Moon shot

One of the nice things about having a digital camera - not that this is a novel thing these days - is that you can take lots of photos in the hope that one will turn out.

I thought that this one was pretty cool.

Pink slime, it's what's for dinner!

According to recent news stories (here and here), the USDA has approved the use of so-called "lean textured fine beef" or "boneless lean beef trimmings", aka "pink slime", in school meals.


Pink slime is basically recovered beef meat that has been treated with ammonia gas. In this case, "recovered" refers to the fact that this meat used to be deemed unsuitable for human consumption, in part because slaughter conditions made unhealthy by exposing it to cow feces. It is "recovered" in the sense that it's no longer used as dog food. In other words, it's recovered because it now generates a higher revenue than it used to.

If you live in the USA, pink slime can be part of your hamburger today, and you'll never know it because it doesn't have to be labeled - after all, it's just meat.

If this seems strange to you, it's because it is.

Pink slime might well epitomize the problem of industrial meat production. We have animals that are slaughtered in factories, their carcases treated with toxic chemicals, and the resulting "meat" sold to unwitting consumers. At the same time, the USDA refuses to mandate clear labeling thereby preventing consumers from making informed purchasing decisions.

Digression: why oppose labeling? those with nothing to hide will not fear labeling requirements, unless it's the cost of the label that's the problem??


To argue, as the president of the American Meat Institute, that pink slime reduces waste and is therefore a "sustainable" product is to insult the intelligence of one's audience. There is nothing sustainable about the mode of production that produces pink slime. Industrial meat production is, by its very nature, unsustainable, as argued elsewhere on this blog. While I do not doubt that producing and selling pink slime is financially profitable, its production cannot transform an unsustainable industry into a sustainable one. To invoke sustainability is disingenuous, if not outright mendacious.

Personally, I sidestep this entire problem by not eating much hamburger to start with. If I do, I buy it straight from my butcher and watch him grind it for me using his refrigerated grinder - I know exactly what cut of beef he's using to make my hamburger.

If you don't have access to a butcher, or if your butcher won't grind your beef to order, you have three choices if you want to be sure to avoid pink slime:

• grind your own hamburger
• eliminate hamburger from your diet
• shop only at supermarkets that guarantee that their ground beef is "pink slime"-free. There is a list of supermarkets in the ABC story linked above.

If your supermarket isn't on ABC's list, you could ask what their policy is on pink slime. I know I would.

The Human Cost of Animal Suffering

In a column in the New York Times, Mark Bittman discusses some implications of industrialized meat production.

He makes some interesting points, most notably that the disconnect between animal slaughter and the vast majority of meat consumers has insulated those consumers from the realities of meat production, and allowed them to abdicate their responsibilities as meat eaters.

These responsibilities, as I discussed in previous posts, include sticking to the inter-species "contract" established between livestock and humans:

• Humans provide comfort, food, veterinary care, evolutionary advantages, and a humane death to their livestock.
• In return, the livestock provide their meat, skin, milk, etc...

Clearly, this compact is not made at the individual level, but it hard to argue that as species, cows, pigs, ducks, etc... have not benefited from their symbiotic relationship with humans.

The industrialization of meat production violates all of the humans' obligations under the "contract". Animals are raised in uncomfortable conditions, given unhealthy foods, pumped with hormones and antibiotics, culled instead of cured, and slaughtered in abhorrent conditions.  As consumers, we are responsible for the way in which the products we buy are produced: with our dollars/euros/yens, we agree to participate (or not) as the final rung in the production chain. This means that by consuming industrial meat, each one of us is endorsing the violation of the inter-species contract described above.

I'd like to think that most meat consumers are willfully or unwillingly ignorant of the manner in which their meat is produced, and that is why the industry is able to operate as it does. At the same time, it is fairly clear that the industry has taken great pains to hide its practices, sensing, perhaps rightly, that knowledge might bring on scrutiny and reduced meat consumption.

Petit salé aux lentilles - salt pork with lentils

It's still winter, and so it's still slow-cooking season. This week my daughter and I tried a very easy dish: salt pork with lentils (petit salé aux lentilles). This is a traditional French dish that is often served in cafeterias and such because it doesn't have many ingredients and can cook without much supervision.

