Letters to The Atlantic Monthly

In my last post, I encouraged you to write to The Atlantic Monthly Magazine after getting your hands on a copy of the Sept. 2007 issue. The email address is letters@theatlantic.com. In the meantime, I thought I would share with you both my letter as well as that of my friend and activist extraordinaire (and letter-writing machine), Patti Breitman.

Written by Patti Breitman:
I was simultaneously delighted and discouraged by Hard to Swallow by B.R. Myers. Delighted to read the truth about how animals are raised for food and how food writers, Michael Pollan in particular, but not alone, ignore the moral component when focusing on the taste of animal flesh. Discouraged to realize through my tears as I read, that it is so rare to see anything in the media about the cruelty involved in breeding, confining, and slaughtering animals to satisfy human habits. Thank you for printing this much neglected point of view. There is a reason that class trips are never to slaughterhouses or factory farms, and a reason that only vegetarians are willing to bear witness to the horrors perpetuated by the billions each year. I am indebted to B. R. Myers for pointing out how "foodies" make light of and a living from the suffering of other living beings.

Written by Me (Colleen Patrick-Goudreau):
I cannot thank you enough for publishing B.R. Myers' wonderful article ("Hard to Swallow") in your September 2007 issue. It is a powerful truth-telling piece that finally sheds light on the spurious claims and specious arguments of Michael Pollan and other "excuse-itarians," whose romantic depictions of something so ugly belies a pathological denial of reality. I've been writing about this for years, likening the public's response to his justifications for eating meat to Hans Christian Anderson's fable, The Emperor's New Clothes. In Anderson's morality tale, it takes a child to say what everyone knows is true but nobody would admit. The child's declaration that the emperor is wearing no clothes at all makes the public feel as duped as the emperor feels naked. Myers is the child in our own very real morality tale and skillfully reveals the gaping holes in Pollan's logic and the troublesome degree to which Pollan makes poetry out of pig slaughter. I have been waiting for a very long time for just one reviewer to take Pollan to task, and I am very grateful to Myers for doing so.

Hope At Last: A Book Critic Finally Takes Michael Pollan to Task (a.k.a. I Knew I Wasn't Crazy!)

As many of you know, the notion of “humane meat” or “humane any kind of animal product” is an oxymoron to me. There is simply no such thing. (See From Cradle to Grave: The Facts Behind “Humane” Eating.)

Over the years, I have become increasingly distressed by the romantic assertions posited by those who consider themselves “foodies” or “gourmands” or “slow-foodists” or “consumers of sustainable meat or humane meat or organic meat.” Anyone who’s ever been uncomfortable at the thought of killing animals for human consumption but who has resisted taking responsibility for it (i.e. most of us) has always sought to have their meat and eat it, too. That is, they figured if something was labeled in such a way that enabled them to enjoy their steak but still sleep at night, then that was good enough for them. So, they abandon their ideals of compassion, nonviolence, kindness or whatever it is that makes them feel inclined not to eat animals at all and put their trust in the very industries who have the most to gain from such spurious labels and feel-good marketing campaigns.

But alas, it wasn’t until the spring of 2006 with the publication of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma that meat-eating was elevated to such a degree that you’d think the very animals themselves gave their blessing. With lyrical language, Pollan turns pig slaughter into poetry and likens the consumption of animals’ bodies to a spiritual transcendence that “transforms the body of the world into our bodies and minds.” The romanticizing of something so ugly belies a desperate attempt to deny what’s true.

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, they say, and Pollan’s text is awash in all manner of sweeteners. For those who so desperately wanted to rid themselves of their nagging conscience and to wash clean their blood-stained hands, they now had their messiah, their liberator. Pollan became canonized, “ethical ranchers” became idolized, and veganism – the one true response to the violence inherent in turning beautiful beings into butchered bodies – became perceived as a naïve (and even dangerous) ideal. Pollan admits he “pities” the vegetarian, ironically (and arrogantly) asserting that “dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.”

