BOOK:|:KITCHEN

Lately, before taking a few days off for a little holiday, I'd been thinking of meat.  Meat in all forms.  Cooked in many ways.  My obsession could be attributed to finally reading the last chapter of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, the one where he kills his own wild swine and prepares a dinner of all his hunted and gathered foods.  I should say I never wanted to read the final chapter, not for objections to hunting (I don't, but grew up around it in Texas) but more essentially not agreeing with the idea Pollan was pushing: that sustainable eating practices are so rarefied a practice, so far-flung into the woods of unattainability, that there's really no point if one cannot hook up with a few chefs, score some wild game, and make pate and prosciutto out of it.  Casaubon's more comprehensive look offers both praise and some pretty important probing questions derived precisely from sublte omissions found throughout the chapters.  Some of the meatiest criticism of the book she expertly breaks down with a measured and fair tone.

Back to the meat. . .Maybe it was the fatty duck brined, steamed, and fried Malaysian style that I utterly consumed, sans fork and knife, from Fatty Crab in the Village a week ago.  Yet, cravings come in other forms, like my desire to see Frederick's Wiseman's 1976 Meat, a great documentarian's film in the Upton Sinclair vein and one, I would guess, that could throw me off red meat and its barnyard friends for a spell.  

The next few entries I will devote to the meat theme, not in any formally designed or outlined way.  These are simply short stories--a la carte if you please, or short orders for the diner crew--that I've stumbled upon over the last several days.

United States Department of Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns has announced that domestic and export stocks of long grain rice has been contaminated by a genetically engineered variety of rice that is not approved for human consumption. Johanns said that the contamination was admitted to be the fault of Bayer Corporation, but the USDA doesn't know how widespread the contamination is. According to Johanns, the biotech rice poses no health risks, but could damage the U.S. $1 billion rice export market, since many nations refuse to import genetically engineered rice. Japan has already announced a ban on long grain rice imports from the US. Last year, Japan and the EU banned US corn imports as a result of yet another GE contamination scandal.

This would happen when I am absorbed in reading Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's Seductions of Rice. The WaPost explains that the "[a]nnouncement quickly prompted a new round of accusations that the government is failing in its efforts to regulate and contain the burgeoning field of agricultural biotechnology, in which genes from various organisms are added to crops and other plants -- usually to confer resistance to weedkillers or to make the plants produce their own insecticides."  Jeez, hasn't anybody on staff seen The Future of Food?  Furthermore, didn't anyone learn from the 2000 StarLink corn contamination?  Organic Consumers Organization offers this query from their reportage: "How many incidents will it take before the government takes their oversight of the biotech industry seriously?" asked Gregory Jaffe, director of the biotechnology project at the District-based Center for Science in the Public Interest. 

Others have dubbed it "The Attack of Killer Rice" in pure "frankenfood" fashion.  Some use the news as grist for an overall theme.  The real Grist on the gist of the issue.  Knowing this is not only a federal issue, check out what implications are in North Carolina over at slowly she turned, to get an idea how it may affect your state.  I'll be following this, so check back.

"Consumers will not be aware which meat and poultry products have been treated with the spray."  Andrew Zajac, Office of Food Additive Safety, FDA   "And, as long as it's used in accordance with regulations, we have concluded it's safe."

The Food and Drug Administration has for the very first time approved the use of bacteriophages (viruses which kill bacteria) as a food additive to kill strains of bacteria they say are commonly found in cold cuts and other meats like weiners and sausages, and that affect and make seriously-ill an estimated 2,500 people a year. The infection is called listeriosis, and disproportionately invades adults with weakened immune systems, pregnant women and newborns, so says an AP report in this past Saturday's New York Times.

A discussion over at the eGullet boards grows weary and suspicious over the topic. Scubadoo97 dives into several implications, with a measured manner:

Recent studies suggest phages may impair the growth and metastasis of tumor cell and may one day play a role in the treatment of cardiovascular disease. Bacteriophages may have a possible immunosuppressive effect. Bacteriophages could help wage a war on bacteria as well as viruses. Now do I want them to be spraying my cold cuts with phages? I'm not sure at this time we know enough to be exposing the general public to them. There are postivive implications for sure but we really don't know the negative effects of long term exposure.

Phages offer some significant advantages over antibiotics. They are very specific, and have never been shown to affect humans. They also grow and multiply when they find their target bacteria, and stop growing when they have killed all of their targets. They are self-limiting and so the idea of an "overdose" is pretty unthinkable. The problem with phages is that sometimes they are TOO specific, and thus hard to design and use. A phage may kill one strain of a particular bacterium and completely miss another closely-related strain. If used widely, the types of phage would greatly outnumber the types of antibiotics.

