Authors: Nina Planck
NOT QUITE RAW
One very gentle method of pasteurization is of particular interest to turophiles: thermalization. The International Dairy
Federation defines it as heating milk to 145 to 150 degrees Fahrenheit under "flowing" conditions— rather than in a vat— for
fifteen to twenty seconds. Certain bacteria (good and bad) are destroyed, but some enzymes are left unharmed, which leads
to better flavor in cheese. Several European cheeses— Berthaut Epoisses, a blue called Persille du Beaujolais, and II Fortetto,
a pecorino— are made with thermalized milk. The import rules around thermalized cheese are murky, but they're usually regarded
as raw milk cheeses under U.S. law.
The bureaucrats are mistaken. Raw milk cheese is very safe. The beneficial bacteria created by fermentation actually inhibit
the pathogens everyone is so worried about. The acidity of cheese (a pH of four to five) kills harmful bacteria. Nor does
pasteurization guarantee safety. Nearly all outbreaks of food poisoning from milk and cheese in recent decades involved pasteurized
milk. A review of food-borne illnesses from 1973 to 1992 in the
Journal of Food Protection
found no outbreaks attributed to raw milk cheese aged more than sixty days.
Catherine Donnelly, a professor at the University of Vermont, also concluded that pasteurization does not ensure the safety
of aged cheese and may, in fact,
reduce
safety. Donnelly found that raw milk itself is seldom, if ever, to blame when cheese contains pathogens such as campylobacter.
Typically, contamination is the result of unsanitary or ill workers or poor cheese-making methods, such as too little salt
or acidity. "Unpasteurized milk used in some cheeses (such as Swiss and Parmesan) may even retard the growth of pathogens
in aged cheese," writes Donnelly.
Nevertheless, from time to time officials— citing food safety— drop hints about outlawing raw milk cheese altogether. A ban
on raw milk cheese would mean the end of classic European cheeses such as Roquefort, Parmigiano Reggiano, Gruyere, Manchego,
Montgomery cheddar, and American cheeses such as Thistle Hill Tarentaise, made in North Pomfret, Vermont, from grass-fed,
raw Jersey milk— a bleak prospect.
At the mere suggestion of regulatory threats to traditional cheese making, however, artisan and farmstead cheese makers, cheesemongers,
and cheese lovers rally. Gerd Stern, a past president of the American Cheese Society, says there is no scientific evidence
to support claims that raw milk cheese is dangerous. In a very American way, Stern regards using raw milk as a question of
liberty, not only for cheese lovers but also for cheese makers. "Unique microclimates and traditional variegated pastures
with many wild flowers and herbs— rather than single-crop grass— give a rich variety of herbal and floral flavors to raw milk,"
he says. "We believe cheese makers should have the right to use it."
Why Even Vegetable Farms Need Animals
HISTORICALLY, FARMING WAS always an uncertain proposition, with the constant risk of uneven harvests due to droughts, floods,
and locusts. But in the 1940s and '50s, the second-oldest profession became much more predictable. Farmers achieved more reliable
crops and vastly bigger yields with three key technologies: chemicals, laborsaving equipment, and breeding. Genetic experts
designed highly productive, disease-resistant plants and animals, from corn to beef cattle, which mature quickly and efficiently.
With these new methods, farms overflowed with cheap food.
Conjuring up images of bursting grain silos to feed the world's hungry, the masters of this technological boom called it the
Green Revolution. It's a flattering moniker, but misleading, because the side effects were nasty. Chemicals employed to achieve
huge yields included powerful pesticides, nitrogen fertilizers derived from World War II bombs, synthetic growth hormones,
and antibiotics. Like traditional factories belching out smoke, factory farms also produce unsavory waste: noxious manure
lagoons, pesticide drift, and nitrogen runoff polluting rivers and streams. It was as if the methods of the Industrial Revolution
had been applied to farming.