With that, Pollan completely dismisses the idea of not eating animals at all, not because the arguments for veganism and animal rights aren’t convincing enough or sound enough or compelling enough but, in short, because he wants to keep eating animals. Period. Pure and simple. He says it himself: “If I believe in equality, and equality is based on interests rather than characteristics, then either I have to take the interests of the steer I'm eating into account or concede that I am a speciesist. For the time being, I decided to plead guilty as charged. I finished my steak.”

Throughout the book, he skillfully makes it appear as though he thoughtfully considers an alternative to killing animals for human consumption, but it is all a ruse. He is a meat-eater and wants to defend his meat-eating; his arguments against vegetarianism are unfounded and embarrassingly pedestrian. But for all the praise and accolades he received, not one reviewer ever questioned his logic. He kills a pig to “see if I could,” and not one reviewer or interviewer questioned this unethical decision, which, among other things, breeches the journalist’s code of ethics to “minimize harm.” I suppose, however, that the “harm” refers to human beings – not all beings. He uses the pathetic argument that humans are physically designed to eat animals and even says that we’re denying our heritage by not eating animals.

And nobody questioned any of this. Nobody!

Well, *I* did. And so did like-minded folks who, having no need to spend hundreds of pages defending an unnecessary habit, saw right through Pollan’s lofty language. But my blog posts and podcasts didn't exactly have the power to overturn the damage Pollan caused.

In my podcast version of my article: The Rise of the Excuse-itarians, I read Hans Christian Anderson’s fable, The Emperor’s New Clothes, because I find it a fitting analogy to the “sustainable meat” phenomenon. In summary, it’s a morality tale whose message is “Just because everyone else believes something is true, doesn't mean it is.” And it takes the voice of innocence, of truth, in the form of a little child to pierce the illusion and lift the veil from everyone’s eyes.

Well, I'm now thrilled to report that another voice has just pierced the illusion - and what a voice! B.R. Myers, a book critic for the Atlantic Monthly magazine, has written a fiercely honest criticism of Pollan’s book in the Sept. 2007 issue of the magazine. It’s called “Hard to Swallow: The gourmet’s ongoing failure to think in moral terms.” I ran to my local bookstore, sat down, and almost squealed with delight as I read it. In fact, I did squeal and sigh and cry, and I'm sure my fellow book patrons were wondering what the heck I was reading!

Myers adeptly scrutinizes Pollan’s arguments, chews them up, and spits them out. Though the doublespeak of such “excuse-itarians” as Michael Pollan has always been very clear to me, it was incredibly satisfying to have a respected writer agree that Pollan’s justifications leave as bitter a taste in his mouth as they do in mine. And to have it published in a magazine such as The Atlantic gives me great reason for hope.

I will be reading the article in my next podcast episode, but I highly recommend that everyone get themselves a copy and more importantly write a letter to The Atlantic Monthly magazine. The email address is letters@theatlantic.com. Thank them for publishing Myers piece, a powerful piece of truth-telling that recognizes that the emperor is indeed wearing no clothes.

All About Tofu - Part I

The versatile little soy bean is used to make such delicious foods as tofu, tempeh, miso, and soy milk, and yet it's misunderstood, especially here in the West. Tofu is derided, scoffed at, and even feared by some, and I'm here to set things right. Our little lesson may seem technical at first, but once you read it, I think you'll come away with a much better understanding of our high-protein friend and look with suspicion upon anyone who denigrates it. I think you'll also gain a new perspective of animal-based cheese, which far too many people think "they couldn't live without." When we look closer at its production, perhaps you just might change your mind.

Tofu originated in China about 2000 years ago, and while the details of its discovery are uncertain, legend has it that it was discovered by accident when a Chinese cook added the seaweed nigari to a pot of soybean milk, causing it to curdle, and the result was tofu.

