The challenge facing local food

Food service giants like Sodexho, Aramark and BAMCO are jumping on the "eat local" bandwagon. Will the corporate attention give a boost to sustainable agriculture, or defuse the grassroots revolution?

By John Feffer

Topics:Food

On Oct. 3, with the fall semester in full swing, the dining hall at Georgetown Law School was packed with students slumped over bookbags and laptops. Squeezed among their plates and papers were tabletop displays announcing that the day’s meal was part of an “Eat Local Challenge” that required the school’s chef to create a meal of ingredients entirely grown or raised within 150 miles of his kitchen. Between bites, the future lawyers peered at the signs with a mix of curiosity and indignation. Reducing food-shipping miles and supporting small farms were all good and fine — but what ever happened to Taco Tuesday?

Though it’s been 20 years since graduation, I can still recall my alma mater’s grim fare: the tetrazzinis, the iceberg lettuce, the gluey stews. I remember how my fellow students clamored for more vegetarian dishes — or more anything that just plain tasted better. The garlic roasted chicken and sautéed greens served up at Georgetown Law would have blown our minds and our taste buds. But the students I met there spoke longingly of packaged sandwiches and tacos filled with greasy, industrial-strength hamburger meat — while the food service staff sounded like gourmet revolutionaries. I wondered: What kind of culinary looking-glass universe had I fallen into?

Georgetown’s Eat Local Challenge — and the temporary disappearance of Taco Tuesday — was the brainchild of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Bon Appétit Management Co. With a national staff of 10,000 and annual revenues of $400 million, BAMCO runs 300 cafes in colleges like Georgetown Law, at the corporate campuses of Oracle and Yahoo, and at other posh locations including the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif. Yes, that’s cafes, not cafeterias, as BAMCO’s director of communications, Maisie Ganzler, is quick to stress. “Cafeteria” conjures up images of can openers, frozen veggies and great quantities of mystery meat. But BAMCO believes even lowly college mess halls can be brought into the culinary vanguard.

BAMCO is not alone. In the past year, the “local” ethos has overtaken even organics as the gourmet cause célèbre — And eat-local challenges have begun sprouting up all over the place. Large food service providers like Sodexho and Aramark, having already introduced organic products, are now experimenting with local sourcing. At Yale, Stanford, Berkeley and other universities, students can eat meals prepared with fresh local produce grown on or just off campus.

The eat-local movement owes no small measure of its success to recent exposés of the organic industry. As huge corporate farms have moved into the sector, the media has been abuzz with the transformation of organics into business as usual — with Whole Foods catering to the upscale consumer and Wal-Mart aiming for the fat middle demographic. The question is: will big business’s discovery of “local” food eventually undercut the positive effects the movement may have on the environment, small farmers and taste? Advocates of eating local say no. Their singular hope is to foment a revolution that starts on the farm and ends on our plates.

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BAMCO’s annual Eat Local Challenge debuted only two years ago, but the company has long made local food a priority. Since its founding in 1987, the food service company has attempted to marry sustainability with profitability. “We weren’t founded as a health food company,” Ganzler explains. “And as we’ve made more decisions about sustainability, we’ve always considered the bottom line.” BAMCO’s Farm to Fork program, which connects small local producers to the cafe chefs, guarantees that an average 20 percent of sourcing for all meals must be local. “But that’s not the upper limit,” Ganzler says. “Some accounts go up to 70 or 80 percent during harvest season.”

On the wall of the Georgetown Law School cafe is a placard devoted to BAMCO’s Circle of Responsibility. It stresses the use of organic products, cage-free eggs, humanely raised meat and low-fat ingredients. The list even gets down to the nitty-gritty of stocks from scratch, fresh-squeezed lemon juice and mashed potatoes from real potatoes. The trifold brochures available beneath the placard read like the demands of a student protest movement rather than a multimillion-dollar company. The community brochure speaks of “boycotting purveyors that do not support farmworkers’ rights in regards to working and living conditions.” The environment brochure emphasizes fair trade coffee and decries net-pen fish farming, and the nutrition brochure challenges the claims of high-protein diets.

At the Georgetown challenge, however, few students had bothered to read any of the materials. “Those of us who are foodies don’t eat here,” admitted third-year law student Morgan Lynn. She dropped in that day for a juice and decided to stay for the Eat Local lunch, which she and a friend declared tasty but a little on the greasy and salty side. Lynn shops at a food co-op and prepares meals at home. The students who do frequent the cafe, still harboring a grudge over Taco Tuesday, are a tough crowd that is quick to criticize. Most days, chef Horne and his kitchen crew are like stand-up comics stuck with an audience of drunken hecklers.

But for the 800 students at Albertson College, just 25 miles outside Boise, Idaho, BAMCO is the best thing going. This year, the Eat Local Challenge surrounded students with local food. Beth Delmar, the general manager of the Albertson cafe, estimates that its food was 95 percent local that day — with local beef short ribs in plum sauce, sustainably farmed trout with cherry tomato and cilantro salsa, and even some unusual ground cherries for the salad bar. Delmar’s baker also runs an orchard, so comes to work every morning with fresh apples, plums, pears and pluots for pies and breads. But here, too, except for the environmental studies students — and the discerning faculty — her clientele has been slow to embrace the core concept of eating local, many still hung up on the ugliness of heirloom tomatoes.

Google and YouTube might have struck their recent deal at a Denny’s, but it’s a different scene at BAMCO’s five cafes at the Yahoo corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. The folks at Yahoo take their food very seriously. Executive chef Bob Hart designs menus for the five employee cafes at Yahoo, plus the executive meals and the occasional business meeting. Northern California has local products year-round, and the Yahoo cafes serve an older crowd whose interest in the origins of their food is already primed. Breakfast for the Eat Local Challenge day was two eggs, duck confit and fingerling potatoes roasted in thyme, duck fat and kosher salt from the San Francisco Bay.

Whatever the sophistication level of their audience, the BAMCO chefs clearly enjoy the Eat Local Challenge. Far from rebelling against the sourcing requirements, they relish the way the restrictions spur their creativity. At Georgetown Law, for instance, chef Horne solved the black pepper problem — there are no tropical microclimates conducive to growing Piper nigrum in the D.C. area — by adding baby arugula to his sautéed greens to give them a kick. At the Yahoo cafe, for a thickener, Hart used boiled Italian butter beans in place of cornstarch and substituted blackberry compote for cranberries with his roast turkey. Michael Anderson, the chef at the Eckerd College cafe in St. Petersburg, Fla., solved his protein challenge by devising a citrus-marinated alligator salad (though less adventurous carnivores could take refuge in smoked chicken, organic beef burgers or Florida shrimp).

“I think it’s pretty hard to co-opt local, though doubtless people will try,” says environmentalist author Bill McKibben. In 2005, McKibben wrote an article for Gourmet magazine detailing how he subsisted entirely on local food through a Vermont winter, thanks to a lot of canning, the help of a local wheat grower, the consolations of locally brewed beer, and more root vegetables than you could shake a parsnip at. He says he came away from the project with a greater appreciation for the community connections that sustain local food production. “You just keep narrowing the distance you want your food to come from — 100 miles this year, 75 next. The industrial food machine depends on economies of scale, and these simply aren’t available locally — which is good.”

Though their approaches are different, behind both BAMCO’s and McKibben’s quests lay the same economic, environmental and aesthetic rationales. Economically, local sourcing can help small farmers establish relationships with the chefs and consumers who appreciate the quality of their produce. In Northern California, “farmers could easily build condos and get rich selling land at $100,000 an acre,” Yahoo’s Hart reports, so local purchasing provides the higher profit margins that can keep farms in business and the Bay Area a diverse ecosystem.

