Meat, Cancer and the (deliberately Misleading but Trendy) Headline Race

By Lisa Haessler

For Ethical Omnivore Movement (http://www.ethicalomnivore.org/)

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” – H. L. Mencken

Well, there you have it folks: definitive evidence that “Processed meats do cause cancer” (BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34615621). I guess we should all toss in the hat here at Ethical Omnivore Movement, right? We can’t argue with science: meat causes cancer! We’re informed, rational, open-minded people; that’s how the EOM community got started: people looking at our broken food system that is horrible to animals, people and the planet on one side of the spectrum and the total removal of animals from the human food chain on the other side and realizing, “there is more to the world’s Food story than just these two perspectives”. But headline after headline is proclaiming the new food truth:

The Telegraph : “Processed meat ranks alongside smoking as major cause of cancer, World Health Organisation says” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11954640/World-Health-Organisation-report-processed-meats.html

The Guardian: “Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes – WHO: UN health body says bacon, sausages and ham among most carcinogenic substances along with cigarettes, alcohol, asbestos and arsenic” http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/26/bacon-ham-sausages-processed-meats-cancer-risk-smoking-says-who

Except that, as it always seems to be the case on the internet, the most popular headlines are often the most misleading. In today’s news cycle it’s the trendy, shocking headline that gets the clicks (re: website traffic that translates into advertising dollars for online news publishers). What it doesn’t get is accurate information into the hands of the general public. Take, for example, this portion of the Telegraph article cited above (emphasis added): “Dr Ian Johnson, nutrition researcher and Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Food Research, said: "Meat consumption is probably one of many factors contributing to the high rates of bowel cancer seen in America, Western Europe and Australia, but the mechanism is poorly understood, and the effect is much smaller than, for example, that of cigarette smoking on the risk of lung cancer. It is also worth noting that there is little or no evidence that vegetarians in the UK have a lower risk of bowel cancer than meat-eaters.”

The BBC article cited above, writes this in the third sentence of the article: “The WHO did stress that meat also had health benefits. Cancer Research UK said this was a reason to cut down rather than give up red and processed meats. And added that an occasional bacon sandwich would do little harm.”

And the Guardian, includes this in their write up: Prof Ian Johnson, emeritus fellow at the Institute of Food Research, also said the effect was small. “It is certainly very inappropriate to suggest that any adverse effect of bacon and sausages on the risk of bowel cancer is comparable to the dangers of tobacco smoke, which is loaded with known chemical carcinogens and increases the risk of lung cancer in cigarette smokers by around twentyfold.”

Okay, wait, so then what is the big deal with this WHO report? Why is it showing up all over my social media feeds? There are two things you should keep in mind:

1. Food-related research findings are very popular news bites and get passed around a lot on social media, so they tend to make headlines. Remember the old media adage: “If it bleeds, it leads”. So if the paper can link its topic to death, it will.  Everybody eats and everybody is very worried about things that might kill you. It has universal appeal.  But before you swallow that headline, remember: any food-related headline trend must be taken with a grain of salt. If it sounds too simplistic, too cause-and-effect-case-closed, it's probably is.

The WHO report isn’t false, but the way its findings are being reported is very misleading. What is does tell us is not new information. It is a meta-data study of previously completed research (much of that research has already been reported in the news media over the past two decades). The American Institute for Cancer Research has been recommending the reduction of red meat intake and processed meats for some time now. We have also had health and nutrition experts warn about the possible dangers of modern preservatives (used heavily in commercially "processed meat" products) for quite some time. Nitrite in particular, seems to get most of the bad rap, even though it is naturally occurring in many vegetables. You have to dig a little further into the science to understand why certain substances can be harmful to your health in some contexts and totally harmless in others.

One facebook page, Dihydrogen Monoxide Awareness, has been having a really fun time lampooning our human tendency to react too quickly to a scary sounding headline when it's connected to products we regularly consume. 

2. Meat is not “bad”. Broccoli is not “bad”. Cheese is not “bad”. Yes, even bread is not “bad”. In order for you to make that kind of broad, universal statement you have to assume that all methods for producing that food are equal and unchanging and that each human beings immune and digestive systems respond the same to all foods. Our complex food system refutes the ability to make such statements. Every farm, climate, and food processing facility has unique characteristics that could impact the food that lands on your plate. Stop making (or accepting) blanket statements about food.

