My beer’s not vegan?

Left Hand Milk Stout Nitro!

Photo by stevegarfield via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

This past winter, I got into dark beers like stouts and porters. Among the beers that I came across were so-called milk stouts. It seems odd to think of dairy in beer, even here in Wisconsin where each is enormously popular in its own right, but the name doesn’t lie. Milk or cream stouts are made with lactose, a sugar derived from milk. As Alisa Fleming explains, “Since the lactose is unfermentable, it adds sweetness, body, and calories to the finished beer, contrasting the roasted flavor.”

Look hard enough, and lucky vegans just might be able to find a milk stout they can enjoy. For example, Golden Road Brewing of Los Angeles makes an Almond Milk Stout as a limited release, which they describe as “a sweet stout with rich malts and almond milk in lieu of lactose, providing our Vegan friends with a tasty alternative to standard milk stouts.” Homebrewers also have tips on alternatives to recreate some of the characteristics of a milk stout without lactose.

Lactose as a beer additive isn’t nearly as strange as my recent discovery about Guinness, the world-famous stout. Rachel Tepper describes how a fish byproduct is used as a sort of processing agent in making the beer:

[S]ome vegetarian and vegan revelers might want to reconsider that thick, creamy Irish stout — it could contain trace amounts of fish bladders.

Smithsonian.com’s Food&Think blog published … an in-depth explanation of isinglass, a form of collagen culled from a dried swim bladder, an internal fish organ that helps regulate buoyancy in water. It’s used in a process called fining — when unwanted leftovers, like solid particles and degenerated yeast cells, are removed from the brewing process. These elements settle on their own to the bottom of a cask in a jelly-like clump, but isinglass quickens the process and makes them easier to remove.

The use of isinglass as a fining agent isn’t exactly new, and it’s not exactly news. While many beers and wines use gelatin instead of isinglass these days (those beverages aren’t vegan, either), Guinness still uses it in much the same way it has since the mid- to late-19th century. And publications and blogs have been taking note of it for some time now.

Still, it remains largely unknown to the greater public, likely because Guinness doesn’t publicize it.

For the full story and lots of links, head here. For more on vegan (and non-vegan) beers, check out this post from the blog of the “No Meat Athlete” (runs on plants!) and this one from the “I Think About Beer” blog.

The business of community supported agriculture

Photo by The Conscientious Omnivore (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Photo by The Conscientious Omnivore (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Last Thursday we picked up our first box of produce from Vermont Valley Community Farm, the CSA that J and I joined this year. The cold spring briefly delayed the start of our subscription, but as you can see in the photo, we’re off and running now. The box included spring greens, spinach, a beautiful and enormous head of butter lettuce, scallions, radishes, turnips, a whole lot of rhubarb, potatoes that had been stored at 38 degrees all winter, and even a small potted basil plant.

With the start of our CSA subscription, I thought I’d share a recent report from Luke Runyon of Harvest Public Media that considers the ways that running a CSA can be a tough business. As he describes,

Within the local food movement, the community supported agriculture model is praised. CSAs, as they’re commonly known, are often considered one of the best ways to restore a connection to the foods we eat.

The model is simple: Consumers buy a share of a farmer’s produce up front as a shareholder and then reap the rewards at harvest time. But running a CSA can bring with it some tricky business decisions.

Farmers, some of whom have limited business experience, must quickly learn how to market products, build customer loyalty, advertise, manage risk and diversify their revenue sources. CSAs, depending on their member involvement, often force farmers to turn a portion of their operation into a customer service business.

It’s an informative piece, so check out the full story in audio or text format here. And for more on CSAs, head to my earlier post on the subject.

International trade agreements and the future of food safety

Valley Farm, West Wratting

Photo by Andrew Stawarz via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Yesterday, Katherine Paul and Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association analyzed at AlterNet the possible effects of two international trade agreements currently in the works. As they explain,

Designed to grease the wheels of world commerce, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would force the U.S. and other participating countries to “harmonize” food safety standards. That means all countries that sign on to the agreement would be required to abide by the lowest common denominator standards of all participating governments….

Both the TTIP and TPP could have dangerous consequences for food safety in the U.S., and around the world…. From day one, negotiations for the TTIP and TPP have been shrouded in secrecy. The public and participating governments, including the U.S. Congress, have been shut out of the negotiating process, denied access to everything from early proposals to final draft texts….

If the public is shut out, and Congress gets no say, who gets a seat at the table? Corporations. That’s right.

The article is written with the urgency of folks who care deeply about the state of our food supply; even though the rhetoric gets a bit heated at times, it makes for pretty compelling reading. Find the full piece here.

Finally, lest you doubt Paul and Cummins’ analysis that these agreements favor corporations, see what the folks at The Economist had to say in this op-ed from February:

[A]s the cautious Mr Obama’s willingness to gamble on this shows, the best time to push [for the TTIP] is now. Some of the most obstreperous lobbies have been giving ground. The EU recently opened its market to imports of live pigs and certain types of treated beef from America, suggesting that it may at last be possible to make progress on trade in genetically modified products…. The only reason for business not to throw everything it has behind TTIP would be if there were a bigger global trade pact to be had. Sadly, there is not. Done properly, a US-EU deal could even create a bit of momentum for other pacts, including agreements with Asian trading partners. And that potentially might lead to a new round of global trade talks.