In Idaho farm country, where land prices are nowhere as dear, small farmers still face steep competition from the state’s powerful agribusiness sector. Boise lacks the concentration of high-end restaurants of Silicon Valley, so the small farmer is often searching for buyers. “We get calls from farmers who want to sell us their excess peaches and peppers at a low price instead of letting them rot in the fields,” Delmar says. Such unexpected bounties translate into char-grilled peaches for the Albertson students and lots of cobbler.

Tim Fischer, of Fischer Farms Natural Pork, raises 1,800 head of hogs a year in rural Minnesota, which is nothing compared to the corporate hog operations that supply tens of thousands of pigs for bacon, sausage and Spam. “I raise hogs the way my grandpa raised them in the 1940s: in big open buildings where they have room to run around,” Fischer says. “It’s hard to sell those kinds of pigs to Hormel because they have more fat on them. The meat is a crimson color.” The meat of the Hormel pigs, he says, turns gray because of the stress of their confinement.

Dozens of restaurants in Minneapolis, including the BAMCO cafes at the Guthrie Theater, want this tasty and tender pork. Fischer makes a better profit margin on his meat now than he did during his days supplying Hormel. But he also works harder. “The way I raise hogs is a lot of hard work, a lot more manual labor,” he explains.

On the environmental front, eating local reduces the amount of energy consumed in transporting food across vast distances. In his book “Coming Home to Eat,” ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan reports that food in America travels an average of 1,300 miles between farm and fork, changing hands six times — a figure that, according to Worldwatch, has increased by 25 percent since 1980. The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture estimates that the food system accounts for 16 percent of U.S. energy consumption. And we’re importing more fresh fruits and vegetables than ever before: According to the USDA, 9 percent of our fresh fruit came from abroad in 1985; the figure had risen to 23 percent 16 years later.

But those numbers don’t even take into account the amount of energy that goes into the industrial production of food, from the petroleum-based fertilizers to the heavy machinery. Every mouthful of food fairly oozes with oil, and it’s not canola.

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Conserving energy and preserving America’s small farms may be important, but eat-local initiatives like BAMCO’s will likely live or die by taste. Many of those who opted for the local meat and potatoes at Georgetown Law chose to do so because the food looked better and, as they discovered, tasted better too. As he tucked into his roast chicken, law student Francesco Totaro spoke glowingly of the food traditions in Italy, his home country. “When we eat local, we know what it is,” he explains. “Here everything is artificial, plastified, genetically modified.”

For Americans, the desire to recapture a lost taste may prove the most powerful agent of change in our food culture — even if, for the younger generation, the taste is not remembered from their childhood but, rather, appropriated from the recollections of their parents and grandparents. Amy Trubek, an anthropologist of food at the University of Vermont whose book on the geography of taste will be published this year, believes that force is what will determine whether eating local will endure or “be just another blip, the latest version of food activism from the 1970s — what Warren Belasco calls a ‘counter-cuisine.’”

For local eating to catch on, Trubek argues, taste must drive large-scale infrastructural change. “If it’s going to be more than the month of August or a special week of menus at restaurants, like in Chicago or San Francisco, we have to create the infrastructure for slaughterhouses, processing plants, along with food safety regulations that are not based on huge factories but on small-scale operations,” she says. “All of the policy and regulatory apparatus around the food system since World War II has just assumed the industrial model. Everything has conspired against the small and the localized.” BAMCO has no plans to reduce its 150-mile target for either its Farm to Fork program or its Eat Local Challenge. But Ganzler, the company’s director of communications, agrees with the notion of scalability. “Because we value local over organic, our system is set up so that each individual chef and manager is responsible for sourcing products locally in their own community,” she says. “Our approach is scalable because it’s managed at a micro level. Our model puts power in the hands of people closest to the food.”

If Ganzler is right, local eating can indeed go national without suffering from the industrialization and homogenization that has afflicted the organics sector. Under current organic standards, you can eat organic lettuce that was grown with sodium nitrate fertilizer on a huge corporate farm, picked by poorly paid labor, and shipped thousands of miles. As the organic sector has grown, so has the pressure on growers to cut costs. Sure, if you happen to live right next to a corporate farm, eating local might not be any better for the environment or for your taste buds. But in most other situations, local sourcing eats away at the very foundations of corporate agriculture.

Whether appreciating the bison-and-wild-rice soup at Macalester College in Minnesota or the heirloom-tomato gazpacho at the Yahoo cafe in Sunnyvale, consumers might never go beyond the sybaritic pleasures to meet the local farmer or fully understand the fuel savings behind their food choices. Yet behind the scenes, consumer tastes, the rising cost of energy and the falling prices of agricultural commodities will conspire together to replace the agro-industrial complex with a new, sustainable system.

The effects of eating local don’t stop at the water’s edge. Eating local is not the culinary equivalent of Pat Buchanan’s isolationism. We live in an increasingly global age, and our food depends on global environmental conditions, the working conditions for migrant labor, the overall stocks of fish in the sea. It’s no contradiction, then, that the local meal at the Georgetown Law School cafe was dished up at the “global station.” “This is the station where I want to do the sustainable stuff,” chef Horne explains. “It’s because this is where we can have the most effect.”

: John Feffer's most recent book is "North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis." More John Feffer

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Bridging the Irish-Italian divide

A Jersey transplant shares the chicken Parmesan recipe his outcast aunt brought to the family

By Felisa Rogers

Clockwise from left: Aunt Sissy, Uncle Frank, Aunt Jonie and Aunt Rosie (Credit: Courtesy of Tom Gannon)

Topics:Heirlooms, Food

You wouldn’t want to tangle with Tom Gannon. When I look at Tom, I end up imagining his ribcage, which must be massive, like the stays in the hull of a galleon. He has a wide chest and meaty arms scrolled with tattoos: on one arm, a full sleeve of roses against a black background; on the other arm, a giant Ganesh winks from a swirl of peacock feathers and smoke. Tom is tall and balding with a neatly shaved head, a red goatee dusted with white, and no-nonsense blue eyes. But in the end, his fortress-like demeanor stems not so much from his appearance as from his attitude.

Maybe it’s the Jersey. Tom’s dad was a New York cop, and his mom worked full-time as a nurse, yet somehow found the time to give four boys a good Catholic upbringing. “It was different in the city,” Tom remembers. “We were surrounded by family and other people who had tons of kids. Childcare was not an issue.” When Tom was 9 the family moved from the city to Hackensack, N.J., where they lived in a close-knit neighborhood Tom describes as “very Irish and Italian, with some token Protestants.”

Listening to Tom talk about his family is like watching a nostalgic movie about growing up on the East Coast — one of those films that begins with a rueful voice-over as the camera pans in on the old neighborhood. Tom is not sure when his ancestors emigrated from Ireland to New York: “We don’t know. My father’s generation was the first generation that was literate. No one could read. I don’t think anyone kept track.” He describes his family as close; they ate dinner around the table every night (classic stuff: meatloaf, spaghetti with meatballs, roasted chicken), watched the game together and took care of their own, no questions asked. When I ask Tom if he can pinpoint a family philosophy, he answers immediately: “The philosophy of my family is family,” he says, and laughs a little as he unloads a shopping bag full of onions and canned tomatoes.

Tom’s chicken Parmesan recipe comes from his great aunt Rosie, who caused a huge family scandal when she married Tom’s great uncle Frank in 1914. Frank was 16 and Rosie was only 14, but the scandal had nothing to do with age. Tom’s densely Irish family disapproved of Frank marrying an Italian. “Their generation was, of course, very bigoted,” Tom remarks, rolling an onion onto the cutting board. “By the time my father’s generation rolled around, it was much more common. Some of my dad’s best friends married Italian women and nobody cared. But back in Rosie’s day, it was different, it was a huge deal. Until they got married — then you couldn’t say anything.”