Before long, the Industrial Farming Revolution begat a counterrevolution. In my view, this was a truly green revolution— environmentally
sound, humane, and healthy. In the 1970s, food co-ops and health food shops in Berkeley, California, started selling organic
and whole foods, and chefs like Alice Waters at Chez Panisse and Nora Pouillon in Washington, D.C, started to buy local and
seasonal foods. Small farmers like us, using ecological methods, began to sell directly to a newly conscious public at farm
stands and farmers' markets.
At first, this new market was mostly for fruits and vegetables. Although some farmers (like my family) kept a cow or chickens
for home use, most of us were growing fruit, vegetables, herbs, and flowers for local markets and chefs— not meat and dairy.
That was partly because processing, transporting, and selling foods such as beef and butter is more costly and complicated
than taking cucumbers to market.
But there were also cultural reasons, I think, for the emphasis on produce. In the early 1970s, vegetarians claimed the nutritional
and environmental high ground. As my friend Joann wrote in 1990, "So vigorously has the vegetarian movement pursued the twin
themes of whole food and rejection of animal products that in the minds of most people, to be committed to whole foods or
organic gardening without being a vegetarian takes some explaining."
Fans of organic and local foods have sometimes been outright hostile to meat. In 1982, we started a farmers' market in Takoma
Park, Maryland, and it soon grew popular. When we invited Forrest Pritchard, a young Virginia beef farmer, to the farmers'
market in 2001, a few customers objected— loudly. Letters to the editor were heated. The farmers' market was for vegetarians,
they protested. (Er . . . we thought it was for
farmers.)
But times change. Today Forrest does a brisk trade in grass-fed beef and pastured poultry, and in 2004, members of the Takoma
Park food co-op, after an emotional debate, voted to start selling natural meat.
No one— vegetarian or omnivore— who cares about farming, nutrition, or ecology can afford to ignore animals. Animal products
account for the majority (51 percent) of American agriculture, about one hundred billion dollars in annual farm sales. The
average American eats 186 pounds of meat annually, including beef, poultry, lamb, pork, and veal, and almost 600 pounds of
milk, cheese, and ice cream. Unfortunately, most of these foods are produced on large industrial farms with methods that degrade
the environment and diminish nutrition. The question is not whether one should be able to buy meat at farmers' markets, but
what
kind
of meat.
Today many farmers like Forrest raise animals with humane and ecological methods for local and national markets. Farmers'
markets, food co-ops, and specialty shops sell beef, lamb, pork, game, poultry, eggs, milk, butter, and cheese to go with
the seasonal produce. In supermarkets and casual restaurant chains, Niman Ranch represents five hundred independent family
farms raising beef, pork, and lamb the traditional way. In the market for organic foods, demand for meat and dairy is growing
fastest.
Not long ago, the food world was splintered. There were vegetarians and meat lovers, gourmands and environmentalists. Often
they had little in common, but today we all rally around slow and local foods—
slocal
foods, as I call them. (Slow Food is the very American name of a group born in Italy as a protest against fast food. Dedicated
to traditional foods, Slow Food has chapters all over the world.) Today, vegetarians who learned about heirloom tomatoes twenty
years ago are discovering raw milk cheese, health-conscious people are asking how pastured eggs have more omega3 fats than
industrial eggs, and steak lovers are listening to animal rights advocates who decry factory farms.
As I pondered this cultural shift, I discovered something curious about animals. Every ecological farm— even a vegetable farm—
needs them. When I was little, it never occurred to me that we imported horse manure from local stables for soil fertility.
Our own cow and chickens simply left their manure on pasture; we didn't compost it for the zucchini. Much later, I learned
that the ideal farm builds soil fertility from its own resources— a bedrock principle of organic and biodynamic farming.