Farmers hit with weather whiplash

Photo by Stephen L Harlow [p0ps harlow] via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Yesterday, Peggy Lowe of Harvest Public Media reported for NPR on the wet conditions farmers in the Midwest are confronting this spring, in strong contrast to last summer. She describes,

As Chris Webber checked the 40 acres of muddy field he wanted to plant on a recent morning, he worried about getting more rain, even as he worried about the lack of it.

“The drought is over at the moment,” he says. “But in Missouri, we tend to say that in 10 days or two weeks, we can be in a drought again. That’s how fast it can get back to dry.”

Midwestern farmers like Webber, who has a family farm in central Missouri, are suffering from “weather whiplash,” according to meteorologist Jeff Masters. In the past three years, there’s been flooding, then record-setting drought, and now flooding again.

“It’s a term I’m going to be using a lot in the coming years, I think, because the jet stream patterns that we’re familiar with have changed in the last few years,” says Masters, who co-founded Weather Underground. “They’ve slowed down, exposing us to longer periods of extreme weather, and they’ve gotten more extreme.”

Find the full text and audio versions of the story here.

Hop on by

Deschutes Hop Trip Pale Ale 2011

Photo by Northwest Beer Guide via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Adrienne So had a nice piece in Slate recently about the craft-beer trend toward hoppy (sometimes aggressively hoppy) beers. She makes the case that some brewers and beer geeks have perhaps gone a bit overboard. For the uninitiated, she offers an introduction:

Hops are the flowers of the climbing plant Humulus lupulus, a member of the family Cannabaceae (which also includes, yes, cannabis), and they’re a critical ingredient in beer…. Recipes usually call for only a few grams of hops per gallon of beer produced, but those little flowers pack a big punch. In addition to their bittering properties, hops impart strong piney, spicy, or fruity flavors and aromas. They also contain antimicrobial agents that act as natural preservatives.

Although they make up a small proportion of the ingredients used in beer, hops command the vast majority of the industry’s passion. Beer geeks have an intensely emotional relationship to hops. We wax poetic about the differences among varieties: the mildness of the Saaz, the bright tang of the exotic Sorachi Ace.

Nevertheless, she argues, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing:

From a consumer’s standpoint, though, beers overloaded with hops are a pointless gimmick. That’s because we can’t even taste hops’ nuances above a certain point. Hoppiness is measured in IBUs (International Bitterness Units), which indicate the concentration of isomerized alpha acid—the compound that makes hops taste bitter. Most beer judges agree that even with an experienced palate, most human beings can’t detect any differences above 60 IBUs.

For all the details, including a shout out to world-class, non-hoppy brews from Wisconsin’s own New Glarus Brewing Company, check out the full piece here.

A cleaner fish farm?

Salmon farm

A salmon farm in the Bay of Fundy. Photo by Leigh Angel [revafisheye] via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Last Thursday, NPR ran a very interesting story from Dan Charles that featured the efforts of Thierry Chopin, a Canadian marine biologist, to develop fish farms that are less polluting that most. As Charles reports,

[Chopin's] approach involves creating a whole ecosystem around a fish farm, so the waste generated by the salmon gets taken up by other valuable seafood commodities, like shellfish and kelp….

[T]here are rafts made of black PVC piping, sticking out of the water like catwalks. They are home to cultivated seaweeds and mussels — species that thrive on fish waste.

“What we are doing is nothing more than recycling the nutrients,” Chopin explains. “Instead of looking at them as waste, we look at them as nutrients for the next species.”

One of the best things about the story is Charles’ nuanced approach—he’s thoughtful enough not to present Chopin’s work as the solution to all the environmental downsides of farmed fish. As Charles describes, Chopin’s “integrated multi-trophic aquaculture”

addresses the mostly localized problem of water pollution, but it doesn’t address other problems with aquaculture: the spread of fish parasites, the escape of caged salmon, or — worst of all — the need to harvest wild fish to feed the salmon. That’s a big problem for inland aquaculture as well.

The full story is worth checking out; find both audio and text versions here.

Not conquest, but communion

Duck Blind

Photo by Caitlin Burke via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

I took my own advice this weekend and checked out one of the recent winners of the James Beard Foundation’s Journalism Awards. The 2013 Individual Food Blog winner is Hank Shaw for his blog at honest-food.net. As an exemplar of the great writing there, check out his December 7, 2011 post titled “On Killing,” in which he considers what it means to him to hunt wild animals for food. As he describes,

What I do to put meat in my freezer is alien to most, anathema to some. In the past seven years, I can count on one hand the times I’ve had to buy meat for the home. This fact alone makes me an outlier, an anomaly….

Not too long ago, I was at a book signing event for [my book] Hunt Gather Cook when a young woman approached me. She was very excited about foraging, and she had loved that section of my book. Then her face darkened. She told me she’d also read my section on hunting. “How can you enjoy killing so much? I just don’t understand it. You seem like such a nice person, too.” It took a few minutes for me to explain myself to her, and I am grateful that she listened. She left, I think, with a different opinion.

It’s a thoughtful and beautifully written piece, that ends this way:

Meat should be special. It has been for most of human existence. And no modern human understands this more than a hunter. I am at peace with killing my own meat because for me, every duck breast, every boar tongue, every deer heart is a story, not of conquest, but of communion.

Find the entire essay here.