Rosie and Frank moved into an apartment above Frank’s brother’s funeral parlor in Gramercy Park, where they would live for the next 70 years. As soon as Frank married and the family realized they were stuck with Rosie, everyone shut up about the Italian issue. “As a matter of fact,” Tom says, “she became like the most popular person in the entire family. I mean everybody loved Aunt Rosie. She was very gregarious. She was very opinionated. She liked to complain a lot, but in a funny way.” When I ask him what she looked like he says, in his thick Jersey accent, “She looked very stereotypical. She had a wide nose and hair like steel wool. Very sad eyes, kinda baggy, like some kind of basset hound or something like that. She liked to eat,” he adds, slapping his gut. He remembers Rosie pinching the kids’ cheeks, drinking Seven and Seven and “a fair amount of wine,” and cooking constantly, until her classic Italian-American recipes were adopted by every household in a proudly Irish family. In fact, half of Tom’s favorite family recipes are Italian-American.

To make Rosie’s chicken Parmesan, Tom starts with the sauce. He shows me a neat way to peel a large quantity of garlic cloves: Put the unpeeled cloves in a lidded cook pot and shake vigorously. I’m amazed to see that half the cloves are peeled in the first rough shake; after a second session, all the cloves are skinless. He throws the garlic in with the onion, which is already sautéing in a cast iron pan. “This is about how you want them to look,” Tom remarks, gesturing to the pan full of translucent golden onions. He dumps two cans of whole tomatoes into the pot and mashes at the mixture with a potato masher.

Despite making a huge mess in the kitchen, Tom is not a haphazard cook. He takes his time as he slices each chicken breast into cutlets, and then dips the meat in eggs and bread crumbs. He’s a more precise cook than I am — his every motion betrays the typical New York obsession with exact culinary tradition. When I suggest we could use a preexisting bag of panko to coat the chicken filets for the Parmesan, he looks horrified. “No,” he says decisively. “We need the cheap stuff.”

While he’s making the Parmesan, he’s instructing me on how to make another family specialty, Uncle Frank’s meatballs. When I start rolling the mixture of pork, beef, eggs, panko and spices, he views my handiwork with a dubious expression — it’s clear that my meatballs are neither small enough nor round enough for Tom’s taste. When I later offer to help fry the chicken fillets for the Parmesan, Tom doesn’t allow me to bread the cutlets myself — he does it for me, and then hovers behind the stove to make sure I’m letting the cutlets get crispy enough before I flip them.

Tom’s concern doesn’t come across as fussy — he’s just the type of guy who likes to do things right. It makes me think about the difference between East Coast and West Coast culinary culture. I come from a culinary tradition that is primarily focused on innovation and substitution. “Sure, that’s good, but how can I make it with nettles?” Tom’s background is more old school — recipes were passed down from generation to generation, and changing things up was more likely to be viewed with horror than with admiration.

But Tom’s family story isn’t all about staying the same. During the course of our conversation, Tom affectionately describes his family as square and later says his parents were “straight as a pin.” The same could hardly be said for Tom: He says he always felt a little different, never liked suburbia or really bought into the whole Jesus thing. When I ask him how he “was led astray,” he laughs and answers: “rock ‘n’ roll”. After a deadhead phase, Tom moved to Seattle, where he fell in with a group of friends that reads like a who’s who of the grunge era. His family back home didn’t know much about his Seattle life. “They never saw my tattoos for years,” he says, taking a sip of beer and meditatively stirring the red sauce. “In those days I only went home for Thanksgiving, and I always wore long-sleeved shirts. I didn’t know how long I could keep it going, but I always figured as long as I could keep it going for that Thanksgiving, I’d be fine,” he laughs. “But then I got real sick with pneumonia — it was around 1998, and my lungs stopped working. I was in a coma. My parents flew out. They thought I was dying. That’s when they first saw my tattoos — I’m lying in a hospital bed, totally inked, and they’re like ‘what the hell?’ But I never got a lick of shit for it, because I lived — suddenly me having tattoos didn’t seem too important to anybody. Never any discussion about it — to the point when my mom eventually even started thinking she wanted a tattoo herself.”

Despite their dramatic tattoos and stereotypically West Coast behaviors (Tom manages the recycling program for the city of Seattle, his wife Becky eats organic) Tom and his wife are pillars within their East Coast family: In the summertime the entire extended family vacations in the Adirondacks, where Tom and Becky’s son Jack runs wild with his Jersey cousins. I hear shades of Aunt Rosie in Tom’s story, and both tales remind me of something that’s been on my mind lately: When we are forced to accept Italian Aunt Rosie or tattooed Uncle Tom or gay cousin Doug, we become a little less likely to jump to conclusions and, more often than not, our realities are enriched in untold ways. (In a best case scenario, this enrichment appears in the form of cheese-coated chicken cutlets.) On a grander scale, the way we are forced to evolve as families plays out in the way we see the world and the way we change as a nation.

But perhaps I’m getting too high-minded — when I’m sitting in the glow of candlelight spooning Aunt Rosie’s chicken Parmesan onto my plate, I’m just happy. The sauce is tangy and simple, the chicken is crunchy and coated in gooey cheese, and the company is solid. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Aunt Rosie’s Chicken Parmesan (Serves 6)

Ingredients

1 package spaghetti noodles (cooked, still hot)
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion (chopped)
3-4 garlic cloves (chopped)
1 32-oz can whole tomatoes
½ cup red wine
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon fresh oregano (minced)
1 tablespoon fresh basil (minced)
1 teaspoon sugar
Salt to taste
2 lbs chicken breasts (sliced into ½-inch thick fillets)
2-3 eggs (beaten)
1½ cups bread crumbs
1 small zucchini (sliced)
10 ounces baby spinach
1 tablespoon butter
Mozzarella cheese (sliced)
Grated Parmesan

Directions

In a large pan, heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil and sauté onion over medium low heat for 5-6 minutes. Add garlic. Continue to cook until onion is translucent. If necessary, turn heat down.
Add tomatoes, wine and bay leaf. Break up whole tomatoes as you stir. Simmer sauce for 30 minutes. Add water or stock if necessary.
Add spices, sugar and salt to taste. While sauce continues to simmer, slice chicken breasts into cutlets and preheat oven to 350.
Dip cutlets in eggs and then in bread crumbs. Brown cutlets in olive oil. When one side is thoroughly brown, flip and fry the other side.
While cutlets are frying, add zucchini, spinach and butter to sauce. Cook for a few minutes and remove sauce from flame.
Cover bottom of baking pan with sauce. Add chicken. Cover chicken with mozzarella and additional sauce. Bake in oven for 15 minutes.
Serve over spaghetti with Parmesan cheese.

: Felisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at the Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More Felisa Rogers

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The rise of Big Meat-bred super bugs

Despite the public health risk of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the lobbyist-swayed FDA keeps easing regulations

By Martha Rosenberg, Alternet

(Credit: Reuters/Mike Cassese)

Topics:AlterNet, Food, Food Business

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

So far, 2012 is bringing bad news for people who don’t want “free antibiotics” in their food.

Antibiotics are routinely given to livestock on factory farms to make them gain weight with less feed and keep them from getting sick in confinement conditions. But the daily dosing, at the same time it lowers feed needs, lowers drug effectiveness and produces antibiotic resistant bacteria or super bugs that can be deadly to people.

This month, researchers found 230 out of 395 pork cuts bought in U.S. stores were contaminated with a super bug called MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). Worse — there were “no statistically significant differences” between “conventionally raised swine and swine raised without antibiotics,” reported the researchers.

