll give you the website for my husband’s shop. It lists the vendors we are currently working with. (But my non-Zorro name is right there on the second page. Sigh. A good advertising opportunity up in smoke.)
And since you’re close by, we might be able to arrange a shipping protocol for you. We cannot ship across state lines (outside of California) because of USDA regulations.
I know, nox 🙁
Lyvvie: greed, that’s why. That article gives the details.
Thanks, Maureen. I’ll take a look at it.
Suisan, thanks. On my way to emailing you as we speak. And you could ship to my office, since that’s in CA.
I was serious – what do you mean by ‘good’? Practical for everyday use? Fun, challenging recipes? Good for entertaining? A mix of simple and challenging? Spicy? Mild? Vegan?
For everyday use, we’ve had pretty good luck w/ our Cooking Light subscription. For psycho-crazy-but-delicious recipes, we like Lord Krishna’s Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking. Beyond that, we keep an eye out for cookbooks from cultures that tend to make meat more of a flavor than a main ingredient.
You probably have more veggie recipes at your disposal than you realize… Got a Middle Eastern cookbook? African? Any number of Asian cultures? Indian?
I’ve personally found the Moosewood books to be hit-or-miss… Many of their recipes seem overly fussy, with too many compromises on ingredients if you’ve had more ‘authentic’ versions of their ethnic dishes. When they’re good, they’re good; when they miss, though… watch out.
Thanks, PS. That helps. “Everyday use” is what I had in mind — it seems prudent to try to reduce (at the very least) our meat consumption. Not sure I’m ready to give it up altogether, but I think I could cut way back and not miss it.
Meanwhile, here’s an update.
That’s pretty much where we are, too. Unfortunately, The Boy is an avowed carnivore…
Here. I sort of mis-spoke in the earlier comment.
The contamination of the human feed pork is because the feed pellets given to the pork included contaminated gluten. Ok.
What I was TRYING to say, but being clumsy about, is that most supermarket pork is allowed to be fed sweepings. Sweepings BAAAAD.
If you contract with a vendor who is using humand quality feeds, you are LESS likely to have melamine contaminated animal feed show up for them. Most of those producers are feeding raw grains to their stock, not manufactured feed and pellets. However, you can be CERTAIN that they are not also getting sweepings.
(For example: Jelly Belly jelly bean factory in Fairfield, CA produces lots and lots of mishapen candies. Some of those get sold as “seconds” to factory visitors. However, everything else, including the nightly sweepings of the factory floor, is fed to local pigs. Then Jelly Belly doesn’t have to pay as much or garbage disposal. Technically, the candies are “Human quality food” because they are produced for human consumption. However, the sweepings off the floor aren’t humand quality.)
Meat regulation is a ver complicated thing.
The dairy farm next to my folks used to get the sweepings from the original Smartfood factory. We used to think that our dog didn’t like popcorn; eventually we found out that he knew when the truck with the sweepings would show up; he’d mosey over and gorge himself silly on the stuff.
Hi,
I am generally a lurker, but I have been a vegetarian for many years and had to chime in. I love and adore the Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian cookbook. It is a fantastic book. It is organized largely by ingredients and the recipes are usually very easy to make with delicious results. I haven’t made a single bad one. Her World of the East cookbook is good too, but it doesn’t have the variety of recipes of the World Vegetarian. I have many other cookbooks and this is one I use most often. Hope this helps….
Oh nono, I read the article and was suitably horrified! I was more thinking, who was the person who thought, “Hey, let’s add melamine and see if that helps!”
I mean, I hear melamine and immediately think non-microwaveable children’s picnic ware. Why are they adding that to pet food?
And you got to think, this has to effect the milk supply coming from these animals too. I’m so gad we are dairy free. But from now on we buy organic meats. Screw the cost.
Lyvvie–they add melamine as an extender as a cover for the fact that the gluten is of lesser quality.
