Rethinking Frankenfoods

I'm one, lucky sonuvabitch. Why? Because I have a great job and I live by the beach close to a major metropolitan center. Because of this, I have access to everything I need to support my hoighty-toighty, organic, locavore habit.  I can bike to one of three different farmers markets and when I get a hankerin' for a hunk o' protein, I walk down to the Redondo Beach Pier and grab a locally-caught red snapper.

My location and my steady (albeit not stellar) income allow me to make Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food my culinary canon. I eat organic, local food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Problem is, here in Los Angeles, it's easy to eat only seasonal, locally-grown veggies, but what if you live in Alaska? Not so much with the winter squash and citrus. Similarly, it's easy for me to insist you eat only grass-fed, hormone-free beef, but if you're just scrapping by on your paycheck while feeding a family of 6? Who cares what goes into the cow's mouth? You have other mouths to worry about.

Those are usually some of the first points that trollers make on my blog when I extol the virtues of cruelty-free eggs or summer peaches or whatever. Not only does most of the world not have access to this stuff, but with our exploding world population, traditional methods simply can't support them all. They have a point. While I love watching hardcore sustainable farmers like Joel Salatan at Polyface Farms in action, I have a hard time believing that set-ups like that can sustain the diets of 7 billion people. There are too many of us. In other words, we've screwed ourselves out of this simple, sustainable solution by screwing too much.



So how do we fix this? Please don't answer battery cage hens and feedlots. As much as I believe that it's well within our rights as humans to eat other animals, I just don't see how it's our right to force them into living tortured, short, drug-adled lives in shoeboxes or their own shit. I mean, sure, being well-doped and dying young was good enough for Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain, but at least they got bigger hotel suites.

And, of course, there's monoculture, where you're, for lack of a better term, fucking the earth. Monoculture farms do away with crop rotation, instead planting GMO corn and soy from the same soil over and over, dumping chemicals in the dirt to keep nutrients up. If it isn't completely obvious to you why this is bad, check out an ever-growing list of documentaries, from King Corn, to Food, Inc., to The Future of Food.

(I'm going to pause here to personally address any angry agronomists reading this and getting their overalls in a bunch because a city slicker doesn't have any right to talk about farming. Relax, Mr. Green Jeans, I'm on your side. The documentaries I mentioned above describe in great detail how Big Agra like Monsanto is making millions screwing y'all over.)

So I'm wondering. Is there a third way? Maybe we can't all eat cherries right off the tree and have a halibut jump into our plate and fillet itself come suppertime, but instead of continuing to exploit over-exploited resources, how about exploiting a resource that can handle a little exploitation?

A cool explain of this is whey. For generations, this white liquid was considered nothing more than a useless byproduct from cheese production. Then the supplement industry discovered that it's actually a great source of complete protein. I'm willing to bet only a tiny fraction of the whey out there is used in those chocolate and vanilla wonder tubs. Can you imagine how many people we could feed if we devoted more energy to properly using all the whey the dairy industry discards?

I'm also interested in the trend to use sustainably-fished seafood as a source for Omega-3 sups, such as krill, anchovies, and trout. In fact, here's a cool article about a recent study on using trout protein as an omega-3 source for "functional foods."

Admittedly, this gets into frankenfood territory, something I've always spoken out loudly against, but maybe I need to reconsider. Maybe if we're smart about it and test things properly, it makes sense to investigate under-utilized foods. Sure, it might burn a few extra food miles, but the simple fact is, in the 21st century, sometimes you just gotta drive to dinner.