Why would meat labeled “raised without antibiotics” be as full of super bugs as conventional and factory farmed meat? It can be contaminated with MRSA at the farm, by slaughterhouse workers who carry MRSA or by other meat, if processing equipment is not “cleaned out between runs of certified organic and non-certified organic meats,” say the researchers. A 2009 study of swine workers in Iowa and Illinois found that almost half carried MRSA.

And last month, the FDA scrapped its three-decade-long effort to regulate the use of the popular human antibiotics penicillin and tetracycline in livestock. While the FDA says in the announcement that it “remains concerned about the issue of antimicrobial resistance,” it also says “contested, formal withdrawal proceedings” consume too much of its time and money. For example, withdrawing nitrofurans from livestock use took 20 years, DES (diethylstilbestrol) took seven years and enrofloxacin took five years and cost $3.3 million, says the agency. Hey, we’re just the government that makes the laws and enforces them. They’re Big Meat!

Cynics might have seen the concession to Big Meat coming when a report from a USDA-contracted researcher that asserted that MRSA kills more Americans per year than AIDS “disappeared” from the National Agricultural Library Web site last summer with no explanation, says reporter Tom Philpott. Of course, MRSA is only one antibiotic-resistant germ and not even the one clinicians fear the most anymore. Clinicians also worry about vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), encouraged by the use of the antibiotic virginiamycin in livestock; Clostridium difficile, a serious intestinal bug developing resistance; and resistant Acinetobacter baumannii which has so afflicted U.S. troops in Iraq it has been dubbed “Iraqibacter.”

And days after the penicillin announcement, there was another concession. The FDA issued new, watered down rules on the use of cephalosporins in livestock (a different type of antibiotic) after Big Meat muscled down the FDA’s original order to prohibit cephalosporins in 2008 (which also disappeared with little explanation). Cephalosporins are antibiotics like Cefzil and Keflex used for pneumonia, strep throat, salmonella and skin and urinary tract infections in humans and one type of antibiotic that Clostridium difficile is developing tolerance to. Over a million human salmonella infections occur in the U.S. every year, resulting in 16,000 people being hospitalized and nearly 600 deaths, reported the Harford Advocate.

In 2008, the FDA announced that there was “evidence that extralabel use of these drugs [cephalosporins] in food-producing animals will likely cause an adverse event in humans and, as such, presents a risk to the public health,” and called for their prohibition. Notice the FDA says “will likely cause” not “could likely cause” and “presents a risk” not “could present a risk”?

But by the time hearings were held two months later and lobbyists had worked their magic, the “Cephalosporin Order of Prohibition,” had somehow become a “Hearing to Review the Advances in Animal Health Within the Livestock Industry.” Prohibition — advances, same idea, right?

At the hearings, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the Animal Health Institute, a Big Pharma trade group and the egg, chicken, turkey, milk, pork and cattle industries whined that they could not “farm” without antibiotics because more feed would be required and the animals would get sick from being immobilized over their own manure.

“To raise turkeys without antibiotics would increase the incidence of illness in turkey flocks,” sniveled the National Turkey Federation’s Michael Rybolt. Antibiotics “reduce the level of potentially harmful bacteria which result in infections and sickness,” contended the National Milk Producers Federation Robert D. Byrne (key word, “potential”). Antibiotics decrease the amount of land needed to raise animals and provide a lower-priced “wholesome” product for the public, said one farm operator after another. One even claimed that manure is reduced because animals eat less. In their twisted thinking that would make factory farming green.

While most ag reps at the hearings defended the use of antibiotics for “treatment, prevention and control of disease,” the AVMA’s Christine Hoang actually went so far as to call the less feed that antibiotics make possible a “health-promoting” effect and a “therapeutic use.” Maybe she meant health and therapy for the bottom line.

After the hearings, W. Ron DeHaven, who was the USDA’s top vet before leaving for industry and helming the AVMA, penned a rambling, almost incoherent 18-page letter with 62 footnotes to the FDA. Cephalosporin-resistant “human pathogens” aren’t increasing, says the letter, and even if they are, they’re not affecting human health and even they’re affecting human health, how do you know it’s from the livestock drugs and even if it’s from the livestock drugs, the FDA has no legal authority to ban cephalosporin. Got that?

Alternately maudlin and accusatory, the letter plays on terrorism fears by calling a cephalosporin ban a “food security issue” affecting “the number of animals available for the food supply.” It also plays on humanitarian sentiments by claiming a ban would impede veterinarians’ ability “to relieve the pain and suffering of animals” as if cephalosporins are painkillers and other drugs aren’t available. (And as if antibiotics are given for animals’ welfare instead of revenue welfare.)

Nowhere in the letter is mention of the reason Big Meat won’t let go of antibiotics: The industry is able to raise thousands of animals in crowded conditions that would otherwise kill them for prices as “artificial” as the drugs they are raised on. Big Pharma’s invasion into farming is probably the biggest reason for the demise of family farms which are no longer able to compete in price.

But less than a month after the letter was sent, on November 25, the FDA quietly revoked the prohibition. Good hire, AVMA!

Of course, the revolving door between government/Big Pharma lobbying has a distinguished tradition from Louisiana representative-turned-lobbyist, Billy Tauzin, who presided over the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) until 2010, to former CDC Director Julie Gerberding, who presided over the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak and turned up as — anybody? — head of Merck vaccines when she left the government.

It was not a great surprise that the FDA’s new cephalosporin livestock rules, four years later, had the Agribusiness Seal of Approval. “We thought the original order was too broad and unnecessarily prohibited uses that were not likely to cause problems for human health,” said AVMA’s Dr. Hoang, perhaps tempted to take a bow.

The new rules, which no longer ban cephalosporins, limit “large and lengthy dosing in cattle and swine,” says the New York Times, but allow uses “the F.D.A. has not specifically approved,” and wide use in ducks and rabbits. Yum. Still, the new rules prohibit one unsavory factory farming practice that few are aware of–the “routine injections of cephalosporins into chicken eggs.”

In 2008, while inspecting egg operations, the FDA caught hatcheries injecting cephalosporins directly into chicken eggs, “rather than by the approved method of administering the drug to day-old chicks.” The same year, Tyson Foods was caught injecting eggs with a different antibiotic, the human antibiotic gentamicin, linked to serious side effects. Tyson especially had egg on its face, because the previous year the government disallowed its slogan “Raised Without Antibiotics,” because the ionophores it adds to poultry feed are antibiotics. Ionophores are antibiotics added to poultry and cattle feed for the same “feed efficiency” as produced with other antibiotics but they are not used in humans. Tyson had just backpedaled into the new phrase, “Raised Without Antibiotics That Impact Antibiotic Resistance In Humans,” when it was caught playing fast and loose with gentamicin. Oops.

Several scientific journals report that antibiotics injected into the eggs of layer hens before they hatch produce drug residues in the eggs they lay.

The abuse of antibiotics on farms was one of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s last stands. “It seems scarcely believable that these precious medications could be fed by the ton to chickens and pigs,” he wrote in a bill called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2007 (PAMTA), which has yet to pass. “These precious drugs aren’t even used to treat sick animals. They are used to fatten pigs and speed the growth of chickens. The result of this rampant overuse is clear: meat contaminated with drug-resistant bacteria sits on supermarket shelves all over America,” said Kennedy years before this month’s report on MRSA-contaminated pork. The meat industry, “is rampantly misusing antibiotics in an attempt to cover up filthy, unsanitary living conditions among animals,” echoed Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., who cosponsored the bill and holds degrees in microbiology and public health.

Over 70 percent of antibiotics go to livestock, not people, says the bill and they are used on over 83 percent of grower-finisher swine farms, cattle feedlots, and sheep farms and found in 48 percent of U.S. streams.