The trick is to find a good piece of salt pork, and possibly a nice thick sausage to go with it. You can use any piece of salt pork, depending on your budget or appetite. This time around, I used a piece of pork shoulder, from the top of the shoulder (palette). This is the "blade" or "blade shoulder" in the US and UK systems. If you want to make a true-to-tradition petit salé, you can also add a Morteau sausage.

As always, you start by assembling the ingredients. In this case, I went for a slightly fancy stock, with an eye to making soup with it afterwards. My broth had carrots, onions, black radish, leaks (white and green parts), kohlrabi (chou-rave) with its leaves, pork belly, herbs (parsley, rosemary, thyme), cloves, garlic, and peppercorns. You get to eat all of the vegetables in the end, so it's not a loss... You can stick to carrots and onions if you'd like.

Next step, put the well-rinsed piece of salt-pork in a pan of cold water and bring to the boil. When the water boils, take the meat out and empty the water. Be sure to trim any excess fat off, as it won't be grilling away but rather going into the broth.

 

While the water is boiling, prep the vegetables for the broth, enlist your 4 year old if necessary

Tie all of the herbs into a bundle so that you can fish them out at the end. Note that this doesn't work as well as advertised, and I think I am going to buy one of these soon (or this). This is a good time to teach your child how to tie a knot, without the pressure of rushing off to school in the morning and without being bent over to tie a shoelace.

 

The broth ingredients, together with the clove-studed onion.

Put everything back into the pan once the salty water's been thrown out (great task for a small child).

Pour water over the whole thing, cover, and boil slowly for 2 hours or so. Don't worry if the pot is very full: the veggies will shrink over time. You should not add any salt, as the meat will provide all that you need.

 

Even though this is a stand-alone meal, you can prepare some side dishes in the meantime. We glazed some yellow turnips and and onions. My daughter has become quite the expert peeler over the last month, and so I delegated the turnips to her while I took care of the onions. As it happens, onions will sting your eyes more if you're shorter, as your eyes will be closer to the chopping board. This is therefore not a good task for a 4 year old.

Once again, this is not a dish that looks all that good at the end (so no photo), but it sure is delicious!

Pot Au Feu - with children

I'm back with more experiments in meat-cooking. This being winter, it's good to undertaken slow-cooking projects that won't be as appetizing in the warmer months (to the extent that it gets warm at all in Paris, but that's another story). 

Last weekend, my daughter and I made this very tasty French dish called a pot-au-feu, which despite its rather scary name, does not involve throwing anything into a fire. It's a slow-cooked, extremely simple beef dish that is hearty and warm and makes for great leftovers.

The premise of pot-au-feu is that if you cook vegetables and meat together long enough, you'll end up with delicious veggies, tender meat, and tasty broth, all with minimal supervision or work. Of course, it gets a little more complicated if you try to involve little hands, but that's part of the fun.

HFW has a recipe for this dish, but I didn't follow it completely, in part because my wife won't let me cook with things like beef tongue (which is a bummer, because it's yummy).

I went to the market and picked up a variety of vegetables to give the dish color, flavor, and texture.

I used the following: carrots, Jerusalem artichokes, heirloom purple carrots, turnips, parsnips, onions, black radish (that large black thing - it's white inside), and leeks.

For meat, I used cheek (leftmost below), paleron (center), which is a piece of chuck in American beef-cutting, and a saw-off veal leg bone for marrow (rightmost).

We had to peel all of the vegetables, and my daughter helped with the turnip. She managed it despite the turnip being quite big for her hands. It helps that we have an awesome (and safe) peeler. So awesome that we actually take it on vacation with us.

The heirloom carrots were a bit of a bust, seeing how they're just orange on the inside...

Once you've prepped, you boil the meat by itself for about 10 minutes, or until the foam becomes white. You remove all of the brown/gray foam as it forms and throw it out.

Once you've got your meat where you want it, you just throw the vegetables in, and simmer for 3-4 hours. You can't really overcook pot-au-feu, but you can under-cook it, so be on the safe side. Just be sure to add enough liquid to cover everything at the beginning and add some herbs to give the broth flavor.

