by Vicki Robin
Of course we all want the FDA and USDA and CDC to be vigilant so that our national daily bread—nearly four tons of it consumed every twenty-four hours—will not poison us. Even so, we must, with all that fresh food sold daily, assume that the consumer is also responsible for making informed choices and engaging in safe practices.
Raw milk, it seems, is one of those front lines in the struggle between individual liberty and government oversight. In some cases, like Medicare for all, I’m for giving the government the power and pocketbook to make us one nation, all insured, with liberty from bank-breaking medical bills and fair access to health care for all. I’m for most of the ways government functions to level the playing field, giving everyone a fair shake. I’d rather have traffic lights than traffic accidents. I’d rather have local taxes than local potholes. But in the case of what we do to our own bodies—be it smoke cigarettes or have sex or drink (booze or milk)—I favor the right to choose.
For my 10-mile month, since I’m a milk drinker until I find a compelling reason to swear off the stuff, I needed to side with Belinda both on the safety of Elsie’s milk and on the insanity of it being illegal for her to provide me with my weekly milk “fix.”
She told me what she’d have to do to sell her milk legally. She would get a license—it’s only fifty-five dollars—but that is only the beginning of an expensive and tedious process that knocks most small producers out of the market.
“The whole milking facility,” she said, “requires more stainless steel than a Microsoft exec’s kitchen. It has to be completely separate from the home, including bathrooms.” In addition, farmers have to keep extensive records that can be inspected at any time. They also have to conduct monthly bacterial testing (at their own expense), including for Q fever, which isn’t even transmitted to humans through cow’s milk. The time and expense of these requirements mean that small producers (i.e., neighbors) can’t afford to fly above the radar.
If you sell milk, you must comply. And the Department of Agriculture defines selling as “offering for sale, holding for sale, preparing for sale, distributing, dispensing, delivering, supplying, trading, bartering, offering as a gift as an inducement for sale of, and advertising for sale in any media.”
“This means,” Belinda said, “that even if you give milk away, barter, or trade milk for other items, you must meet all of the state licensing requirements.”
I asked a former dairy farmer about raw milk and she said, “All milk needs to be pasteurized to be safe. But,” she said as an aside, “I drank raw milk growing up and I think that’s why I’ve traveled the world and never gotten sick.” Advocates say that the bacteria in raw milk actually make our immune systems stronger.
It was easy drinking Belinda and Koren’s milk. It was rich and delicious, and the thick yellow cream made wonderful butter. It came from neighbors I had come to trust. It was not easy, though, translating my personal choice into some general social policy.
Was raw milk more like alcohol or unprotected sex—risky but basically up to the individual to regulate? Was it like “consenting adults”—a transaction between two responsible individuals that didn’t of itself hurt anyone else? Or more like builders who use substandard materials, risking the lives of many unwitting people should the structure fail? Where is the line between private right and public good?
I’d never until now had to tease this apart . . . for milk, of all things! In fact, this issue showed me that I had a sketchy food ethic, if any at all.
What unexamined assumptions did I have about food? Food preferences—like a spot of milk for my morning cup of tea—are one thing. Food orthodoxies—raw milk is good for you/bad for you—are quite another. How do I develop an “internal locus of control” or “agency” (psychological terms for inner authority) in my eating? In a sea of manufactured foods, many—called functional foods—claiming health benefits, how do I become an informed chooser? Whom do I believe? How do I educate myself enough (but not obsessively) to choose well what food to make my own? Literally, to ingest so it will become me.
I certainly had a lot to chew on as I tucked into my pannier a week’s worth of elixir or poison, depending on who’s talking.
And chew I did on my ride home—or should I say ruminate in honor of the animal in question?