Tofu was introduced into Japan in the 8th century, where it was originally known as "okabe," but was not called "tofu" until the 15th century, though tofu did not gain its great widespread popularity in Japan until the 17th century.

Tofu's popularity in the West has mirrored the increasing interest in healthier foods. First gaining more widespread attention during the 1960s, tofu has been skyrocketing in popularity ever since research has begun to reveal the many significant benefits of this food.
So, what is tofu? What is this white block of what is also called "bean curd"?

Tofu or Dofu (based on the Chinese spelling) is a food that is made in much the same way that people make dairy-based cheese. First, you coagulate soy milk.

Well, let's back up. As with cheese, when you make tofu, the first you need to start with is milk.

In the case of dairy-based cheese, in our crazy world, we use the milk of animals. To make tofu, we use soy milk. Now, most commercial tofu makers make their own soy milk, which anyone can do by soaking, grinding, boiling, and straining dried (or, less commonly, fresh) soybeans.

When you have your soy milk, you then need to add a coagulant. When you coagulate something, you cause it to curdle. In other words, you transform it from a liquid into a soft semisolid or solid mass. Most of us have seen curdling when cow’s milk starts to go bad and you see little semi-solid white lumps floating around. Those are curds. That’s a process of curdling to indicate that it’s spoiling, that it’s going sour.

But there are other ways to sour milk intentionally. You do this by adding an agent that will produce that souring effect. Acidic liquid substances are the most obvious, such as vinegar or lemon juice. For instance, and I talk about this in my new baking cookbook, to make “buttermilk,” all you need to do is add some lemon juice or vinegar to your non-dairy milk, and you’ve got what is sour milk – “i.e. buttermilk.”

So that you better understand the process of creating tofu, let me first talk a little about curdling cow’s milk before I continue with soy milk. For animal-based cheese, what is most often used as a curdling agent is rennet. Rennet is essentially a bunch of enzymes produced in the stomach of mammals to help the offspring digest the mother's milk. One of the enzymes causes the milk to coagulate, to curdle or separate into solids (curds) and liquid (whey). Now you understand what Little Miss Muffet was eating. Couldn’t tell ya why she’d wanna eat it, but now at least you know what it is: curds and whey are the solid and liquid results of curdled milk.

For cow’s milk cheese, the rennet is extracted from the fourth stomach of young calves. And where would you find an abundance of young calf stomachs? The veal industry, of course. The stomachs used to get rennet are a by-product of veal production. Each ruminant animal produces the special kind of rennet needed to digest that species' mother's milk, so there is kid-goat rennet especially for goat’s milk cheese and lamb-rennet for sheep’s-milk cheese.

Let's pause for a moment to examine a few health considerataions. I mentioned that increased acidity in cow’s milk causes curdling. Let’s go a little deeper. What’s actually happening is that the milk proteins (the casein) is tangling up into solid masses or "curds.” The rest, which contains only whey proteins, is the whey. In cow's milk, 80%-87% of the proteins are caseins.

If you haven’t yet read T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study, I can’t recommend it highly enough. I urge you to read it. Campbell is a highly respected researcher and policy advisor in the field of diet and cancer. He is Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University and has had a long career in research, teaching and development of national/international studies on diet, nutrition and health.

About casein he says that it is the “#1 carcinogen (i.e. cancer-causing substance) that people come in contact with on a daily basis.” We’re consuming, drinking, swallowing, digesting this stuff every time we drink animal milk or eat animal-based cheese. And in cheese it’s even worse, because the casein is super concentrated.

So back to rennet, there is vegetarian rennet, and sometimes it’s used in the production of kosher cheeses but just keep in mind that though rennet can be produced by plants that have coagulating properties (such as nettles, thistles, or mallow – as in marshmallow – you probably know that marshmallows that are made with gelatin (the boiled hooves, bones, and other leftover body parts of the slaughter industry), but they used to be made with the marshmallow plant!).