Rinsing herbs in the sink is a good task for a 4 year old. I used parsley, rosemary, and thyme (no sage...) because it's what I had. For spices, I used black pepper and a couple of cloves. Of course, I put a couple of garlic cloves in as well.

Predicting, rightly, that the kids wouldn't be so keen to eat mushy turnip (all the veggies end up mushy, but that's to be expected), we also prepared some sautéed potatoes and carrots on the side. With the right supervision, and a sufficiently-sharp knife, a 4 year old can chop potatoes. In my opinion, it's safer with a sharper knife because there's less risk of slipping. Adult supervision is paramount, needless to say.

 

In my opinion, carrots are too hard, and therefore dangerous, for a child to chop, and so I prepared those. Spooning out lard, on the other hand, is perfect.

Learning to clean up after yourself is a fundamental cooking skill, and it's always easier if your daughter has a Cinderella obsession...

After 4 hours of cooking, you end up with a rather unimpressive dish, but it is melt-in-your-mouth delicious. In this particular case, the purple carrots lost their color and ran all over the other veggies, which all ended up with a dull purple hue - note to self: don't cook with those carrots again, unless they are by themselves or in a salad. It wasn't exactly lovely to look at, but it was mighty tasty. Serve with mustard and cornichons or pickles.

If you're like me, you'll make too much of this, and have leftovers. In the River Cottage Meat Book, HFW recommends pan frying the leftover meat in a bit of oil. I tried this and it's absolutely delicious because the fibrous meat will break down and fry fiber-by-fiber, leaving you with a crunchy treat. You can serve the leftover vegetables in the broth.

The crunchy meat is so good that I am tempted to modify the way I serve this next time: keep half of the meat in its melt-in-your-mouth soft state and fry the rest. Serve together for added texture and flavor.

Why we pay for water - a digression, part 2

The problem

Water utilities around the world are struggling to make ends meet, particularly in the developing world, and as a result have trouble providing basic services to ever growing populations.

The price of water is a highly political and emotional subject and some people will argue in the same breath for free or cheap water for all on the one hand, and for environmental conservation on the other.

I intend to show that this position is both illogical and irresponsible, and to propose a solution to make water affordable to all to ensure access and expensive to all to ensure conservation.

Before going any further, it is important to point out that one rarely pays for water itself, but rather for water service. The distinction is important: you pay for the convenience of having water come to your taps (hopefully 24/7), not for the resource itself, which is not for sale. In some cases, the government applies a water tax or levy that is meant to compensate the state/community for the uptake of raw water - this is a good idea that promotes conservation, but it is a tax, and not a fee levied by the service provider, be they public or private.

The reasons behind the problem
In a previous post, I discussed the technical elements of a water/wastewater system. In theory, the price of water/wastewater, as paid by consumers, should reflect the expense of constructing/ replacing, maintaining, and operating a water/wastewater system on a per volume basis over the long term. This is to say that each consumer should pay according to the amount of water consumed, and to the amount of pollution produced. This has the following advantages:

• transparency: it is clear what the water tariff pays for
• water service pays for water service: there are no subsidies and water/wastewater service operator is encouraged to be efficient, both technically and financially.
• polluter-pays principle: applies to wastewater and states that each should pay according to the level of damage done to the environment (a brewery does not pollute like a house)

Unfortunately, in the real world, this is not what happens.Water service regulators put customers into categories (domestic, industrial, institutional, etc...) and apply different tariffs to different categories, sometimes using one to subsidize the other for political gain. Politicians also subsidize the construction of infrastructure, or even (gasp!) the operations of utility companies so that they can keep tariffs artificially low - again for short-term political gain and at the expense of long-term management best-practices. Sometimes, they'll even take what little cash has been collected by the utility to fund other projects (nobody's ever taken a publicity photo in front a buried pipe) - particularly if the utility operates as a city department rather than as a company (public or private).