My 10-mile diet led me to a raw milk supplier. My growing appreciation for the milk and my milkers led me to grumble as I rode against the corporate control of what I am allowed to eat. As Belinda says, we have lost confidence in our capacity both as animals and as citizens to make our own choices about something so basic as food. Have we replaced personal responsibility, common sense, and traditional culture with an arm’s-length legal system that makes lawsuits our main recourse and corporations more trustworthy than our neighbors? I wondered how else I might have decided I was unqualified to do something so basic as eat—and thus turned authority for my food choices over to the “experts.”
I arrived home, carefully poured off the cream from my jar of milk for churning later, and set it in the door of my fridge. My mind was still churning, though. What do I really believe about eating? That my body is sturdy, able to remake itself each day from any old crap I put in it? That my body is a temple and needs to be fed the most pure and nourishing substances to spur my spiritual growth? That my body is eternally too fat and needs to be fed less, period?
Let’s check out some myths together—myths that convince us that cooking and eating food grown closer to home is more expensive, less convenient, more dreary, and less secure than “food court” food or industrial food or fast food or convenience food or any other type of food that requires nothing from you but money.
Fast Food Costs Less?
It’s common to defend fast food based on economics. “I can’t afford local food, and certainly the poor can’t afford it.” But it’s also pretty easy to challenge this assertion.
Yes, superficially, fast food seems to solve the challenges of people with two jobs and four mouths to feed. Especially if they haven’t learned to cook from scratch—or cook much at all. It’s a revolving door: the fast food industry makes it easier to fill your family’s calorie (if not nourishment) needs inexpensively, so you don’t exercise your cooking skills, which atrophy . . . which makes fast food ever more necessary. Not everyone wants to reverse that process in their own lives. It does take time and work, just like breaking any other habit. As I’ve said, affordability is one of my hardest nuts to crack (if I had nuts!). Here’s how I’m doing it.
A McDonald’s Quarter Pounder, on average, costs three dollars. A quarter pound of local grass-fed beef costs me $1.25. You might like it just as much—unless you miss antibiotics and stress hormones in your meat, not to mention extra fat, which may well carry pesticides, herbicides, etc. Sliced onions and tomatoes and lettuce were available on my 10-mile diet and cost pennies. Had I the time, I might have been able to make sauerkraut (salt shredded cabbage, then cover it with a weighted plate so it brines in its own juices for a week) or even pickles. What about mayo—you can make that with oil and an egg yolk. What about ketchup? You can make that with onions, tomatoes, peppers, honey, and spices. A bun would be possible with a 25-mile diet, but for the sake of our financial calculations, let’s simply buy a high-end locally baked burger bun for fifty cents. Even if you give it a squirt of anywhere ketchup you are well under three dollars. You can go eat it in the car if you miss the experience.
What about a side of fries? In the drive-through a small one will set you back a buck. With my chef’s knife I can turn some big Tricia or Eric potatoes into sticks, coat them in oil, sprinkle them with salt, and put them in the convection oven until they brown. Probably a buck, but you end up with the equivalent of three sides of fries.
If you want to make this faster food, you can buy ten pounds of local burger, make it into patties, and freeze them individually. You can slice a bunch of sweet Walla Walla onions (with
your Zyliss slicer) and freeze them as well.
You say you don’t know how to prepare them? Aah, now we’re cooking with gas, so to speak. We’re back at how the industrial food system has allowed us to drift away from basic human competencies.
Am I saying there is anything inherently wrong with that fast food meal? It’s your choice. I am just taking away from you the argument that it’s less expensive than a local food meal. It’s habit, cooking deficit disorder, advertising, social pressure (especially from the kids in the backseat), and FASS that keep you going back to these ubiquitous fast food outlets. I agree, these are powerful forces to overcome, but if you are motivated to improve your diet and empower yourself and “bless the hands that feed you,” you might give it a whirl. Even for one meal a week, just as a revealing little experiment.
Let’s challenge those boxed foods now, shall we? Let’s examine one of the many “hamburger helpers.” A box with five ounces of pasta plus spices costs $2 unless you are a super coupon buyer. That’s $6 a pound for pasta—plus you still have to cook it. Or you can buy pasta for just over $1 a pound; $1.50 a pound if you go whole wheat organic. You just drop it by the handful as needed in boiling salted water and fish out the finished pasta in seven to nine minutes.