Food is not “bad”. It is fuel for your body and your brain. It is the basis of your health. Your body may decide that bread is bad for you. But why? Is it the actual whole ingredients that your immune system reacts to or is it the preservatives added to the bread in the processing facility it is made in that is bad for you? Is red meat bad for your health and the environment? Depends, like all food, on how it is grown and processed. Locally raised, grass-fed beef on farm that rotates it’s pastures to support soil sustainability and sequester carbon is a completely different kind of red meat than anything that will come out of a CAFO. Unfortunately, there haven’t been enough studies on the differences between the two for WHO to release a report on it (yet).

The takeaway? There are no shortcuts in finding your personal, optimal-health food balance. Hopefully, you choose a food balance that is healthy, nutrient dense, compatible with your individual health needs, and that has positive impacts on the environment and the economy.  There is no, “one size fits all” diet solution that will magically make you super healthy and prevent you from dying.  Anyone who claims this is only telling you what has worked for them: their biology, their digestive system, their metabolism, their health needs. You still have to do the work and the research to find out what is best for you.

What you do need to be aware of is how much human “intervention” is involved in getting your food to your mouth and the effects that human intervention has on the wider world. The general concept still holds true – the less people (and people-designed processing) involved in your personal food chain, the better. From your own garden? Excellent. From a local farmer who’s practices you know and trust? Awesomesauce. From an organic grocer? Maybe not ideal, but probably better than conventional.  Even so, there are many variables. So if you aren’t sure – investigate. Was the steak I'm eating come from a cow that was given an appropriate diet and humane living conditions? How far did my food travel? Were the workers who picked and packed it given safe work conditions and a fair wage? How will my food dollars impact my local economy and local food chain stability? Do my food dollars encourage sustainable business practices? At EOM, adding considerations of humane animal husbandry practices, fair trade and labour rights for farm workers, and environmental sustainability to your food choices also plays a big part in finding the best food sources available to you that also have a positive benefit on the world around us.  

Your food choices have big impacts on your well-being and, by extension, the well-being of every living thing in your food chain. Choose wisely what food, and what headlines, you will consume. 

For a well balanced article on the recent WHO report (which contains a very reasonable headline!), I recommend: http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2015/10/26/processed-meat-and-cancer-what-you-need-to-know/

A Giant Leap Forward!

I guess it's time to dust off the old blog.

We were busy this summer. Lots of camping, music festivals, weekend road trips and...

BUYING 85 acres of LAND!

I know, I know! What the heck? Where did that come from? If you had asked us 6 months ago if we planned on buying a homestead this year, we would have given you a blank stare and probably mumbled something like "No, we want to someday but that's a couple of years down the road probably..." And yet, here we are. Landowners. Planning a homestead. (Holy crap...)

How did this come together? The short and sweet version is one domino fell, we took a step forward, another domino fell, next thing we knew everything had fallen in to place. 

So here it is guys, the beginning of the Grizans-Haessler (Grizzler?) Homestead. Don't worry we'll come up with a better name eventually. But we have BIG plans for this little plot of land of ours. 

Stay Tuned... there's lots more to come!