It gets worse...
With artificially low prices, consumers are encouraged to over-consume, which in turns leads to the construction of needlessly large (and expensive) new infrastructure. Starved for revenue, the utility does not have the resources to maintain its growing infrastructure, which slowly falls apart. This negative cycle is completed when service quality is reduced, leading to the impossibility of raising tariffs to right the situation. This is something that I have observed first-hand in countless places around the world.

To break this cycle, we need a solution that will:

• guarantee that the utility company has the revenue necessary to meet its technical obligations and maintain high-quality service to all
• ensure that everyone can afford to meet their basic water and sanitation needs, including (and in particular) the poorest who tend to consume the least.
• encourages conservation by all members of society, including (and especially) the richest who tend to consume the most

The issue of affordability of water/wastewater services has been extensively researched by the likes of the World Bank. The consensus is that people (and the poorest in particular) can afford to pay up to 4-5% of their income for 24/7 water/wastewater service.

To ensure that the poorest meet their needs, a variety of tools have been imagined, the most common of which are block tariffs, whereby the price of a cubic meter (or gallon) of water increases as consumption increases. In this way, those who consume more water (typically the rich) subsidize those who consumer less (typically the poor).  This is a good-but-not-perfect system that does not guarantee that the very poor will be able to afford water/wastewater or will have an incentive to conserve water.

My proposal
I propose that the tariff each household is charged for water should be on a strict volumetric basis (per cubic meter or gallon) and proportional to this household's taxable income divided by household size. This is, I realize, a radical proposal that is sure to anger libertarians will not want a utility having access to their revenue information. However, it is the best way to ensure that each household pays a "fair" price for water/wastewater service, according to its ability to afford it. The volumetric price would be set so that each household would pay 4-5% of their income to meet their basic needs (roughly on the order of 100-150 liters per person and per day), no matter what their income level might be. Any surplus revenue to the water utility could be used to for water conservation or resource protection projects, or paid as tax to the government.

Unlike for many other goods, nothing can substitute for water, and so there is no way for the poor to consumer 'cheaper' water without risking their health. At the same time, the ability of the rich to pay for and use water for non-basic needs is an issue that concerns everyone, not just  those doing the 'water wasting'. All of us have a stake in preserving common water resources and in setting prices sufficiently high that all of us have an incentive to save water.

There is no God-given right to consume large amounts of water just because one can afford it. At the same time, it is morally and politically necessary to ensure that even the poorest can consume the water they need.

Because all societies have income disparity, the only way to meet our two objectives (affordability by all and conservation by all) is to index the price of a unit of water to our income. In Finland, the penalty for traffic violations is indexed on one's income, and that is where I got this idea.

The price of water - a digression, part 1

Allow me to stray a bit from my self-assigned task of blogging about meat eating and, somewhat inspired by last few posts, to digress into my professional interests: water.

As an engineer primarily focused on the financial aspects of water service provision, I have developed some knowledge of what it takes - technically and financially - to bring water to your tap and to take sewerage back out again. This first post will address the technical aspects.

To put it briefly, the water part of the system is composed of the following:

• an intake, where raw water is taken from the environment : wells, river or lake intakes, rainwater harvest, etc...
• a water treatment plant, which is more or less sophisticated depending on the quality of the raw water
• a distribution system, which is more or less extensive depending on the size of the city and the density of the population (sometimes 1000s of km for a single city) and almost always includes reservoirs or water towers
• pumping stations, which keep the water pipes under pressure to ensure that pollutants cannot enter the system through leaks - better to waste some water than to allow MTBE (for example) to enter through a cracked pipe - and to move water uphill when needed.
• house or building connections, where meters measure the flow of water into households.

The wastewater part of the system is the mirror image of the water system:

• house connections through which sewerage will flow into the collection network
• a collection network, preferably not under pressure to prevent the occurrence of anaerobic conditions and leaks to the environment
• pumping stations to move waste uphill, when necessary
• a wastewater treatment plant to treat the sewerage - more or less sophisticated depending on the nature of the sewerage, the sensitivity of receiving waters, and the regulatory environment
• an outflow pipe, to discharge the treated wastewater into the environment.