For a hamburger dish that looks like the picture on the box and tastes better, sauté your burger meat, add the spices you like, make a sauce by adding some cream to the burger drippings, and voilà, you have the same meal, only 20 percent of the cost.
Same for tuna helper. Or a vegetarian pasta dish with grated cheese, olive oil, and sautéed broccoli or zucchini and onions.
Sure, pasta isn’t local for most of us, but wait a decade—as local food becomes both more common and more necessary you’ll have grain farmers in your region and pasta makers too (pasta is just wheat, eggs, oil, salt, and some good coaching).
Am I dissing Hamburger Helper? Not really. I’m dissing the conditions that make us believe it’s in any way the best way to feed your family a nutritious meal.
A friend cooks a pot of brown rice on Sunday and uses it all week in various dishes. With a rice cooker you combine a two-to-one ratio of water to rice, add a bit of salt and oil, click it on, and wander away. You do the same with a pot on the stove, but if you walk away, come back in twenty minutes for white rice, forty minutes for brown, take it off the heat, fluff it with a fork, and let it cool.
What about a Taco Bell–like treat? Sauté your burger, shred some lettuce and dollop with a quarter cup of canned refried beans and lettuce, and you have a cheap home-cooked meal. Or you can get dried beans for a fraction of the cost of canned, cook them in a slow cooker, and mash them when they are soft. If you have a pressure cooker and know how to use it (not hard, especially if you read the manual), you can turn any kind of dried beans into dinner with half an hour of cooking after soaking them overnight.
How much are you paying a day for that fast food lunch? Three dollars? Four? Six? You can bring a sandwich to work. Or boiled eggs, apples, carrots, raisins, and almonds. You’ll feel so virtuous that you’ll lose weight just by hours of exercising your smugness, not to speak of how healthy that all is.
Breakfast? Forget about the drive-through. Microwave a yam. Really, it’s a great breakfast. Or before you go to bed, put a handful of oatmeal plus some raisins, chopped nuts, and cinnamon in a wide-mouth thermos, pour about triple the amount of boiling water over it, tighten the lid, and you’ll have warm oatmeal in the morning. Or buy bulk (not packaged!) instant oatmeal and make it in the morning. Pour on some milk and you’ll have a super-healthy breakfast. How hard is it to scramble a few eggs? Grate some cheese (or crumble some goat chèvre) on them and they’ll taste really rich. With toast that’s $.60 for the eggs, $.20 for the cheese, $.20 for the toast, and some pennies for the salt, oil, and butter. An Egg McMuffin costs $1.65. My version is twice the amount of food at almost half the cost. If you regularly run out of the house late for work, consider boiling some eggs on Sunday to grab as you go out the door. Add an apple and some almonds and you’ve got a good meal.
This is not a recipe section or a judgment about your lifestyle. As I’ve said, I know that in the stress of daily routines of life on the go, we develop habits in order to squeeze everything we have to do into our busy lives. I am suggesting, however, that our time-saving habits don’t have to revolve around corporate foods that commercialism has convinced us to use. And I am offering these few examples of how a short apprenticeship with someone who knows how to cook can save you money and help you turn local ingredients into cheap meals. Don’t have a mom or aunt or neighbor who knows how to cook and has the time to teach you? Almost everyone and his sister has access to YouTube cooking videos.
Cooking from Scratch Takes Too Much Time?