Though plant-based rennet is technically possible to create, nearly all “vegetarian” kosher cheeses are produced with either microbial rennet or genetically modified rennet. Microbial rennet is produced by using certain molds that are fermented. Apparently, using microbial rennet produces a slightly bitter tasting cheese, so with the development of genetic engineering, scientists starting using calf genes to modify some bacteria, fungus or yeast to make them produce Chymosin, one of the enzymes found in rennet. Chymosin produced by genetically modified organisms was the first artificially produced enzyme to be registered and allowed by the FDA in the USA. In 1999, about 60% of U.S. hard cheese was made with genetically engineered Chymosin.

When we eat animal-based cheese, we're consuming either the by-products of the veal industry or genetically engineered enzymes based on calf genes.

So that’s rennet – used to curdle animal milk to make animal-based cheese. Now we can return to tofu.

As I said, you have to add a coagulant to your soy milk to curdle it, and for commercial tofu, the two coagulant types most commonly added are acid-based and salt-based.

SALT COAGULANTS

-An example of a salt-based coagulant is calcium sulfate, which is essentially tasteless. Tofu that’s made with calcium sulfate is obviously rich in calcium, and such tofu is pretty common. Tofu made with calcium sulfate tends to be Chinese-style tofu, which is tender but slightly brittle in texture.

-Other salt coagulants used are Chloride-type Nigari salts - Magnesium chloride and calcium chloride. These are the coagulants used to make Japanese-style tofu with a smooth and tender texture. Calcium chloride is a common coagulant for tofu in North America. You’ll recognize this coagulant on the list of ingredients, because it will most likely say Nigari, which consists primarily of magnesium chloride. It’s produced from seawater after the sodium chloride is removed and the water evaporated.

ACID COAGULANTS

Another coagulant that’s used – mostly for silken tofu or soft – is Glucono delta-lactone (GDL), a naturally occurring organic acid, which produces a very fine textured tofu that is almost jelly-like. Think silken tofu.

Tofu producers may choose to use one or more of these coagulants, as they each play a role in producing a desired texture in the finished tofu. So when you notice a different taste or texture in tofu depending on the brand, this is why. A lot of it depends on the coagulant used. The coagulant mixture is dissolved into water, and the solution is then stirred into boiled soy milk until the mixture curdles.

So, now you’ve got your curds, which, like in the process of making cheese, you press these curds. The curds are processed differently depending on the form of tofu that is being made. For soft silken tofu, the soy milk is curdled directly in the tofu's selling package. For standard firm Asian tofu, the soy curd is cut and strained of excess liquid using cheese cloth or muslin and then lightly pressed to produce a soft cake. Firmer tofus are further pressed to remove even more liquid.

In Part II, we'll talk about the various texture varieties of tofu. That's it. Science lesson over.

(Visit CompassionateCooks.com for tofu recipes or for our DVD, in which we demonstrate various uses with tofu, such as our Veggie Stir-Fry with Peanut Sauce and Eggless Egg Salad.)

Maternal Instincts Belong to All Animals

Humans have claimed so much over non-human animals; we deny them everything that’s natural to them. We manipulate them, mutilate them, enslave them and deny them their most basic, basic desires. Most egregiously, we deny mothers their own babies. We deny them the most basic desire to nurse their babies and groom them and protect them.

This is especially the case in our exploitation of cows for their milk and you can also see this in the exploitation of female horses (mares) who are kept pregnant to produce a particular hormone that is used in the production of Premarin, which is an estrogen replacement therapy for post-menopausal women. Though there are ways to produce this with synthetic materials, which are just as effective, instead, Wyeth-Ayerst, the company that manufactures Premarin, uses the urine of pregnant mares. The word Premarin is an acronymn of “Pregnant Mare’s Urine.” Just for this product, 80,000 horses live their entire lives penned in tiny stalls, unable to turn around or meaningfully lie down, they’re deprived of water because it would dilute their urine, they’re repeatedly impregnated, and they’re continuously connected to plumbing collecting that collects the urine. When they can no longer produce adequately, they are slaughtered, and the babies of these mares are either put in stalls or slaughtered.

