Act to Make Our Food Safer

This Week at Our Centreville Market
Friday 3:30–6:30pm
5875 Trinity Pkwy.
Map

This weather may not be with us long, but it does help us to think about fall. We are beginning to see some fall fruits and veggies already, mainly because it has been so darn hot that the crops are ripening early this year. Even wine grapes are being harvested about two weeks early this year. And the second planting of vegetables, including things such as green beans, did not even sprout because of the heat.

So I would recommend that you enjoy the fruits and veggies of summer for as long as you can. Check out the corn, sweet pepper and summer squash recipes at the Smart Markets tent and try something new at home before the fall squashes and greens take over the market.

We will have those fabulous end-of-season peaches for another few weeks, but we already have two varieties of early apples, and it will not be long before the Honey Crisp are here. First we will see a new variety called Zestar, which we had last year for the first time. It was a fabulous eating apple.

Betty’s Chips and Salsa is sending enchilada dinners that are divine and some other new items including a salsa, gazpacho and guacamole. Come early for the guac — it has wings and just flies out of the market.

And Culinary Herb Farm should soon be sending new infused oils along with the vinegars and spice mixes. They are wonderful for salads and brushing on our great breads for bruschetti, pizza or plain old sandwiches.

We are looking for a home baker for this market through the end of the year or for next year. If you or a neighbor loves to bake cookies or pies or cupcakes, we would love to have you sell at our market. We would love to have international specialities as well as good old American home-baked goods. As long as you are baking only items that do not need refrigeration, you can bake for a market without a kitchen inspection. All you need is approval for your labels and some instruction on your display, and you are ready to sell. Farmers’ market vendors can now buy a reasonable insurance policy through the Farmers Market Coalition, and we can put you in touch with them, too. Let us hear from you if you are interested in looking into this opportunity.

From the Market Master

Have you heard or read about the latest meat recall? Now it’s beef — again — and if we do not soon begin to regulate what goes into the animals you eventually eat, recalls will just keep coming. It is not so much that our food supply is dangerous; considering the few illnesses and very few deaths that occur each year from contaminated food, this is not a huge threat to our individual health and safety. Right now, these continuous food recalls are more a threat to our sense of security and our trust in our government to do the right thing and get to the root causes of these problems before they escalate into real health crises.

What worries me most about these incidents is their increasing frequency and the entrenched and unquestioned power of corporate food companies to refuse to do the things that would reduce the numbers and their severity. The recent turkey contamination is the direct result of the overuse of antibiotics in animals because they are raised in such unhealthy conditions that they would die prematurely if not pumped full of preventive antibiotics. Which puts us in danger of releasing on our population a bacterium that cannot be controlled. That was the problem with the turkey — and why it put us in danger. The salmonella that it contained was antibiotic-resistant. The hospitalization rate for this outbreak was 38 percent. Now that’s scary.

Two recent articles in the Wall Street Journal (1, 2) described the growing concern of government officials over their limited options under present law to prevent an outbreak and recall or even alert the public to the presence of these contaminants in our food. And the responses from the National Turkey Federation would make you think that small farmers all over this country are threatened with extinction if they are not allowed to inoculate their poultry. And then they posit that antibiotics may protect consumers as well from animal-borne illnesses. That’s what is known in logic as a circular argument.

Another funny thing about that argument: I don’t know any real small farmers who raise chickens or turkeys who would even think of feeding their animals antibiotics, hormones or arsenic to make them grow fast. They choose instead to take good care of their animals and let them live their lives outdoors in the fields, feeding on nature as much as possible so they don’t need anything else to stay healthy and provide us with real good food that will not make us sick.

To read what you can do about this growing concern — other than shop at a farmers’ market — please read about this petition campaign by FRESH the movie. There is just as much power in numbers as in money, and that will always be the case. You do have choices and could have more.