The reason to add gluten as a separate ingredient to a food product is to boost its protein level. But then you have to know how much protein is in your gluten powder. The test for protein involves looking for how much nitrogen is in the powder. amount of nitrogen (easy to test for) correlates to amount of protein. OK?
So….melamine is nitrogen rich. If you nave a low protein gluten powder, but you add melamine, it will test as being higher in protein than it is. Melamine is cheap and is s by-product of coal refining.
So the end product has *less* protein than what is says on the label and has melamine in it. Factories used to do the same thing with urea until people caught on and started tesing for uric acid compounds. So they’ve moved on to melamine. (No WONDER the gluten from China is such a bargain! Less protein!)
Melamine by itself isn’t thought to pose a risk (we make dinnerware out of it), but with another compound, which is present in the Chinese gluten, it becomes toxic.
Please note that there is no federal regulation for pet food, only livestock feed, and with livestock feed a LOT of stuff is acceptable to feed to meat stock. Like cardboard, feathers, sewage sludge (dried), and “protein sources”.
Food safety regulations are fairly good, but meat inspection and safety regulations are really behind the times. (As in one requirement for the meat to reach Prime grade is the conformation, the level topline, of the orginating cattle. So a Brahma steer, for example will never reach Prime stock. So farmers breed less of them, which limits the genetic diveristy of the cattle before us.) And then pork and lamb are not graded at all, and the requirements for “all-natural” are different too. Lots of people buy by grades, thinking the higher grades are going to be of higher quality.
Creekstone farms started a protocol wherein every beef carcass they slaughtered would be tested for mad cow and bacterial contamination. The Feds sued them because for one plant to test evey carcass made the other plants look less safe. Sigh.
Until a few years ago, bacterial contamination was screened by visual inspection of the carcass. The inspector would pull one off the line if it *looked* contaminated. Uh huh.
Can you tell that I spent a lot of the last three years researching the federal meat loopholes? What a disaster.
Thanks, Suisan. How sad . . . it’s looking like our food supply is becoming more and more questionable. Wonder how tough it would be to raise my own chickens?
PS, Robin, thanks for the recs!
Lyvvie: yeah, what Suisan said. I wonder what other surprises are in store for us?
Re: raising chickens… There’s a reason that practically every culture eats them – they’re more or less avian weeds. Seriously. There’s a whole urban farming subculture here in Seattle – chickens are pretty high on the list of easily growable things.
My parents raised them. They stink, they’re cheerfully canniballistic, they’re noisy… (Uh, chickens, that is – not my folks, whatever their other faults.) But the eggs are delicious, and they’re phenomenal for pest control in a garden.
I’ll bet there are how-to websites on raising chickens. Must say, I don’t relish the idea of gutting a chicken. Yuck. On the other hand, if I just used them to produce eggs . . .
One problem, though — I keep wondering about the predator which took out our outdoor cats. Chickens would be a real temptation, I imagine.
It was probably a coyote. The worst are raccoons – they’ll go into a killing frenzy and leave shredded chicken bits everywhere. The other predators are content to take one or two and leave, but not raccoons.
My parents raised them for eggs, so the only beheading/bleeding/gutting sequence I’ve ever seen was when I was in the Boy Scouts. It wasn’t too bad. It was certainly far less traumatic to witness than listening to our neighbors slaughter pigs… *shudder* That’s nasty.
Supposedly, we have mountain lions. Raccoons, too. Do we get coyotes this far north (OR/CA border)?
Fresh eggs would certainly be nice.
Coyotes are really adaptable, like raccoons. I’d be stunned if you didn’t have them.
If you can find the Green’s Cookbook it’s very good, plenty of different things so you don’t go mad with boredom.
Just had bloodwork done…kidneys OK. We try to eat mostly the wild caught fish and meat from Whole Foods. But not exclusively. But as my husband likes to say, “You gotta die of something.”
Mauigirl, what brought you back to this old post?