An artists' view of the systems can be found below (credit: Moira Wu)

Obviously, building, maintaining, and operating these infrastructures is very expensive, and they must be operational 24/7. This is both a matter of convenience and public health. In addition, empty water pipes are subject to infiltration from ground pollutants (see above), and you should never drink tap water in a city where supply is not available on a 24/7 basis. Costs are directly linked to the quality of intake water, the required capacity of infrastructure, the required quality of drinking water (up to or beyond WHO guidelines), the terrain, and the required quality of treated effluent.

In principle, the burden for recovering the cost of investment, maintenance, and operations should be born by consumers, according to how much they consume and how much they pollute (industries pollute water more than toilets, usually). In practice, costs can greatly exceed the population's ability to pay and regulations around the world vary greatly so that this rule is not always applied.

Next post: how much you should pay for water.

Meat - it messes with water, part 2

One of things that I did not write about in my previous post is the impact of antibiotics on water systems and on water supply.

As HFW points out, livestock raised in intensive farms are often fed growth-enhancing antibiotics, which also serve another purpose: they combat the infections that befall livestock living in the cramped, insalubrious conditions of factory farms.

You might think that this is all well, except that antibiotics are deadly, in that they kill bacteria - good and bad. When livestock is pumped full of medicine, some of it passes out through body waste and finds itself in the environment, where it can have unpredictable effects on aquatic ecosystems and water quality. The same goes for the hormones routinely given to cattle in the US to boost milk production - hormones which are banned in most other industrialized countries.

Lastly, and while I am neither a biologist nor a doctor, I'll bet that the overconsumption of antibiotics by livestock could have the same impact as in humans and could lead to new and dangerous super-bugs.
All this to say that the impacts of intensive farming on water quality and aquatic ecosystems are complex and most likely significant. Further argument for staying away from factory meat.

Meat - it messes with water

As promised, I am going to revisit the environmental issues that surround animal husbandry with a particular focus on water.

Before we proceed any further, I have to digress a bit into the field of water chemistry, but don't worry, I'll keep this simple.

Water is "clean" when the ecosystem that lives in it thrives. This ecosystem requires nutrients, which at the most basic level are carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus (C, N, P). Under normal conditions, bacteria and algae will oxidize these chemicals to grow. As you might have noticed, bacteria are not known for being braniacs and so they'll eat and multiply until they run out of something, be it nutrients or oxygen.


At the simplest level, one of the ways in which water becomes "dirty" or "polluted" is when there is so much C, N, P in it that the bacteria and algae consume all of the oxygen, leaving none - or not enough - for the fish or the rest of the ecosystem. To take it slightly further, the ecosystem can be severely harmed by the intrusion of excess C, N, P, even if not all oxygen is consumed. Some organisms, like trout, require a minimum level of oxygen in water to thrive.

This leads to our first equation :

C, N, P + WATER = POOWATER

There are plenty of sources of C, N, P in this world, including fertilizers, among others. So this wouldn't necessarily concern our meat eating ethics except that there is a second equation:

POO = C, N, P

Those who paid attention in math will know that we can combine these equations to reach this brilliant conclusion (Nobel committee, are you paying attention?):

POO + WATER = POOWATER

That's right, when a cow, a pig, a chicken, a human etc... poos in water, the water gets dirty, and now we have mathematical proof! Thanks to the utter brilliance of the above equation - brilliant because it also works with pee - you now know why it's bad that livestock to poos in water. Aren't you glad you made it this far? Besides C, N, P, poo also contains suspended solids, antibiotics/hormones (if given to the animals), and  fecal coliform, all of which are also bad for the environmental health of water and can be directly harmful to humans.



As is often the case, the amount of damage caused by livestock poo is directly related to the amount of poo as compared to the size (and other physical characteristics) of the receiving water body - river, lake, pond, estuary, groundwater, etc...

To illustrate: 1000 cows pooing on a mile or river means an environmental disaster whereas 1 cow pooing on 1000 miles of river means some happy algae.

Anybody who's been to the country knows that livestock isn't toilet trained, and will tend to relieve themselves wherever they please, which can very much include right on your shoes. So the next question we must answer is: how does poo go from the fields to the river?

