Year of the Cow (16 page)

In much of the United States, however, the choice between raw and pasteurized milk isn't one that consumers are allowed to make. Sale of raw milk for human consumption is outright illegal in seventeen states. On August 3, 2011, federal agents conducted an armed raid on Rawesome, a private, raw-milk-buying club in Venice, California. Sale of raw milk is legal in California, but only from certified dairies. In California at the time, only one dairy qualified, and Rawesome had been distributing raw milk from other dairies. This was unambiguously illegal. As a result, armed federal agents raided Rawesome's warehouse, arrested the leaders of the collective, and destroyed more than $70,000 of perishable foodstuffs to be sold to the members of their private club, all of whom had signed a disclosure form signifying that they understood the risks of consuming raw dairy. Further, the club's members had no history of illness caused by their raw dairy habits.

Meanwhile, industrial food giant Cargill was at that time trying to plan how to best manage an outbreak of drug-resistant salmonella in ground turkey at one of their processing plants—one of the largest meat recalls in history. Cargill sells its products under a number of names, none of which feature the word
Cargill,
to clients that include the national school lunch program. As a result of this outbreak, 136 people became infected with drug-resistant salmonella. One died.

Three people were arrested as a result of some crunchy, granola-esque folk at a club in Venice selling uncertified raw milk, privately, to fully informed members, with no incidence of product-related disease. Elsewhere, 136 people contracted drug-resistant salmonella from ground turkey sold under another label by an enormous corporation that the USDA allows to self-police, and no criminal charges were filed.

I'm not by any stretch saying that raw milk has all the answers or that it's the panacea that some say it is. But in learning about food production, I can feel myself starting to slip down the rabbit hole a little bit—the Rawesome/Cargill debacles do strike me, at the very least, as a gross misallocation of resources. Which is the greater threat to public health, some hippies with a raw milk habit or a self-policing multinational corporation repeatedly botching food-safety protocols and selling meat tainted by drug-resistant salmonella? If nothing else, it's a pretty stark illustration of the extremes to which an overreliance on the industrial food system can take us.

No, Americans aren't starving. We have an abundance—perhaps an overabundance—of food choices in every supermarket, gas station, and retail store in the country. But if we don't exercise some preference as to where our food comes from—who makes it, what's in it, and how it's made—we could lose the opportunity to choose.

*   *   *

I find all these assertions of the Weston A. Price crew fascinating, but for me, at least, something of a solution in search of a problem. I'm a big, healthy guy. At six feet one, 184 pounds, I'm in pretty good shape. I hike a lot—or as much as my schedule allows, anyway. I bike on the weekends. I have the regular aches and pains of a guy in his early thirties who works in an office. I appreciate beautiful meals, but I'm not really embarking on this cow odyssey for my health, necessarily. Though I'll certainly admit, much of the stuff in the middle aisles of the grocery store—home of all the processed foods the Weston A. Price crowd inveighs against—does not seem, by any stretch of the imagination, healthy.

I think back to the taco pie we made when I first brought home the cow. Something about it struck me as off. Not right. Borderline obscene, maybe. I can't quite put my finger on it, besides a vague notion that there was something odd about the juxtaposition of the sacrosanct nature of the grass-fed beef with the cheap, almost tawdry quality of the Fritos. Like Funyuns in a Fabergé egg. Perhaps on some not-quite-conscious level, the dish seemed like something that should not be.

It's true that we modern Americans didn't always eat the way we do now—that much is undeniable. My own great-grandparents owned an acre or so adjacent to some train tracks in Lawrence, Kansas. They had a cow for milk. They grew all their own vegetables, kept chickens, and bought very little at the market. In fact, my grandfather hated the taste of chicken until the day he died—because as a boy, if his family didn't have enough money to buy something at the market, they could always go out into the yard and kill a chicken for supper. For my grandfather, the taste of chicken meant poverty and hard times. It was a meal of necessity; chickens bred quickly and ate bugs and whatever table scraps were available. Chickens converted nonresources into protein. His family didn't eat chicken because they were foodies or had some fetish for free-range poultry. They ate chicken because they were poor. And if they didn't eat chicken, some nights they didn't eat.

