Are Centre Region's Conscientious Omnivores Getting a Slaughterhouse They Want?

The locavore movement keeps growing. In the last few years, the small local farmer has reemerged as friend, hero, and businessman...actually it's more often a businesswoman. The smaller local farmer new shine has brought with them the other businesses. Seed savers and restauranteurs and brewers are integrating the market. And of course, the local slaughterhouse and butcher.

The last time I ate a fast food burger was the same day I watched Supersize Me. It was shocking. I don't think I was ever a fast food kid...well...I did work at Wendy's in high school. But I wasn't one of those every chance I get I'll eat a 99 cent burger types. Then when I read Fast Food Nation, I felt vindicated. And curious. Like a lot of people I know now, I started asking the question, "Where's my food come from?" I read Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, Francis Moore Lappe, and some others.

The industrial meat system terrified me. I read a piece, "Farmacology" in Johns Hopkins Magazine regarding the massive antibiotic inputs into chickens in industrial chicken, pig, and cattle farms called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Johns Hopkins researchers were finding that "nontherapeutic use of antimicrobials is building dangerous genetic reservoirs of resistance. If they are right, industrial agriculture is fostering and dispersing drug-resistant bacteria that impair medicine's ability to protect the public from them." It's an arms race. Eventually, we could lose. Rolling Stone's Jeff Tietz wrote a similarly alarming story on pig production (excerpts here) featuring the goriest details about manure lagoons and piles of dead pigs. And last month Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and Arizona State University researchers found evidence suggesting that previously banned antibiotics for poultry production are still being used by the poultry industry.

I've said nothing about the violence incurred on the animals across their whole lives. There are frequent reports of worker mistreatment and higher levels of drug and alcohol problems among such workers. And the enormous effluent waste CAFOs create lead to pollution on a scale unimaginable a century ago such that play into the expanding dead zones in our bays and gulfs.

So if you want to be a responsible omnivore, what can you do? Maybe we go back to that small farmer and that local butcher.

On Friday afternoon at 4:30 we will talk to the people starting Rising Spring Meat Company, a slaughterhouse and butcher shop in Spring Mills, Pennsylvania. They bill themselves as "your connection to a farming community that is dedicated to producing quality livestock and meat" including cows, pigs, sheep and goats expertly butchered to cuts of beef, pork, mutton and chevon.

So we'll be asking them about these things. How are they different from the big boys? Can I trace some mutton from the farm through the plant with any confidence the animal led a sheeply life? Will I get a good-tasting slice? Is money staying in our area?

Listen in on Friday from 4-5 pm. Call in (814) 865-9577 with questions and comments. You can also join us on Facebook and Twitter as well.

Want to learn some skills?

Sustainability requires resilience. Today, lots of us simply never learned or have forgotten some of the basic and necessary skills of our ancestors.

How do you cook lower on the foodchain? Want to learn to sew or do basic carpentry? Want to know how to keep bees? Spring Creek Homesteading is doing just this. Katherine Watt has set up a great series of workshops for people in the Centre Region to skill themselves and one another. Learn more about skilling workshops at this link.

Here is a calendar of upcoming events.

Catering for the local economy by sustaining a healthy appetite

Krystn Madrine, the "kitchen maid" of the Sustainable Kitchen came on the show yesterday and served up some great thoughts on how we feed ourselves and how we can do it better. To Madrine, sustainability means, "being able to keep it going... and with food the path we're on is not sustainable." Listen to her talk with us about food security, regional food systems, sustainable food systems, seasonality, health, and knowing about your food.

What we found so great to hear about are all of the people Madrine gets to know from her work and the web of pretty direct benefits buying her food brings. Learn more about her work with Chef Andrew Monk and the Sustainable Kitchen by listening to the show at this link. You can find them each week at the Boalsburg Farmer's Market on Tuesday and on Saturdays at the North Atherton Street Farmer's Market at Home Depot. They also cater lots of events. To see what they are about you can go to the State Theater in State College on Wednesday Sept. 21st for the showing of Forks Over Knives.

P.S. The Veggie Patty sandwich and the Italian Wedding soup is amazing.

Getting off a diet of tar sand with Toni Brink

Toni Brink (pictured at right) was a dietician for over three decades. Today, she sees the U.S. fossil fuel diet as not only unhealthy, but destructive. She doesn’t just hope that President Obama helps us get a better diet, she is doing something about it.

This week Brink, a 66-year-old mother of five and grandmother of ten will join the No Tar Sands (their Twitter feed) protests in front of the White House in Washington, DC.

Over the last week and a half, hundreds of people have joined noted environmental author and activist Bill McKibben (see 350.org). climate scientist James Hansen, and writer Naomi Klein to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. The proposed pipeline would bring oil from the tar sands of Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico across vulnerable habitats in the Midwest. A broad coalition of Midwest residents, farmers, conservationists, and scientists worry about the pipelines’ and tar sands’ long-term effects.