The mixed farm is best. In addition to fertilizer, animals provide meat, milk, and eggs, and— amazingly— require very little
in return. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of animals— grazers and omnivores— and each has its place on the farm. Grazers,
such as cattle, sheep, and goats, live on grass and other vegetation. With four stomachs, a special system of fermentation,
and help from beneficial bacteria, ruminants convert forage that is literally indigestible to humans (grass is mostly cellulose)
into high-quality fat and protein. Ruminants work this magic even on marginal land, where the soil is poor or cannot be tilled
because it is hilly, rocky, or marshy.
Omnivores such as pigs and chickens can also convert plants to protein and fat, but they need more nutrients— namely, complete
protein— than pasture has. Along with grass, they eat kitchen scraps, field stubble, and wild foods. The adaptable pig will
eat almost anything, from acorns to whey to coconut. Poultry, too, are clean-up animals, eating grain, grass, insects, worms,
and leftovers including eggshells and sour milk.
On ecological farms, animals also provide labor. By labor, I don't mean animals trained to serve, such as border collies herding
sheep or draft horses at the plow, but when animals intended for market— that is, to be eaten— do useful farmwork. Pigs, for
example, like to root; they clear brush and trees like bulldozers. They will snuffle happily for corn the farmer buries in
cattle bedding, and, as they forage, the pigs aerate the straw and manure, creating rich compost. Cattle improve poor pastures
by grazing, which increases plant diversity, and goats will clean up a thorny hedgerow. Geese and turkeys roaming a vineyard
keep weeds down, eat insect pests, and build soil fertility with manure— three economic benefits to the farmer before she
so much as collects an egg, sells a turkey breast, or bottles the wine.
Fertilizer, weed and pest control, improving pasture, turning whey and old sweet corn into bacon and eggs— these are some
of the virtues of keeping animals. Even if the farmer never slaughters her cow or chickens, they will work without instruction
or complaint— grazing and pecking are instincts, after all—
and
there will be butter and eggs for the vegetarians. Animals even benefit the farm ledger. Farmers who raise cows and chickens
on pasture save money on feed, fertilizer, and vet bills.
It's too bad that industrial agriculture has no use for the traditional role of animals. When hyperproduction became the chief
goal of agriculture, we took animals off lush rolling fields and into dark and crowded factories, stuffing them on grain sprayed
with chemicals. As we'll see, the consequences for animal health and happiness, the environment, and the quality of the meat,
poultry, and eggs we eat are unhappy, indeed.
How Factory Farms Wreck the Natural Order
DOWN ON THE FACTORY FARM, the idea is to bring animals to market weight quickly and cheaply. To that end, traditional animal
husbandry has been replaced by industrial methods: cheap, often unnatural food, fattening diets, antibiotics, steroids. The
less space for animals to move around, the better; exercise wastes precious feed calories, and that costs money. Whether the
farmer keeps cattle, pigs, or poultry, the motto on industrial farms is the same: sit down, shut up, and eat.
Fans of the species
Bos taurus
make the enthusiastic, but not unreasonable, claim that cows changed the world. "The history of what we think of as civilization
is, with very few exceptions, a story intertwined with cattle, a narrative pulled along by oxen, a growth nurtured with butter
and cheese," writes M. R. Montgomery in
A
Cow's Life.
Whether raised for labor, milk, or meat, the genus
Bos
shares a long history with humankind. From the aurochs to the Aberdeen Angus, many
Bos
species have made themselves useful and (not by accident) have also been successful at spreading progeny. Except for small
pockets— above the Arctic Circle, some tropical spots—
Bos
covers the globe.
This comes as no surprise because keeping cattle is easy. All a ruminant needs is grass. From Ireland to Argentina to New
Zealand, cattle are traditionally raised on pasture, and until recently U.S. cattle were raised chiefly on grass and hay,
too. In the 1950s, however, beef farming changed sharply, thanks to a surplus of cheap corn and soybeans. Ranchers saw that
cattle gained weight faster on grain, and unlike grass, grain is available all year. Today most industrial cattle are fattened
on grain— a dramatic change in evolutionary terms.