*   *   *

Summer, Dec, and I stand in our local supermarket. We're at the dairy case, way at the back of the store.

“Honey, do we need anything besides milk?” I ask.

“Nah, that's it. I never knew one kid could go through so much milk.”

Summer grabs a gallon of 2 percent and moves to put it in the cart. “Actually,” I interject, “why don't we get whole?”

“It has a ton of fat. This only has 2 percent fat.”

“Truth be told, whole milk has only 3.25 percent milk fat. Plus, it hasn't been futzed with as much. Let's live a little.”

She shrugs. “Sure. Why not?” She replaces the 2 percent and grabs a gallon of whole milk. “Watch out, world. We're drinking whole milk. The sky's the limit.”

We turn and begin the long trek back to the front of the store. Our journey takes us down aisle four: snacks. I peruse yards upon yards of eye-catching packaging. “I think in my next life, I want to be the guy who dreams up the name for snack foods.”

“I think you'd have a knack for it.”

“Thanks. It's all in the vowels. Add enough vowels to something, and it automatically sounds ethereal and wholesome.”

“If you could make a name that was all vowels, you'd be a billionaire.”

“Please enjoy my new snack cracker, ‘Aieiaoia,'” I say. Summer chuckles.

Declan imitates me. “Aaaeah!” he howls as we shush him, laughing.

I grab a package off the shelf—containing some form of extruded, bite-sized crisp. I flip it over to read the ingredients. “You ever notice how much of the stuff from the interior of the supermarket is made of vegetable oil and corn?”

“What, as opposed to the stuff on the roof?”

“As opposed to the items around the perimeter.” I gesture to the exterior walls of the building. “The outside ring is filled with the food that can go bad. All the meats, veggies, dairy, eggs. The stuff in the middle rows is generally shelf stable for a long time. And they contain a lot of corn. Corn is a starch, but it can become a simple sugar if it's turned into high-fructose corn syrup. And it's cheap.”

“I like sweet corn in the summer.”

“Me too. But supercheap corn is a big reason why supercheap food makes people fat. We're suffering from diseases of abundance now, rather than scarcity.”

“But it isn't just about price. All these foods in the middle aisles are convenient, too. You can't forget that.” She pauses, pulling a bag from a shelf. “Besides, if you took away Declan's Goldfish crackers, you'd have a riot on your hands.”

She has a point. Kids of a certain age have very limited palates, and that's completely normal. It's a biological defense mechanism: Not all bitter-tasting things are poisonous, but many poisonous things taste bitter. As a result, human children have evolved so that when they first start eating solid foods, they dislike bitter things. They like bland or neutral things. Further, they
love
sweet things. Sweet means sugar. Sugar means energy. Energy that they need to either burn off or store.

Even if the foods in the middle aisles of the supermarket are cheap, sweet, and convenient—that doesn't necessarily mean that they're healthy.

*   *   *

As with the rise of feedlot beef, we can trace the origins of much of the modern diet to the period immediately after World War II. As the war drew to a close, the industry that had sprung up to feed the troops—producing a variety of field rations for all terrains and situations—needed a new audience for its products. The food industry turned to the civilian marketplace and began offering consumers the same sort of frozen, canned, and processed foods that had once filled military field rations. This is the birth of Spam, TV dinners, and airline food.

At first, many industrial food producers didn't have much luck with their new offerings. Housewives considered many canned, frozen, or dehydrated convenience foods “cheating.” Cooking was considered one of the most important responsibilities that a wife could have, and data from the time indicate that they took pride in their work. A poll conducted by the magazine
Woman's Home Companion
in 1949, and another by Gallup in 1951, found that cooking was the household chore that women had the most positive feelings about, in contrast with the relative drudgery of other housework.