Of course, it’s no surprise that Big Meat denies the dangers of antibiotic resistance and/or its part in it and opposes PAMTA. “We don’t believe we are the main cause of antibiotic resistance,” Dave Warner, the National Pork Producers Council’s communications director told Johns Hopkins Magazine. Doctors who overprescribe antibiotics are the culprit, claims Warner, since “There are only 67,000 pork producers.” Only?

The chicken industry also pleads innocent. “We believe our use is responsible and limited,” Richard Lobb, public relations director for the National Chicken Council, told the Hartford Advocate.

What is a surprise is that Big Pharma, supposed medical professionals, is also “flat earth” when it comes to antibiotic resistance. Elanco, the animal division of Eli Lilly, says that, “Monitoring antibiotic resistance in raw meat products is not an appropriate measure to represent the bacteria that reach the consumer,” in an online brochure, “because cooking destroys these bacteria, and dead bacteria cannot transmit antibiotic resistance.” Plus–who minds germs in their food if the germs are dead? Elanco also asserts, in the brochure, that livestock antibiotics keep occurrences of “food poisoning” down as if food poisoning were unrelated to farm conditions! In fact the size and industrialization of US factory farms is such a factor in food poisoning, it drove the passage of new federal food safety laws in 2010.

The Animal Health Institute, representing Abbott, Bayer Healthcare, Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica, Elanco/Lilly, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer is even more flat earth.

“There is no scientific evidence that antibiotics used in food animals have any significant impact on the effectiveness of antibiotics in people,” it deadpans in a brochure created specifically to oppose PAMTA. “People would be more likely to die from a bee sting than for their antibiotic treatment to fail because of…resistant bacteria in meat or poultry.” But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that hospital-associated infections, which are likely to be antibiotic resistant, cause or contribute to 99,000 deaths each year. Under 100 people die a year from all stinging insects.

And AVMA? “At the heart of this discussion is the premise that the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture directly contributes to bacterial resistance in humans,” says the vet group, urging its members to fight PAMTA. A livestock antibiotic ban in Denmark, “has not shown any clear declines in antibiotic resistance patterns in humans,” says AVMA, though CBS News and Food Safety News find otherwise.

Antibiotic resistant intestinal infections increased in Europe after certain antibiotics were introduced on farms, reported CBS. But after Denmark declared a ban, it “drastically reduced antibiotic-resistant bacteria in animals and food.” The Denmark’s Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries reported that the ban resulted in “overall reductions of antimicrobial resistance countrywide,” said Food Safety News.

Nor is AVMA the only veterinary group that sides with industry over animals. The American Association of Swine Veterinarians was one of the groups filing a friend-of-the-court brief supporting this week’s Supreme Court ruling, National Meat Association v. Harris, that overturned California’s humane slaughter law. The law was enacted after the 2008 Westland/Hallmark school lunch meat scandal in which cows too sick and weak to walk were videotaped forklifted and “water-boarded” to the slaughter line. The humane slaughter law prohibits buying, selling or receiving downer animals and processing, butchering or selling them for human consumption. It requires non-ambulatory animals to be immediately euthanized.

Big Meat and its veterinarians argued the California law “criminalizes” the work of federal slaughterhouse inspectors who are presumably preventing slaughterhouse atrocities without the California law’s help. But former USDA inspectors Lester Friedlander, DVM and Dean Wyatt, DVM have testified that federal inspection is a mockery that puts the public at risk at the same time it permits appalling animal abuse.

In fact, antibiotics form such a huge part of Big Pharma revenues, antibiotic resistance literally divides medical professionals along species lines. Many medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association, support PAMTA out of concern for patient infections while big veterinary groups tend to oppose it.

At first it looked like PAMTA might have a friend in the FDA’s newly appointed deputy commissioner, Joshua Sharfstein, who was a pediatrician and the former food safety staffer for Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. Both he and the newly appointed FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, had public health backgrounds and were not industry insiders.

At a 2009 House Rules Committee meeting, Sharfstein surprised lawmakers by indicating that the FDA supported PAMTA. The ag lobby was enraged because Sharfstein’s remarks implied White House Office of Management and Budget approval, yet there had been no briefing.

“You deliberately tried to blindside some of us on this committee, and we don’t appreciate that,” barked Rep. Leonard Boswell, D-Iowa, former House agriculture subcommittee on livestock chairman, to Michael Taylor, FDA senior adviser on food safety (considered a friend of agribusiness, until the Sharfstein remarks).

But by early 2011, Kennedy had died, Sharfstein had left the FDA abruptly and without comment, and Big Meat had already showed lawmakers where they could put their cephalosporin ban. Congress seemed to have little appetite left to go up against Big Meat.

So it’s no surprise that in 2012, the FDA is waving through major livestock antibiotics, attaching Mickey Mouse restrictions on others, and U.S. meat is full of super bugs — even meat labeled “raised without antibiotics.”

: Martha Rosenberg frequently writes about the impact of the pharmaceutical, food and gun industries on public health. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and other outlets More Martha Rosenberg

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The recipe for security

A friend tells me about a doughnut tradition that's held her family together through tough times for generations

By Felisa Rogers

Jan's grandparents, Opal and Paul, with her father, Jerry (Credit: Courtesy of Jan Kinney)

Topics:Heirlooms, Food

The house is big and heavy-timbered, with log supports and ceiling beams hewn from trees that once grew nearby. Inside, there is chatter and light and the hiss of boiling grease; outside skeins of cloud settle over a dark winter forest.

Jan stands at the wooden kitchen island. She cuts neat circles from a rectangle of flattened dough. She is thin, with short graying hair and blue eyes that are at once friendly and shrewd. Her three granddaughters run screaming loops through the kitchen, and guests cluster around the bar inspecting the cocktail selection, but Jan seems unflustered by the crowd. She passes a platter of uncooked doughnuts to her son-in-law Lou, who mans a stock pot of bubbling oil.

As a general rule, I do not like doughnuts, but I make an exception once a winter. I’ve been attending the annual Kinney doughnut party since I was a kid. But it’s not just nostalgia that compels me to eat Kinney doughnuts — the powdered confections are piping hot, with a texture that is at once pillowy and chewy. I wash down a chocolate-filled doughnut hole with a French75, and the winter months ahead seem to promise cozy cheer instead of dreary gloom. As Jan’s granddaughter Opal chases past me, I think of parties in this house when I was little, of eating doughnuts till I was sick, and of the year it actually snowed and a fantastic wooden toboggan materialized. I remember, as I often do, Jan’s son Japhy, who was two months older than me and a hero of my childhood.

A few days after the party, Jan and I meet so that she can tell me more about the doughnut recipe’s background, about her grandparents, who migrated west in a Model T Ford loaded with all their earthly possessions. The plan is to walk while we talk. We drive to Jan’s favorite hiking spot in my car, a decrepit ’92 Honda Civic with no exhaust system to speak of. I’m a little embarrassed because Jan is a neat and orderly and extremely functional person, and the car is anything but. I’ve cleaned it up a little in her honor, but it’s beyond hope — the floor is covered in a thick layer of pine needles and dust. Jan is not surprised, of course. She’s known me all my life and views my foibles with a wry and expectant eye.

We park at the foot of a logging road. As expected, Jan exclaims about my inappropriate shoes and my hatlessness. Her concern is not unfounded — rain smatters the steep gravel road. As we ascend into a windy forest of giant firs, Jan recalls her grandparents’ relocation from Kansas to Oregon. 1931 was a hard year for the family: Jan’s grandfather Paul was out of work and his wife, Opal, had just lost a child. “An 18-month old girl,” Jan remembers with a precision that hurts. Opal didn’t want to leave their tight-knit German community, but Paul decided to go west. He’d heard there was work in Oregon. Opal acquiesced.