1
With more marbling (intramuscular fat) than grass-fed beef, "corn-fed" beef was promoted as tender and soon regarded as superior.
Grass-fed beef is as lean as a skinless chicken breast, while feedlot cattle are about 30 percent fat by weight— technically
obese. Indeed that's the goal. To win the label USDA Prime, beef needs a certain amount of intramuscular fat between the twelfth
and thirteenth ribs. To achieve this, a steer must wear a layer of fat, an inch or more deep, beneath the skin. Later, this
excess fat is usually trimmed away by butchers and cooks in search of the lean meat we demand. We've made cattle too fat for
our own taste.
The new grain diet had unforeseen consequences. Grains give cattle an acid stomach. When calves are weaned and begin eating
grain instead of grass, they become ill. The more acid gut of grain-fed cattle increases the risk of illness from
E. coli
in people. Finally, grain-fed beef is less nutritious than grass-fed beef, which has more omega-3 fats, vitamin E, and beta-carotene.
The insults to beef cattle don't stop there. To prevent illness and speed weight gain, industrial cattle are fed antibiotics.
Antibiotic use in farm animals has increased ten- or twentyfold since the 1950s.
2
Overuse of antibiotics leads to drug resistance. For farmers, that means using ever-stronger drugs to fight pathogens. For
doctors, it means that common antibiotics no longer work on human patients. The Campaign to End Antibiotics Overuse says that
"antibiotic resistance is reaching crisis proportions, resulting in infections that are difficult, or impossible, to treat."
The American Medical Association opposes the use of human antibiotics for nontherapeutic use in animal farming, and the European
Union bans human antibiotics in animals as growth promoters.
Industrial cattle are treated with growth hormones (also called steroids) to fatten them faster. The natural hormones estradiol,
progesterone, and testosterone and synthetic hormones zeranol and trenbolone acetate are typically implanted in the ear. Environmental
estrogens (as opposed to those made in the body) are called endocrine disruptors because they alter the body's natural hormonal
balance. Excess estrogen is linked to reproductive cancers including breast, prostate, and testicular cancer, and since 1950,
such cancers have risen sharply. Breast cancer is up 55 percent, testicular cancer up 120 percent, and prostate cancer up
230 percent. According to Dr. Samuel Epstein, a professor of environmental medicine at the University of Illinois School of
Public Health and the founder of the Cancer Prevention Coalition, "the risk of breast and other cancers only increases with
the uncontrolled use of hormones in meat."
A grave risk from eating industrial beef is mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Again the culprit may be
what factory farmers force these herbivores to eat. In addition to grain, cattle may be fed less wholesome things: rendered
poultry and pork, chicken litter containing feathers and manure, and— most disturbing— parts of other cattle unfit for humans.
Turning cattle into carnivores and cannibals could prove ruinous. In Britain, where mad cow disease devastated the beef industry,
cattle probably contracted BSE from eating infected cattle or sheep with scrapie, the ovine version of the disease. Mad cow
disease, which appears in similar form in many species including deer and cats, is caused by deformed proteins that leave
spongy holes in the brain. The result is drooling, dementia, paralysis, and death. The rare human version, called variant
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is similarly grisly and always fatal.
In 1997, the United States banned the feeding of cattle meat and bone meal— the parts most likely to carry BSE— to other cattle.
Only two months before the first U.S. case of BSE surfaced in 2003, the FDA reported three hundred violations of the feed
ban and the General Accounting Office estimated many more. Even if it were perfectly enforced, the feed rule— like the brain
of a mad cow victim— is full of holes. In 2005, bovine fat and blood were still permitted, along with restaurant leftovers,
or "plate waste," which means cattle eat the beef with broccoli someone didn't finish. Ground-up pigs and chickens were also
still permitted as cattle feed. Because pigs and poultry are themselves fed cattle parts, that means infected cattle matter
can end up in cattle feed. In Britain, BSE was brought under control only after a total ban on feeding mammals to cattle.