“If that oil is taken out it’s a dirty process,” says Brink referring to the tar sands extraction process. Matt Price of the Environmental Defense Fund says that the Florida-sized affected region of Alberta where the tar sands lie is effectively destroyed. And the waste ponds left from the process can be seen from space.

Proponents say that Canada’s proximity to the United States can help us use energy that comes from friendlier sources with less travel. However, the process from beginning to end is itself very fuel-intensive, yielding little energy compared to the energy return from the sands themselves. Daily, tar sands production generates the amount of greenhouse gases of approximately 1.3 million cars. Those effects combine with the tar sands refinement and its eventual use as fuel to create one of the most greenhouse gas intensive fuels on Earth.

Brink says. “The use of that oil will raise the temperature of the Earth more. It’s already evident that we have extreme weather. It could play into making the Earth uninhabitable to humans or at least unfriendly,” she says. Climate and atmospheric scientists have predicted that storm, flood, drought, and heat wave intensity as human fossil fuel use generates more greenhouse gases.

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change reports that hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean have become both more frequent and more intense in recent years consistent with predictions by scientific bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. High temperature records have also been more frequent and heat waves longer and more intense.

Noted climate scientist James Hansen has said similar things. Writing on Huffington Post, he says,

Easily available reserves of conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO2 well above 400 ppm, which is unsafe for life on earth. However, if emissions from coal are phased out over the next few decades and if unconventional fossil fuels including tar sands are left in the ground, it is conceivable to stabilize earth's climate.

Phasing out emissions from coal is itself an enormous challenge. However, if the tar sands are thrown into the mix, it is essentially game over. There is no practical way to capture the CO2 emitted while burning oil, which is used principally in vehicles.

It’s not just climate or extraction. “The pipeline will go over the Oglala aquifer in the Midwest. And they say the pipeline won’t leak but there’s no guarantee,” says Brink. Indeed, the pipeline would transect farmland and interrupt wildlife corridors. However, the risk of spill is predicted to be very low by the State Department. Russ Girling, the President of company proposing the pipeline has said, "[T]he Keystone XL pipeline will have no significant impact on the environment.” But Midwest residents are not convinced.

And what about our energy infrastructure? Brink worries that increasing U.S. reliance on tar sands and the Keystone XL will harm us in other ways. “I’m afraid it will divert from renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and geothermal and also from energy conservation.” Currently, the United States gets only a tiny portion of its energy from renewables. But if Richard Alley is correct in his program, Earth: The Operator’s Manual, things could be different with the major proportion of our energy coming from renewables if society and economy could be rearranged.

Tomorrow she is going to risk arrest at the White House. “I think it’s really important. Future of life on our planet depends on it.” Like many who have engaged in non-violent civil disobedience before her, she believes that this is the right thing to do. It shows that a large number of people think that this issue needs to be visible.
The protestors, she said, “speak out by putting their bodies on the line.”

What does this all come down to? “We could do so much better,” said Brink. So she is going to put her own body on the line.

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If you care to follow up, Tar Sands Action asks that you call or write President Obama or send a letter to the editor of your local paper to speak against the Keystone XL pipeline. Brink agrees.

The guys at Freeze Thaw Cycles recycle hundreds of pounds of aluminum

A couple of weeks ago we had Jordyn Drayton, the co-owner of Freeze Thaw Cycles in State College, Pa. This morning, they sent off hundreds of pounds of used wheel rims, handlebars, cranks, stems, seat posts, and more to a metal recycling facility in Lewistown, Pa. Check it out.



Disclosure: Peter Buckland races for Freeze Thaw.

The energy crisis is here

A few weeks ago we hosted Katherine Watt on the show to talk about localism and the Transition Towns initiatives in central Pennsylvania. As we collectively face the reality of peak oil will we face the challenge intelligently?

Katherine wrote a piece for the Centre Daily Times reflecting on the peak oil problem and the urgent need for us to move to regional and local economies of scale.

Wednesday’s Sustainable Centre County page is all about energy, with columns on how to build a regional energy system around the sun, food and biodiesel crops. Bustling as it seems, I think the Marcellus methane-energy boom will fizzle out soon. Investing time and money to release colossal Earth farts is a luxury, and we’re not a rich society anymore.

Growth won’t restart because oil prices will keep rising. As we revisit the Dow milestones of the past few decades — heading back down — physical and biological imperatives will be far more pressing than the political and economic calculations underpinning the gas boom. Complex institutions will break apart, replaced by simpler regional cooperatives now rising from grass roots.

We’ll stop digging up dead things to sell and burn, and return to the most basic elements of human life: taking care of each other by working with surrounding life-support systems that provide water, food and shelter.

Read on here.