“There were two kids and two adults and she was massively pregnant with a third kid,” Jan says. “They packed the family and all their stuff into a Model T Ford, and they did not have a trailer. When they came to the mountains they just couldn’t make it up the roads. They had to offload stuff. But even then, the carburetor didn’t work going at a slant and there were areas when they had to put the car in reverse and go up the mountain in backwards. It was just epic. They were like the Joads — you know, from ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’”

Jan remembers her grandmother as neither severe nor especially sweet. “I always look at Grandma as someone who had so much to give to the world. And how could she do that within the constraints of the society at that time is really interesting to me,” Jan says. When I ask her about the basic tenets of Opal’s character, she answers right off the bat: “Opal? Safety, security, order. She was a classic German housefrau in that her house was always clean and orderly and it was important to her that it be that way … But at the same time she was very creative, which I think is why she was a good cook,” Jan muses. Opal made a point of bringing the kids together for an annual winter doughnut party, an old family tradition. “Always my grandmother’s kitchen,” Jan muses. “For me it was always about safety and security and warmth and acceptance. She liked cooking. She loved the presentation — the doughnuts were always about presentation, and that came through in how they were cooked. It wasn’t a chaotic scene when we were making doughnuts at her house.”

Jan’s own parents were young and eccentric, sometimes chaotic. Jan was an orderly little girl with a heavy sense of responsibility for her younger siblings. She saw her grandmother Opal as a haven. Although she is thankful that her artistic mother gifted her with an abiding curiosity and a love for reading, Jan looked to Opal for security. She remembers her grandmother bringing the family together through food: making sauerkraut, baking bread, fixing summer dinners bright with garden vegetables, frying perfect doughnuts.

The wind picks up and roils the branches of the great firs. Somewhere in the woods, a branch cracks. A blur crosses our path with the sound of wings beating air. Jan pauses in her story. “For the record,” Jan says, “that was a grouse.” A native of western Oregon, Jan has lived in the Oregon Coast Range for most of her life. She married at age 17 and she and her husband, Ray, moved out to the woods to start a family.

“You know, we moved to Deadwood with the intent of creating and being part of a larger community,” Jan says. She sees parallels between her rural community in Oregon and the community Opal left behind in Kansas. This surprises me because Deadwood, Ore., is an infamous enclave of hippies and rednecks, and Opal came from solid German Lutheran stock. As the forest opens up for a view of the adjacent mountains, Jan illuminates the similarities: Although her grandparents were Lutheran, Jan thinks that to them church was really about community, a gathering spot much like Deadwood’s community center and fire hall. “Their kids grew up with a neighborhood,” Jan says. “The parents remained lifelong friends. Cooking and eating was always at the center of social events. You knew people’s foibles and strengths. You accepted them for whatever, loved them even. There were no secrets, which keeps us accountable …” Jan now sees Deadwood as an extension of her own family, which is why she includes the community in the doughnut tradition that was once intended for the immediate family.

After Opal moved to Oregon from Kansas, she managed to get a job at the cannery in Eugene. After that she worked as a housekeeper until she was well into her 60s. Even though she was always busy, she took the time to cook and bake from scratch. From Opal, Jan learned to see cooking as a manifestation of love. She thinks Opal’s fixation with maintaining culinary traditions stems in equal measures from the security of her Kansas community and the uncertainty of her childhood home life.

“She had an insecurity,” Jan says. “When she was 4 or 5, her mother was five months pregnant with her second child, and she developed encephalitis and she died. So grandma lost her mother. Her father couldn’t cope with his wife’s death or with his little daughter, and he farmed her out to his parents. He remarried and eventually took Opal back, but as the much older sibling, she became a caregiver to her father and stepmother’s nine children.” Jan remembers Opal saying that her family never emphasized that she was the half-sister and not her stepmother’s biological daughter.

“So she wasn’t made to feel different?” I ask.

“I think she was, because she said she wasn’t,” Jan says definitely. “Why did she even talk about it if it wasn’t an issue?”

Opal’s story makes me think how our positive aspects are so often shaped in reaction to loss and hardship. In order to survive the vagaries of life, we mimic the people and activities that represent islands of solace. “I think one of the reasons that our family really centered on her traditions was that she was always determined to be the secure, safe person — and nobody was going to feel left out or abandoned,” Jan says. Opal created the sense of family and security she missed as a child, and Jan continued the tradition.

Jan’s family has now weathered the death of her son Japhy, her own battle with cancer, her husband Ray’s back problems and the rewarding but tumultuous experience of generational cohabitation: Jan and Ray now share their home with their grown daughter Mizu, her husband, Lou, their three little girls, and Jan’s mother, Margie. Food is still an important part of family life. Margie is a master gardener, so they are able to maintain Opal’s tradition of garden vegetables. Jan believes in making things from scratch, and every weekend, she bakes enough bread for the entire family. Like Opal, she struggles to find time for everything: After starting out as a young general assistant at a local clinic, she has worked her way up from the bottom to become Director of Quality at a hospital, a job that requires a two-hour commute daily. “Director of Quality” is a pretty apt title for Jan.

When I ask Jan her secret for surviving the long hours and the tumult of a large family, she says that her tongue is calloused from biting it, but then admits that her son-in-law probably feels the same way. This year they argued over the doughnut party. Lou wanted to serve cocktails and other types of fried food such as deep-fried cheese curds and calamari. Jan was resistant to modifying her family tradition. Now she concedes that Lou’s idea wasn’t so bad. “Isn’t that how traditions always are? Don’t they always change? For me the nucleus of the doughnuts is the family. And what that family looks like and when it happens … that’s where all the change happens.”

Opal’s Doughnuts (makes 18)

Equipment

2 bowls
Stock Pot
Doughnut cutter
Cooking thermometer
Paper towels

Ingredients

1 tablespoon yeast
¾ cup of warm milk
1/3 cup of sugar
¼ cup of shortening
1 teaspoon of salt
2 eggs
3-3 ½ cups of flour
Vegetable oil for frying.
Sugar to dust on doughnuts

Directions

In a large bowl, dissolve yeast in warm milk.
Add sugar to mixture.
In a smaller bowl, beat eggs and shortening together.
Add salt and 2 ½ cups of flour to the milk mixture.
Add the egg and butter mixture to the large bowl.
Beat well.
Gradually add more flour to make a moderately soft dough.
Beat or knead until smooth.
Shape dough into a ball and put ball in a greased bowl.
Put dough in a warm place to rise until it doubles (45-60 minutes).
Punch down.
On a lightly floured board, divide the dough in half.
Roll each piece out until it is ½-inch thick.
Cut doughnuts from dough using doughnut cutter. Put doughnuts on plates. Cover and let them rise for another 30 minutes.
Heat vegetable oil in a large pot or fryer.
When oil is 375 degrees, begin frying doughnuts.
Cook each doughnut for about one minute on each side.
Drain doughnuts on paper towels.
Roll doughnuts in sugar.

: Felisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at the Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More Felisa Rogers

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When Michelle Obama came for lunch

I'd been working as a line cook for just three months when the first lady showed up -- and ordered my dish

By Sophie Brickman

First Lady Michelle Obama (Credit: Reuters)

Topics:Food, Michelle Obama, Life stories

This article originally appeared on Gilt Taste.

In my dream scenario, titled “Michelle Obama Drops By for Lunch,” there are a few givens. I’m:

Clean;
Well-rested;
Impeccably dressed;
Well-versed in current events and prepared to deliver a handful of hilarious yet tasteful jokes on relevant topics; and
Ready to Dougie, if asked.

