#87 | The Tale of Tierra Vegetables
U.S. House Select Subcommittee Report on Meatpacking Industry
Hello!
Lines on Last Spring
For John and Ellen Peck
I have been thinking again
of your acacia grove. Spring
had made its small start
in the meadow mushroom
and the flowering plum. Fog
heaved inland from the sea,
grey as the distances I feared
once falling into, driving east.
Your creek ran with new rain.
II
A clean taste for bitter things
like unripe almonds or hard words:
I touched the cold surfaces of rock
and peeled the roughened bark
from pepper trees. The air was thick
with birds, linnets like wounds,
slow towhees, dumb, earth-colored birds,
harks overhead floating in the wind.
The eucalyptus leaves I crumbles
smelled pungent lemon in my hands.
III
We sucked at oranges we stole
from your alcoholic neighbors
who fermented in their bed
all day and watched tv.
Texas oil and California land
had married their tanned, torpid bodies
and produced one hand steady enough
to switch the channels by remote control.
Clouds scudded in their great bay window
on the hill. Their hounds bayed from the kennels
and hurled themselves agains the fence.
IV
We talked about the war,
examined tiers of pearl-
tinged fungi on a rotting pine
and, warily, without passion,
invented a small country
free from repression
just north of Mendocino on the coast.—Robert Hass, from Field Guide.
By the way, I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. If you’re new here, welcome to EAT.DRINK.THINK., a newsletter spotlighting seasonal recipes (like Samin Nosrat’s Little Gem Salad with Fresh Herbs), the latest SF Bay Area food news, poetry (scroll back up if you skipped over this week’s poem), and more!
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was the poem Wire Hangers (be advised that some people may find this poem to be disturbing).
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Edited by food writer Alicia Kennedy, Prism's latest newsletter parcel "The Meat Issue" tackles the complex conversation around meat and plant-based diets from all angles, combining original reporting, actionable tips, and compelling essays. Subscribe here.
Sweet And Sour: We like Chef Lucas Sin’s videos; he breaks recipes down into easy-to-follow steps for a foolproof meal, and he always provides cultural background on where the dishes originate in China. Here he is on the simplicity of sweet and sour sauce, how it can be used for dipping, as a dressing, and in Guo Bao Rou, a sweet and sour pork dish from Northeastern China. That ☝️ doesn’t look like any sweet and sour pork dish we’ve ever been served! Also recommended:
Drop The Salt Shaker: Add vinegar to your dishes to avoid oversalting and build more flavor into your meals. As little as 1/4 teaspoon will also help to tone down the bitterness of greens like broccoli rabe, kale, radicchio and arugula. America’s Test Kitchen
Guatemalan Rice Tamales? Never heard of them, and neither had Luke Tsai until he found them at the food cart, Antojitos Guatemaltecos, in Richmond. KQED
Slutty Vegan: Aisha “Pinky” Cole is building a restaurant empire with the Slutty Vegan, where the burgers come with names like “One Night Stand,” “Ménage à Trois” and “Fussy Hussy.” Based in Atlanta, Cole is looking to take the chain nationally and make it a household name. And we can’t wait. The Washington Post
Note To Mario Batali: Batali, who wore his trademark orange crocs to court this week, was acquitted of indecent assault and battery charges from a 2017 incident.
The Tale of Tierra Vegetables: Longtime Bay Area farmers Lee and Wayne James are ready to retire after 42 years. But doing so has become very complicated. The challenges they face show why small farms across America are disappearing. Edible SF
Healthy Soil = Healthy Food = Healthy People: This quote from J.I. Rodale, the pioneer of organic farming, is proving to be prophetic as recent studies show that crops by farmers who use regenerative agriculture practices contain high levels of vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals, including Ergothioneine, a potent dietary antioxidant amino acid commonly found in fungi. Civil Eats
Regenerative Vineyards: Paicines Ranch near Santa Cruz uses cattle, sheep, pigs, turkeys, and chickens for grazing and foraging in their vineyards, rebuilding topsoil organic matter, increasing biodiversity, and habitat for beneficial insects. Employing grazing animals in the vineyards also helps sequester carbon and minimize water usage. This all helps to “increase the population of mycorrhizal fungi, which form symbiotic relationships with the vine roots, all while producing the material to make exceptional wine.” The New York Times
Free Happy Farm: Joel Gindo arrived in the U.S. from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to attend college with only $200 in his pocket. Now he’s a pastured hog farmer near Brookings, South Dakota, part of the Niman Ranch community of family farms. Watch as Gindo tells his story to Monty Moran in Connected: A Search For Unity. PBS
Pass The Paper Please: When In Rome, a UK-based wine brand, sells wine in eco-friendly paper bottles made from 94% recycled paperboard. Single-use glass bottles make up approximately 39% of the overall wine industry’s carbon emissions. While you can’t stash these paper bottles in a wine bucket or cooler full of ice, they are, of course, recyclable. The Guardian
Pants On 🔥: "The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie."
—Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
The U.S. House Select Subcommittee recently published a blockbuster report revealing the meat industry knew that keeping plants open during the pandemic posed a significant risk to their employees. They also claimed that closing the plants would create meat shortages, even though there was enough meat in cold storage to fulfill the demand for more than a year. Read the full report: How The Trump Administration Helped The Meatpacking Industry Block Pandemic Worker Protections.
Full Coverage In the Washington Post: Meat industry hyped ‘baseless’ shortage to keep plants open amid covid.
59,000 workers at Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS, Cargill and National Beef contracted the coronavirus in the first year of the pandemic.
Research from the University of California at Davis shows that $11 billion in economic damage was caused by an estimated 334,000 coronavirus cases contracted by meatpacking workers and their communities.
While the meat industry justified keeping plants open in order to feed the nation during the pandemic, “JBS exported 370 percent more pork to China than it had in the same period of 2017; Smithfield reported a 90 percent increase during the same window.”
Four meatpacking companies in the U.S. “collectively increased their profits 120 percent compared with before the pandemic; net income spiked 500 percent.”
"Meatpackers knew the risk to their workers and knew it wasn’t a necessary risk. They enlisted USDA to keep workers on the job, to ensure state and local health authorities were powerless, and to be protected against liability for the resulting harms."
TGIF:
LISTEN On repeat this week: The Heart Part 5 from Kendrick Lamar’s new release. Watch the YouTube video as his face is transformed by AI into O.J. Simpson, Will Smith, Jussie Smollett, Kobe Bryant, Kanye West, and Nipsey Hussle.
Details: How Kendrick Lamar’s “The Heart Part 5” Video Subverts Deepfake Technology. Pitchfork
We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
–Bruce
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"Despite its artistic intentions and its many accomplishments, humankind owes its existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains." —Anonymous
fin
Coolio!