There is absolutely no way to justify this stuff. Humans can claim no moral superiority over other animals when we do this kind of thing willfully and knowingly, particularly when it’s not necessary. How can we say that we’re the most advanced species on Earth when we continually choose profits over principles? How can we say we’re the most advanced species on Earth when we use and abuse animals, especially when alternatives are available? We simply cannot claim to be the "higher" species. And we certainly do not have the corner on motherhood.

Despite our desperate attempt to remove ourselves from our non-human brethren, we are animals, and we have a lot more animal instincts than we like to admit. Every woman will tell you that her drive to protect her young - what we call maternal instinct – is pure and fierce and real. I mean we call it an “instinct” – the maternal instinct.

And any right-minded person would agree that this extinct exists in ALL animals. If we know that to be true and real, then how can we so arrogantly deny animals their desire to fulfill that very basic, fierce, real, powerful instinct? I wonder if it's because we come to call the maternal instinct in humans “love” and if we call it “love” in non-human animals, we’re accused of anthropomorphizing.

The one thing each and every individual should be able to claim is the protection of his or her own body. To violate someone’s body is the most egregious crime we can commit. And we do it again and again and again. I think perhaps no animal suffers like the female who endures pregnancy after pregnancy (cows are pregnant as long as humans and horses are pregnant for 11 months) only to have her baby dragged away from her. Ask any farmer what the experience is like taking a calf away from his or her mother. Every instinct of the mother is in full gear, as she tries desperately to take her baby back but is powerless to do so because the humans have already decided against this. She loses – everytime.

Susie Coston is the director of Farm Sanctuary’s New York shelter and has many, many wonderful stories to tell, including one about Bertha and Robin. In 2004, Farm Sanctuary helped rescue 26 cattle from a cruelty case in Pennsylvania. There were 4 calves and 22 cows.

When the cattle first arrived, some of the cows were pregnant, and one of them was Bertha, who after giving birth, didn’t want to nurse her baby. She kept pushing him away, and the staff learned very quickly that it was because her mastitis was so bad that it was really painful for her to nurse.

Mastitis is a painful infection of the udders that affects one in four dairy cows and it manifests itself as an infected, (sometimes hugely) enlarged udder. Though Bertha was being kept on a “beef” operation, she had no doubt been used for many years as a breeding cow and had many babies taken away from her over the years to be killed for steak or prime rib. She most likely developed her mastitis from the filth that she was forced to live in before she was rescued.

So, Bertha couldn’t nurse her baby boy, who was named Robin, but she would still watch the staff very carefully when they bottle-fed him and make sure he was okay. Then one day, when her mastitis was cleared up and she felt no pain, she nursed Robin for the first time. It was a very emotional day for everyone, as they watched her able to feed her baby herself for the first time – and groom him and tend to him.

Three years later, Robin is now 2,000 pounds, and whenever he gets scared, he runs over to his mother and nurses. He’s 2,000 pounds, and the first thing he does when he’s nervous or scared (when he hears a large truck or something like that) is run over to nurse from his mom.

And this bond goes both ways.

Sadly, Bertha has cancer and is dying. She’s about 20 years old now (cattle can live up to 25 years, but we kill them at anywhere from 1 day young (for "bob veal") to 16 weeks (in the case of "veal") to 4 or 5 years (in the case of dairy cows). The first time Bertha was brought to the hospital, she was so upset that she wouldn’t eat. She was just really depressed. So in response, they decided to bring Robin to the hospital to be with his mom, which is no small task, and Bertha was fine. This is the bond they have. This is the bond of mothers and their children. It doesn't matter what species you are.