Then again, life does imitate art or parody, it would seem. Last year The Onion reported:

"Approximately 9,000 deaths per year are attributed to foodborne pathogens, and the most germ-filled location in the house is the kitchen," a woman says as computer-generated footage zooms in to show worm-like spirochete bacteria multiplying on a slice of bologna. "Normal mustards do nothing to combat the germs that begin forming on meats and cheeses as soon as they're taken out of the refrigerator. But an hour after spreading on our powerful French's Antibacterial Mustard, your lunch is still free of everything but zesty mustard taste!"

Elsewhere, Slashfood was on top of this report with a number of comments again worried about health implications. For whatever it's worth, my questions have less to do with health and more with corporate trust and machinations behind the scenes. Intralytix first approached the feds in 2002 with their pitch. The Baltimore based company who developed the product also had money on their mind. Meaning: Develop a product, petition a friendly government (did Intralytix, its board, or owners contribute to campaigns?) for its approval (no matter how statictically insignificant the numbers are for people inflicted). Once approval is determined, license the product to a larger distributor who can take the company global.  As the AP reported: "Intralytix, based in Baltimore, first petitioned the food agency in 2002 to allow the viruses to be used as an additive. It has since licensed the product to a multinational company, which intends to market it worldwide, Mr. Vazzana said."

The principals, including the president and CEO John Vazzana, who make up the company, from their website:

Intralytix benefits from the strength, diversity, and balance between science and business of its founders. The technical team includes J. Glenn Morris, M.D., an expert in infectious disease, epidemiology, and food microbiology who was instrumental in writing the new USDA regulations on microbial safety in meat processing, and Alexander Sulakvelidze, Ph.D., an expert in molecular microbiology and bacteriophage technology. The Intralytix CEO, John D. Vazzana, has over 34 years of business experience, and he has been instrumental in transforming several start-up or small companies into profitable, publicly-traded corporations. This core team is rounded out by co-founders who are seasoned experts in technology development, business, finance, regulatory affairs, intellectual property, and legal aspects of developing technology-based businesses, including: Patrick Hervy, chairman of MDBio and Paragon Biotech, and former CEO of U.S. operations for Thomsen CGR; John Woloszyn, Esq., a partner in a major international law firm and chairman of Lombard Securities who has twenty years of experience working with early-stage technology-based companies; Dr. Torrey C. Brown, M.D., the former Maryland State Secretary of Natural Resources, with extensive business and corporate development experience; Nina Siegler, M.B.A., C.F.A., a former Wall Street biotechnology securities analyst and director of The Johns Hopkins University Office of Technology Transfer; and Gary Pasternack, M.D., Ph.D., a scientist with extensive translational and biotechnology experience who directs the Division of Molecular Pathology at Johns Hopkins.

From my perspective, this story has little to do with "protecting" Americans from cold cuts. Yes, boldy the story has reached mainstream status in the media food chain which raises awareness in an incongruous way compared to the number of people who've been infected with the illness.  Witnessed again, in my view, is a story that's not about its headline, especially if that headline is rooted in fear. There's a deeper story with a different context that gets buried behind semantically loaded words like "bacteria," "food-borne pathogens," and "viruses."  We've been conditioned to fear for 5 long years, and through marketing on these fears using rhetoric evocative of "attacks," corporations and shareholders have profited. 

I'm still digging, emailing some folks and general trying to further understand this story. Sometimes it's hard to find all the facts. If anyone has details on the "political" and "corporate" angle of this story, please write in.

You know that feeling when you find a blog or site that sucks you in and keeps on giving? The kind, like a dream, where you don't want to wake up to the fact that life is going on?  That the clock is ticking. The phone is ringing. Emails are backing up. Your third pot of tea is hissing at the stove. UPS or something is awaiting your signature, as the doorbell rings, and rings. . .
To the cassandra pages, I owe a reflection, for I'm further an accumulation of some goodness that I can only ascribe to reading her pages. As an introduction, one finds the writer answering the reader's who is cassandra? with a past tense attribute:

In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well, you know what happened.

^{Greek warrior drags Cassandra from Palladium; c. 330 BCE
London, British Museum}

Not singularly about food, the cassandra pages explore life and its spirit through the topics of dreams, memory, idle thoughts, summer evenings, innocent provocations, smallish gestures, and, of course, food things. One of her latest entries chronicles a road trip from Quebec farmland to Montreal where they unexpectedly find a cheese shop. She continues describing the terrain and subtle nuances evident in ever turn through what I imagine (with cassandra's help) is a beautiful landscape. Like roadtrips that M.F.K. Fisher would describe through the French countryside, the fromagerie discovered in the Canadian backroads is described with such care as to beckon me. After tasting and purchasing their cheeses, she writes:

Outside, a family was passing a bar of chocolate around the interior of their car as it pulled out of the parking spot, and the line to get into the shop was getting longer. We determined that we would come back soon, and, foregoing the sausages and nearby vineyard, made our way back to the main road, past the cows that made the milk that made the cheese.