Bringing your Values to the Market and Table.

Natasha Rosenstock, friend to foodies, just wrote a terrific article for the Washington Jewish Week about bringing your values to the market and table. She profiled "Jews and their commitments to Jewish food values, including concern for workers’ rights, humane treatment of animals, caring for the land and supporting local businesses.It features KOL Foods (among others)."

Read the whole article.

My first trip to the farm by Intern Joe

About two hours after making it out of the traffic-ridden streets of DC, I noticed the roads were no longer painted with oil slicks, but peppered with horse droppings.  Then I saw the first of many horse-drawn buggies, and a great number of Amish families, strolling through the streets in style (leaving little carbon footprint).  At this point I knew we must be close to our destination – or just very far from where I have called home for the past 23 years.  We pulled into a driveway that was longer than the street I now live on, and were immediately greeted by piercing, yet enthusiastic sounding barks.  They were coming from David’s puppies aka “guard dogs.” We had made it to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  David, our poultry farmer, lives in an old house on thirteen acres of rolling hills where, along with chickens, he also grows cabbage, peppers, strawberries and other seasonal produce.

David walked Robert and I to a fenced off stretch of long green grass.  The space was the size of two football fields and was home to a few dairy cows and 6 chicken shelters, although "shelter" might be a gross understatement.  These humble chicken abodes were like small condos: high ceilings and beautiful 360 degree views.  They serve to protect the chickens from mean foxes, hawks, rain, and the harsh rays from midday sun.  In order to give the chickens a fresh grass diet, David moves the abodes down the field on a daily basis.  This routine gives the used up land time to rejuvenate by using the natural chicken fertilizer.  The process was quite interesting and David seemed to know the system very well.  After helping David rotate his contraptions, he showed us around and sent us on the road with the gift of freshly picked strawberries.

We drove up the road to Roman’s, our turkey farmer.  This farm had a great feel: kids playing volleyball next to the duck pond, dairy cows hanging out, and best of all – a boutique gelato factory!  The only missing piece was the turkeys.  Unfortunately, his turkey hatchlings were on schedule to arrive the next day. 

We hadn’t planned on visiting Jake’s farm for another hour.  With time to kill, we grabbed a beer at Gap, PA’s finest – the Happy Rooster Saloon.  After making a few friends and a gentlemanly game of pool with Robert, we were off to Jake’s, the master beef farmer.  His children had just returned from a fishing excursion and were shy but very welcoming.  Robert and I took the short hike to the pasture where the cows were happily chowing down the tall green grass. 

Although I have never seen an industrial style cattle farm, I was in the midst of reading Micheal Pollan’s “Omnivores Dilemna” during the car ride and Jake’s was the complete opposite of what I pictured a feed-lot to be.  The animals had ample room to roam free and eat whichever type of grass they fancied.  Like Robert and I, these cows were relaxed and at peace while on this small farm in southeastern Pennsylvania.  After giving a farewell to my favorite dog Nikki (though to me, he looked more like a Puck; and to Robert he was Stump), Robert and I jumped in the strawberry scented car headed north for the freezer.

The KOL Foods freezer resides just a few hours north east of the Lancaster farms; it’s a huge warehouse hidden by trees and the surrounding hills.  Donna led us to our inventory where Robert and I broke open several boxes of differing cuts in order to put together a Grill Sampler perfect for the summertime BBQ.  Once the boxes were packed, the only thought on our minds was which Pandora station to jam out to on the way home.  It was a great experience… smelly, but great.

Chicken, hold the arsenic: Pfizer, the FDA, and the end of roxarsone

Soon, Americans may be eating a little less arsenic.

On June 8th, Pfizer Inc. announced that it will stop making and selling roxarsone, an arsenic-containing additive in chicken feed, phasing out the compound by July 9th.

Since 1944, arsenic-containing additives have been used in chicken feed for “for increased rate of weight gain, improved feed efficiency, and improved pigmentation” and “as an aid in the prevention of coccidiosis [a parasitic infestation]". Some of the arsenic that the chickens eat accumulates in their muscles, and when people eat the chicken, they also eat the arsenic.

Recently, evidence has been building that roxarsone and other arsenic-containing additives are not as innocuous as was once thought. The poultry industry has long maintained that use of roxarsone is safe for humans because roxarson contains an organic arsenic compound (meaning that it is chemically bound to carbon), rather than the carcinogenic inorganic form of arsenic; however, the arsenic in roxarsone can convert to this more dangerous inorganic form both inside chickens and inside people. Though there is no direct evidence linking the arsenic specifically from poultry to human disease, research has shown that exposure to arsenic in humans causes cancer and may contribute to other health problems including high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and impaired intellectual function.

The final straw for roxarsone came with an FDA study, published yesterday, that found that levels of the dangerous inorganic form of arsenic were consistently higher in chickens treated with roxarsone than in untreated chickens, meaning that use of roxarsone unnecessarily increases human exposure to a known carcinogen. After the FDA released its findings, Pfizer immediately released its plans to end sales of the additive.

While Pfizer’s action won’t immediately remove arsenic from the food system (first there’s the phase-out period, after which poultry producers will still be able to use what stocks they have, and then there are several other, less widely used arsenic-containing feed additives to contend with), it is a crucial and commendable step that has taken one unnecessary form of carcinogen exposure out of our lives.

Whenever industry takes its own initiative to stop a profitable practice, even a potentially dangerous one, skepticism generally follows. Pfizer continued to sell roxarsone for years in the face of mounting evidence of its carcinogenic potential. In March, the failure of a Maryland initiative to ban roxarsone use in the state seemed to signal that arsenic-containing additives were here to stay. Crucial to Pfizer’s decision, then, is the fact that, given its evidence that inorganic arsenic is present in chickens treated with roxarsone, the FDA has the power to ban roxarsone as a carcinogen. Rather than face a ban, Pfizer pulled the product and in doing so took an unnecessary risk off the dinner table.

Unfortunately, the removal of roxarsone from chicken feed only scratches the surface of what could and should be done to improve the ethical, environmental, and health-related implications of industrial meat production. Industrial meat comes from factory farms where animals live in inhumane conditions, where waste is released into toxic “lagoons,” and where the use of chemical and pharmaceutical additives is the norm. My own questioning of industrial meat practices has led me to intern with KOL Foods, a company that provides kosher meat produced in an ethical, health-protective, and environmentally-friendly way. Alternatives to industrial poultry production, like those provided by KOL Foods, light a path as we take small steps to improve the food system that puts meat on our plates.

While changing this industrial meat system sometimes seems impossible, small steps like those that the FDA and Pfizer took last week offer hope that meat production practices can improve. I can only hope that this small victory will be the first of many.

*Amy Radding is an intern at KOL Foods. She prefers her arsenic-free, kosher, pasture-raised chicken spatchcocked and pan-roasted with lemon and rosemary.*

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