Cake mixes can be seen as somewhat illustrative of the process by which Americans became more familiar with and more accepting of highly processed foods. In her excellent
Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America,
Laura Shapiro recounts the transformation. Before the advent of just-add-water or just-add-water-and-eggs cake mixes in the 1930s, cakes were made from scratch by necessity. However, cake mixes rose in popularity after the war, though not without some reservation that the cakes produced were inferior to cakes made from scratch. The assertion wasn't without merit, and producers of cake mixes had a difficult time convincing home cooks that they weren't shirking the duties expected of them as housewives. Famed psychologist and marketing pioneer Ernest Dichter conducted research on behalf of General Mills and hypothesized that home cooks should be encouraged to think that the use of cake mixes—you know, actually making the cake—should merely be considered the
first step
of the cake-making process. The real showcase of a housewife's culinary skill, the real ability for a home cook to make the cake
hers,
was in her ability to decorate it. To frost it, add sprinkles, and pile it high with chocolate chips and Jell-O. Don't have time to make frosting? They can sell you premade frosting too.

The motif of the ticking clock was central to the midcentury advertising of premade and packaged food. Ads served to manufacture a sense of panic—the solution to which was premade and highly processed foods. Without that sense of urgency, there wasn't necessarily any impetus to use cake mixes—or canned meats, or Cheez Whiz, or condensed soups—because they simply didn't taste as good as the made-from-scratch items they replaced. The desire had to be manufactured for its solution to take root.

In the case of cake mixes, the companies that produced them took out glossy magazine ads promoting their new wares, and helpful how-to articles in women's magazines provided inspiration. Further, copious amounts of sugary frosting would mask any deficiencies in the taste or texture of the cake (such as chemical undertones), blunting the comparison between homemade and premixed products. In the 1950s, assisted by classroom teaching aids supplied by the food industry, home economics classes began to teach baking using store-bought mixes instead of building the cake from scratch. As this became the default method for producing a cake, tastes changed to anticipate it. The taste of the cake from a cake mix became the new normal and—as pupils of those home economics classes grew up—acquired the aura of childhood nostalgia. Simultaneously, the number of people with the skill to bake a cake from scratch declined.

Elsewhere in the food landscape, similar patterns emerged. Canned, frozen, or dehydrated versions of familiar foods emerged, usually for some real or imagined labor-saving purpose. New cuisines and new dishes were developed to utilize them in a manner separate from their initial intent. Then, as consumers became comfortable with the artifice of the product, new needs were manufactured and new products developed to meet them. Canned soup from concentrate replaced homemade soup. Then it found its way into casseroles. Fresh fruit for pies gave way to canned pie mix. And look! You can also use it as a festive centerpiece for a Bundt cake! (Also from a mix, of course.)

These processed foods offered convenience and speed in mealtime prep, as well as a much longer shelf life, but all this came at a price. Processed foods tend to be high in sodium to inhibit spoilage from bacteria. Added sugar can mitigate the otherwise bland or even slightly chemical taste of highly processed foods, while contributing mightily to weight gain and the myriad detrimental health effects that come with it. And partially hydrogenated oils—or trans fats—used to keep foods shelf stable at room temperature have been linked to heart disease, Alzheimer's, and cancer.

All this is to say that how we cook and prepare food changed pretty radically in the last seventy years or so. Our relationship with food has changed pretty drastically as well—if getting something to eat is cheap and easy, we'll value it less as a result. In my own experience, people I've known who've lived through the Great Depression rarely leave a scrap of food on their plate. But people nearer my own age will think nothing of throwing half a bagel in the trash. At the same time, over one-third of adults in the United States are classified as obese.

I don't know the solution to our bizarre relationship to food. I do know that a solid first step is to respect what we put on our plates and into our bodies. When I bought this steer, consensus among my friends was that I was doing something spectacularly dangerous and unhealthy in the extreme. That it was stunt food. I thought their fears were largely overblown, but I didn't vociferously contest them. I never really considered the fact that rather than being outlandish and hyperbolic, my meat choice was surprisingly normal for a time other than ours. Perhaps even banal.