What about the time cost of these local treats? Hmmm. Let’s return to the yummy, greasy McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. Here’s how it works out for me on a semirural island. The closest McDonald’s is forty-five miles away, so let’s substitute Dairy Queen—barely inside my ten miles, though for this calculation it doesn’t matter. That DQ is only twenty-five minutes—round-trip—away from my home. Add waiting for your order to be ready and it’s another ten minutes. Let’s compare this to your local burger. How long would it take me to slice up the potatoes and put them in the convection oven, take a patty out of the freezer, thaw it slightly, fry it, slice a tomato, rip a piece of lettuce, slap it all on bread, put it on a plate, get the fries out of the oven, and sit down in my beautiful, cozy home to enjoy this nourishing meal? Less than thirty-five minutes. Oh, and add the cost of gas to the DQ. At current prices that trip would cost at least three dollars. If you live in a city, your calculation will certainly financially favor fast food—but we are questioning assumptions here, not advocating for local as the new right way.
Okay, so doing the work yourself robs a teenager or minimum-wage worker of a job, but is this the reason you eat fast food?
I want to address the time-strapped among you. Maybe you are working two jobs to pay the bills. Maybe you and your mate both work eight-hour-a-day—minimum—jobs.
In Your Money or Your Life, we suggest that you translate your expenses into the time it takes you to earn the money to pay the tab. We also suggest, based on feedback from thousands of people who’ve done the calculation, that your real hourly wage—what you keep after factoring in job-related expenses and the extra time it takes to commute—is probably a quarter of your nominal per-hour salary. There have even been some two-hundred-dollar-an-hour consultants who, when they factored in their free introductions and their Web site writing and marketing hours, found they spend ten hours for every hour of paid work.
Median household income in the United States is currently approximately three times minimum wage, averaging twenty-four dollars an hour. Let’s say that ends up being a real hourly wage of six dollars.
Two basic medium pizzas in my region average ten dollars each, or twenty dollars to feed your family. Add fries, salads, and drinks and you are up to thirty dollars minimum. Five hours of work.
When you think about the cost of foods you normally buy, cooking at home starts to look very appealing—especially with those recipe apps for your smart phone and YouTube cooking shows.
You start to wonder why you slipped into that fast food, take-out food habit. You might ask, as I now ask all the time, “Who wins if I believe cooking is beyond my capacities?” “Who wins if I think I don’t have time for cooking but I do have time for TV, because I deserve it after a long day?” You might follow the money and ask, “Who profits from my not knowing how to cook from real ingredients?”
Who got us assuming that fast food is better for our time and money budgets? Did we? Or were these thoughts generated by PR departments about the “scientific research” that proves that product A, with ingredient B, will make you stronger, wiser, thinner, younger, and better?
Back to fast food. Looking a
t that real-hourly-wage calculation and the time cost of fast food, you might wonder how fast it really is anyway. Perhaps we should call it the industrial-food-system storefront. Or simply “impulse food,” since it is designed to hook you, hungry or not.
The Extra Benefits of Cooking from Scratch
Better Health
If you cook you are more likely to use fresh whole ingredients, thus sidestepping the endless worry about which additives are bad . . . and which are worse. If you invest your time in cooking food, you may find that you invest a tad more awareness in eating it. It’s easier to overeat when someone you don’t know cooks the food. Besides the nutrition in fresh, whole, and nontoxic foods, there are other health benefits of cooking from scratch.
What about the stress of cooking? We think take-out food takes the stress out of eating, but does it? Cooking for me is actually relaxing. It takes me out of my mind and into my body, especially hand prep like slicing and chopping. What if you considered cooking as a destressor rather than a stressor? Who would win then?
Cooking may even keep your brain sharp too. Brain research shows that learning new things keeps your brain in shape. Just as learning a language is recommended as mental calisthenics for staying brain-buffed into old age, learning the language of spices, herbs, methods, and ingredients and discerning FASS means learning to cook is literally brain food.
What if cooking from recipes is as good as crossword puzzles, known to help seniors keep their minds active? You encounter new ingredients. You have to calculate quantities if you adjust the recipe. You use your senses: When are the onions translucent? Does it have enough salt? What is al dente? Compare this to opening a microwavable packaged dinner. Which one exercises your senses and intelligence more?