In reality, when Michelle came for lunch,

I hadn’t showered in two days;
I’d slept less than five hours each night for the previous three weeks, due to a recurring nightmare about burning risotto and disappearing pan handles;
I was in a carrot-spattered chef’s coat and oversize pants held up by a belt made of twisted Saran Wrap;
I hadn’t read a paper in weeks and felt comfortable conversing mainly about legumes; and
I’d spent the last week picking up heavy objects “properly,” according to a chiropractor, which required that I continually squat while sticking my butt out. As a result, I was unable to do a stiff-limbed waltz, let alone a shimmy.

I’d been working the lunch service as a line cook at New York City’s Gramercy Tavern for about three months when one morning I arrived to find a secret service agent inspecting my prep.

I froze. Had my sous chef called the FBI to investigate why my carrot puree always needed more salt? As I tried to remember the name of a good lawyer, our Executive Chef, Michael Anthony, motioned everyone to the pass.

“Listen up, guys,” he said, with a grin. “The first lady is on her way in for lunch with a few friends. Everything is going to run just as it would during a normal service, but we’re just going to be extra sharp today, OK?”

Right.

***

I studied social theory in college and, upon graduation, quickly realized that my degree was practical only if I wanted to foment a Marxist revolution. While working at a nonprofit, I found myself craving hard skills that could deliver instant enjoyment, so I enrolled in evening culinary school. I had no agenda, just a love of cooking and a vague notion of eventually writing about food.

I didn’t imagine I’d end up as a line cook. During school, I staged – or interned — at Jean-Georges. There, I spent days peeling and julienning carrots in a windowless basement, wearing a dorky hat signifying to all that I occupied the bottom rung of the kitchen brigade. Few people spoke to me, I snuck radish peelings for lunch because eating in the kitchen seemed to be a sign of weakness, and the closest I got to the master was when he sliced his morning bagel on my cutting board.

I’d all but sworn off professional kitchen work when, at the urging of a friend, I spent a day at Gramercy Tavern. Chef Anthony introduced himself, then invited me to watch him build a halibut dish, going from station to station, taking a little garlic from here, some thyme from there, a radish, some olives, a strawberry (really, a strawberry?). Around us, line cooks whirled through their prep, juggling pans and utensils, cracking jokes. One sang “chowder base” to the tune of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” – “muh muh my chowder base, muh my chowder base” – as he stirred a big pot. The atmosphere was exhilarating, lively — worlds apart from my previous stage.

Chef effortlessly navigated the line, anticipating the movements of his cooks so that no one bumped into anyone else. I tagged along, bumping into everyone. He cooked, tasted, then handed me a spoon. “Needs a little salt?” he asked. I tasted and shook my head no, baffled that the combination worked.

A few days later, to the surprise of friends, family and myself, I asked to be considered for a full-time position, and later took over the hot appetizer station, where I was responsible for three dishes: barley-carrot risotto, lamb ragu and, a dish added just a week prior to Michelle’s visit, spinach fettuccine with mushrooms.

***

Moments after Chef’s announcement, my fellow line cooks started taking bets on what the first lady would order: “$50 on char!” one called out. “$25 on the trout!” crowed another.

No one bet on any of my three dishes, myself included. She just didn’t seem like a pasta-for-lunch kind of gal.

When the computer spit out the first ticket and Howard, the sous chef, called out, “Obama, VIP,” I was so focused on readying my prep that I barely heard him read out her order: She’d start with a salad, and finish with an entrée portion of … my fettuccine.

For an instant, I was standing on the White House lawn against a backdrop of a giant American flag, expertly flipping mushrooms in slow-mo while the president clapped me on the back, laughing and chanting, “Pasta we can believe in!”

“Sophie!”

I came to. The appetizers had gone out and the kitchen was swarming with sous chefs, one of whom – we’ll call him Andy – was standing at my station.

“I’m going to be handling this,” he said, and when my face fell, he added, “Bring me seven perfect spinach leaves from the walk-in.”

“But— but—” I began to protest, but Andy was already in the zone, setting up his pans, tasting the pasta water for seasoning. I headed toward the stairs, fuming.

Yes, he was an experienced cook and I’d just started. I’d only made the dish a handful of times, and once, my mushrooms had burst into flame, nearly singing my eyebrows off.

But still, I thought as I passed the agent and tromped down the stairs. She picked my pasta. It was my dish. I could handle it. Couldn’t I?

I pushed open the door to the walk-in and proceeded to have a crisis of faith. What did it matter if the leaves were perfect? When they hit the pan, they’d wilt into a green blob anyway, I thought as I ripped open the bin of mizuna — the most expensive salad green in house — and angrily shoved a handful in my mouth. I didn’t even like mizuna. What am I doing in this kitchen anyway?! I grabbed another handful of mizuna, gathered my spinach, and headed back upstairs.

“Corner!” I shouted, rounding the bend. I returned to a kitchen crowded with waiters, busboys, sous chefs and Chef and instead of jostling for position, I paused by the secret service agent. This was the guy who would, presumably, throw himself in front of a bullet to protect the first lady. His eyes moved down to my spinach leaves and hovered there, briefly, before scanning up to meet mine. I gave him a shrug and quick smile, meant to convey, “We all do our part.” He moved his cold, dead eyes back to the kitchen.

Sous chefs, who rarely cooked food to order, were working alongside experienced line cooks, and Chef himself was correcting sauces, adding a spritz of lemon here, a dash of vinegar there, plating dishes and supervising all at once. I watched Andy accomplish in four simple moves what took me twice as many to do — drop the pasta, sear the mushrooms, reduce the sauce and heat the spinach pan. The person next to him asked for a pot, he asked for oil, and both gave the other what he needed without missing a beat. Every movement in the kitchen was quick, deliberate, focused.

“Soph, the spinach?”

I rushed to Andy and, in my most patriotic act to date, handed the perfect leaves over. Something clicked as I watched them hit the hot pan and instantly shrivel. I’d ironed my chef’s coat in culinary school not because it was the first step toward a clean, orderly kitchen, but to dissuade my instructor from referring to me as “la vagabonde,” which he did with regularity. I’d perfected my carrot-peeling swipe at Jean-Georges not to maximize efficiency, but because I harbored a ridiculous fantasy that Jean-Georges would single me out for my peeling skills and reward me with a truffle dinner. Here, I realized a truth of this high-functioning kitchen: Michelle would never know that the leaves I’d picked were the seven best leaves in the bin, but the kitchen would. These chefs pursued excellence for its sake alone.

Andy plated the tangle of pasta and mushrooms, Chef gave the dish a once-over and with his nod, I sprinkled some herbs on top. A waiter wiped the rim clean and whisked the plate out to the dining room. The whole episode, from the moment the entrée course was called until it went out, couldn’t have taken more than five minutes.

Instantly, the kitchen downshifted – one cook grabbed a sip of water, another wiped down his station, quick smiles were exchanged. Andy clapped me on the back and headed downstairs to prep for dinner service and I returned to my station, heady and conscious of my movements as never before. I glanced down at my spattered apron and quickly untied it, turned it inside-out, and put it back on. Howard caught my eye and nodded.

When the busboys returned with plates from Michelle’s table, I found the pasta dish. It was eaten clean, not a spinach leaf left. I felt a twinge of pride, then turned back to my work. Maybe next time, when the kitchen would be swarming with secret service agents, when the ticket spit out read “VIP, President,” I’d be at the stove.