The answer is a simple phenomenon called runoff. When it rains, the rainwater runs off the ground and into rivers, carrying sticks, oil, paper, mud, and (you guessed it) poo with it. If the poo is spread out over a large grassy field, there is a chance that it'll take several rainfalls for the poo to make it to the river, but if the poo is stored in a basin (sometimes called a lagoon) that can overflow all at once into the river, you can imagine that it won't be pretty for the fish.



Unfortunately, the above does nothing whatsoever to further the cause of meat eating, and so we're now getting to the interesting part. I've tried to make it clear in the above that it's the dose of poo in the water that's the determining factor. The example I used is a thinly veiled reference to the difference between extensive and intensive farming, and, as stated in other posts, it's clear that it's only extensive farming that can lead to reduced impacts on aquatic environments.

Notice that I didn't say that there would be no impact from extensive farming, just reduced as compared to intensive. The next question therefore is: is this limited impact "worth it" and would we do better by eating vegetables instead?

The obvious answer is "yes, but". As with meat, it really depends on the vegetables (or other vegetarian fare) that we're talking about. Raising plants can have negative effects on the environment as well, to wit: deforestation, pesticides abuse, irrigation, fertilizer abuse, etc... It's not the same thing to eat a piece of tofu made from locally organically grown soybeans and to eat tofu made from soybeans raised on Brazilian factory farms that have replaced the rain forest.

I do not have access to reliable figures about the relative merits of extensive/intensive animal husbandry/farming and so I can offer no objective and definitive conclusion concerning the morality of eating meat from the point of view its impact on water. Except, of course, to say that meat raised under extensive farming conditions will best intensively farmed meat any day, and will probably beat intensively farmed vegetarian food most days as well.

Boeuf Bourguignon

In parallel to reading the River Cottage MEAT Book, I've been trying to make very good meat dishes, not least of which I like eating them, but also because it's important to respect the animal who died to feed you: prepare his/her meat in the most delicious manner and enjoy it to the fullest.

We decided to have some friends over and to make boeuf bourguignon, for which I happen to have found a great recipe online a few years ago, rumored to have originated from Bernard Loiseau's kitchen. If enough people ask, I will translate it into English - this translation is not perfect.

The thing about boeuf bourguignon is that it is truly a labor of love. You have to love the food, and the people who will eat it, and you have to love the meat. If you don't you'll never spend the time to make this delicious dish.

The first cool thing you have to do is boil some wine and flambé the alcohol. This will definitely impress whoever happens to be in the kitchen with you (in my case: my 4.5 year old daughter). 

Then you let the wine cool completely before marinating the meat, carrots, and onions overnight in the refrigerator. For the meat, I chose some shoulder (paleron) and some beef cheek. It turned out that the cheek was much more tender than the shoulder. It's also a piece of meat that many people won't eat (their loss!), and so it's a great way to participate in the total consumption of the animal.

Here are the marinated ingredients after a night in the refrigerator.

To me, one of the joys of cooking comes from sharing with my daughter. I try very hard to find things for her to do whenever she wants to participate in the kitchen, sometimes handing her a knife that's entirely too big and sharp, but she still has 10 fingers. In boeuf bourguignon, one of the garnishes is glazed onions, which you make by boiling the onions in sugar water under a wax paper cover. I got little hands to help me with making the wax paper cover.
      

Cooking the glazed pearl onions.

The next step is to saute some lardons, which are dices of pork belly (poitrine). The trick is to blanch them first (put in cold water and bring to the boil) as a way for getting rid of both some of the fat and some of the

You also need some mushrooms, best when sauteed in pig fat (saindou) on high heat. Season at the end to keep them from sweating too much.

The garnish, prior to being added to the dish.

Once the meat has cooked for 2-3 hours (the longer the better), have to separate the meat from the onions/carrots. You then puree the onions/carrots in the wine, and pass them through a sieve to extract the juice and leave the gritty solids behind.

This requires a bit of work, particularly if your sieve's handle happens to be broken.

You then reassemble all of the pieces: meat, garnish, sauce, reheat over high heat, and serve with sautéed or steamed potatoes

It's delicious, and you'll wish you'd made more of it.