: More Sophie Brickman

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Why Americans sing about food

Elvis helped cement a lyrical tradition where food stands in for everything from sex to rural nostalgia

By Felisa Rogers

Topics:Eatymology, Food, Music

Elvis Presley once said, “Ambition is a dream with a V-8 engine.” At once a gentleman and a rebel, a down-home boy and a global conquistador, the King, who would have celebrated his 77th birthday on Sunday, was a powerful amalgamation of American obsessions. The King loved fast cars. The King loved rock ‘n’ roll. The King loved fried food. And the King knew how to interpret America. Take food, for instance. Elvis was notoriously obsessed with food, and he sang quite a few songs about this favorite topic. But “Crawfish” and “Milk Cow Blues Boogie” say more about our culture than they say about the icon himself. After all, Elvis wasn’t a songwriter: He was drawing from a deep well. American music sizzles with barbecue grease and bubbles like red-eye gravy. Food is a metaphor for all things, from your baby’s biscuits to the King’s caviar.

What does our music say about us? When it comes to food, it says we have dirty minds. For example, Elvis cut “Milk Cow Blues Boogie” in 1955. It was his third record. Several country artists had already recorded the song, which is credited to a bootlegger and bluesman named Kokomo Arnold. “Milk Cow Blues” works perfectly as a blues, country and rock number, which illustrates how much the three types of music have in common when it comes to sentiment:

If you see my milk cow, lord, lord, send her home …
Since my milk cow left me I’ve been treated wrong …
I ain’t had no milk and butter since my cow’s been gone …

The portrayal of women as livestock and sex as butter is pretty typical of the blues tradition, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the lyrics reverberated up through American music over the course of the 20th century: The song has been recorded by everyone from Bob Dylan and the Kinks to Aerosmith, George Strait and Dead Moon.

Elvis funneled the longing, pain, hokey sentimentality and raunchiness of American roots music into the blender of rock ‘n’ roll. He was always frank about his influences; in a 1970 interview, he describes his sound: “It’s a combination of country music and gospel and rhythm and blues all combined. That’s really what it was. As a child I was influenced by all of that.”

Although gospel music soars above the earthly pleasures, food has long been the go-to topic for country and blues lyricists who wanted to spice up their tunes. Bluesmen have a particularly bizarre talent for turning legitimate and seemingly innocent cooking references into raunchy odes to doin’ the nasty. In contrast to later pop songs in which candy, sugar and fruit are the primary metaphors for sex, these old blues tunes are rich in culinary detail, which leads to some incongruous imagery. In “Fried Pie Blues,” Curley Weaver sings: “My baby baked my first biscuits, she baked them nice and brown. Well, it pleased me so well … she bake ‘em with the damper down.” The song encompasses what sounds like a real longing for an actual fried pie, old school cooking strategies that double as sexual metaphors, and steamier sentiments: “My baby she got a mojo; tryin’ to keep it in …”

Over the past hundred years, blues and jazz singers have appropriated every cut of meat for their bawdy purposes. Fats Waller gets frisky with “The Rump Steak Serenade”: “Big, juicy, nice and tender … the rump steak serenade!” Josh White takes it to the next level with “Pigmeat and Whisky Blues”: “I used to like her love, oh that hard pigmeat can’t be beat.” Not to be outdone, Memphis Minnie addresses her butcher:

I’m going to tell everybody I’ve got the best butcher man in town
He can slice your ham, he can cut it from the fat on down
He slice my porkchops and he grinds my sausage too …

A verse later she saucily demands: “I’ve got enough butcherin’ for you to do if you promise me you just only hush your mouth.” As Savannah Churchill sang with panache, “If you’re a hep cat, you like your meat fat.”

But while food in country music sometimes doubles for sex, it more often represents another American fixation: a longing for lost places. From the first days of the recording industry, record executives and promoters capitalized on town dwellers’ nostalgia for lost rustic roots. Most early country musicians were from the rural South, but it was industry professionals who convinced them to play up their “authenticity” by switching from their Sunday best to hokey down-home outfits: overalls and straw hats for men, gingham dresses for women.

Rootsy names were encouraged, bringing us the Fruit Jar Drinkers, the Possum Hunters and the Skillet Lickers. Naturally, down-home cooking worked its way into the recordings: The Possum Hunters stomped their way through “Ham Beats all Meat,” the Coon Creek Girls wanted to know how many biscuits you could eat, and Uncle Dave Macon growled about keeping his skillet good and greasy. If you can think of a fried food, there’s probably a country song about it.

In old country, blues and jazz tunes, down-home food also evokes hard times. Kokomo Arnold’s “Red Beans and Rice” is about being broke in Chicago and wanting to return to Georgia, a place with an abundance of red beans and rice and mercifully few “mean Chicago women.” These songs have a certain defiance: The lyrics imply that the hard life may be hard, but there’s a badass glory to it. If you want to summarize the rock ‘n’ roll attitude, look no further than Bessie Smith belting Coot Grant’s “Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer”:

I wanna pigfoot and a bottle of beer
Send me ’cause I don’t care
Slay me ’cause I don’t care
Gimme a reefer and a gang o’ gin
Slay me, ’cause I’m in my sin
Slay me ’cause I’m full of gin

Elvis himself was no stranger to hard times. He grew up wearing flour sack shirts, and the family often stretched a pot of beans and corn pone for nights on end. “Poke Salad Annie,” a staple of Elvis’s ’70s shows, describes a family reduced to eating pokeweed:

Some of you all never been down South too much …
I’m gonna tell you a little story, so you’ll understand where I’m talking about
Down there we have a plant that grows out in the woods and the fields,
and it looks something like a turnip green.
Everybody calls it Polk salad. Now that’s Polk salad.
Used to know a girl that lived down there and
she’d go out in the evenings to pick a mess of it …
Carry it home and cook it for supper, ’cause that’s about all they had to eat,
But they did all right.

It’s ironic that Elvis sang this song during the period when he was most removed from his hardscrabble youth: Elvis crooned about poke salad while his belly glittered in jewels and white satin. Yet, the excess of Elvis’ twilight years may well have been a direct result of the poverty of his childhood: Deprivation breeds fascination. You can see it in the King’s infamous fixation on food: Elvis ordered pork chops and gravy at all hours of the night to remind himself both of the comfort of his past (homey Southern favorites) and of his triumph over poverty (his ability to make riches materialize at the snap of his fingers). Oh, and probably also because pork chops are delicious.

As a child of the 1980s, I had an easy time understanding why Michael Jackson was the King of Pop, but I had harder time grasping why Elvis was the King of Rock. Why not Mick or Jimi or Chuck? But as an adult, I get it: In his rise and slow fall, the King mirrored both rock ‘n’ roll and America: from sweaty obscurity to rhinestone-studded excess. You don’t have to be a fan of the 12-bar blues to understand: This story speaks to all Americans. Elvis is King in America because he represents our country to a T: a hip young rebel who ended up overindulged, overprescribed, right wing and paranoid. If Elvis had gone broke, it’d be the perfect analogy. But take heart, America. Old Elvis was still kind of awesome. We’re only obsessed with his decline because he was once so damn beautiful. Maybe we see ourselves in that.

Besides, the King may be dead, but rock ‘n’ roll lives on. Musicians in the post-Elvis era have continued to make the most of food as a metaphor. In 1977, the Dead Boys stripped culinary sexual innuendo down to a brutal scream:

Look at me that way, bitch
Your face is gonna getta punch
I said I don’t need no cook girl
I need lunch!

Southern Culture on the Skids snacked all night on her “eight piece box” of fried chicken, and the Presidents of the United States of America reprised the country music tradition of using food to comment on the superiority of rural life. Other artists have used food to tackle U.S. history head-on: See John Mellencamp’s bizarre decision to write a song about Native American genocide that somehow boils down to deciding between “Hotdogs and Hamburgers.” It doesn’t get much more American than that.

: Felisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at the Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More Felisa Rogers