Harvests

July

It’s 5:30 AM on a Friday in mid-July. It is daylight outside, the sun has been up for over an hour now and so have the chickens. I wake to CBC radio coming through the trailers ceiling speakers. A small pot on the stove boils water for cowboy-style coffee. Derek is grilling eggs and sausage to be placed between two halves of a toasted bagel. Thanks to his absolute need for something meaty and greasy to get through the morning, I’ll also get one. Otherwise I would likely just eat a granola bar on my way to the garden. We complete our animal chores and meet Jen in the Garden by 6:15 AM to receive our marching orders. We start with the first harvest of the carrots; we’ve eagerly been waiting for them to be ready. The first few weeks of harvest have been nothing but the leafy greens of early summer, radishes and salad turnips. I’m eager to pick something I would buy at farmers market. Radishes are not my thing. Our anticipation turns to frustration as it’s discovered that the carrots, though beautiful, are encased in thick soil that is mostly clay and cannot be pulled easily. The carrots must be dug up with a digging fork, but not too close lest we stab our precious vegetable and ruin it. So every group of a half-dozen bright orange roots comes up in a block 5lbs heavy of black, wet soil. Any attempts to pull carrots not fully extracted with the forks ends up with a snapped vegetable, its bottom half sticking up at me from the hole in the dirt, like its taunting me. Jen wants 35 bunches for Market tomorrow.  We slog through; the work feels unbearably slow considering there are 4 people working at it. In the time it takes us to get the carrots, Jen has completed harvesting 35 heads of lettuce, 8 pounds of broccoli and is mid-way through the cauliflower patch. Leafy greens next, we head  to the kale, swiss chard, spinach and bok choy patches to pick the  happiest looking leaves they have to offer. Sweatshirts are discarded and hung on fence posts as the temperature starts to climb. Salad turnips and the last of the radish planting come out of the ground much easier than the carrots. We take the harvest to the barn by the wheel barrow. One lucky apprentice gets the hose and sets up the wash station. Another heads to the field to bring Sparkle in for milking. About this time, the sun has come up over the mountains and into the valley and it’s dry enough to grab a 5-gallon bucket and head into the pea patch. Until this point, harvest has been moving quickly, stubborn carrots notwithstanding, but once we’re in the pea patch, it slows to a crawl. And I do mean crawl. On hands and knees, we make our way through the heavy vines, doing our best to pick quickly yet selectively. There are sugar-snap peas, so sweet and delicious eaten whole, which must be not be picked unless full, but not too swollen, lest they become starchy and tough. Then the darker shelling peas, like candy once removed from their casing, which can look deceptively full and yield only a few tiny peas if picked too soon. And then the incredibly big and flat avalanche snow peas, tasty raw, but especially delicious when sautéed with butter and garlic or in a stir-fry. Eventually the apprentices washing vegetables and the one milking the cow join us in the patch, but even so, it will be lunch before we’ll be done. Backs sore, buckets loaded. Beneath our feet is a carpet of weeds, and they will fill our day tomorrow.

August

It’s 5:45 AM on a Tuesday in mid August. Derek and I slam back some form of breakfast, likely a bowl of instant oatmeal or a toasted bagel with egg. It’s light outside, but not the eager brightness of our July harvest mornings. Today is a CSA harvest day, which means we are picking for the customers who have pre-paid the farm for a weekly bag of fresh produce. Some also receive farm-fresh eggs with their share. The nice thing about CSA harvests is there is a finite amount of produce to pick, as Jen has already planned what each share will receive. The tough part is we are on a deadline. Our harvest must be picked, washed, weighed, and packed before lunch. By now, we are a well-oiled machine in the garden and the stress of meeting this deadline is significantly less than we began 8 weeks earlier. Jen sends us again into the carrots first, it still takes a long time and there is often a curse shouted at the snap of a carrot or elastic, but we have found ways to make it more efficient so that it takes two people half the time it took four of us back in July. We are into the third planting of lettuce now, swiss chard and kale are still growing strong, but the bok choy, spinach, and yukina savoy are done. Turnips and radishes have also finished, but in their place beets of gold, pink and purple add beautiful colour to our shares and market table.  Early onions have arrived just as the green onions are waning. The brassicas are also doing great: cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and kohlrabi have all taken their turns in the CSA and appear every week at the Market. Cucumbers, zucchini, patty pan squash and even cherry tomatoes are just starting to come on, we are excited that we now have enough for the CSA. Basil and parsley are booming. We had breathed a sigh of relief when the peas were declared “finished” and the tractor tilled the spent vines into the dirt. But no sooner had we rinsed our buckets and stretched out our backs than we were sent to the bean patch and the fun started all over again. In the relentless heat of August, the green and yellow bush beans came on as hard as the peas and twice as fast. In the pea patch, you sometimes could sit perched on the back edge of your bucket, using it as a stool and leave a convenient opening between your legs to deposit the harvested pods, but with beans, no such luxury. You can stand and bend at the waste, crawl on hands and knees, or scoot along on your butt. And just like the peas, it can take the rest of the morning and an hour after lunch in the baking sun to get the whole patch picked.  The potatoes have been the hardest hit this year. An infestation of Colorado potato beetles started slow in July, and despite hours on our knees almost daily crushing the damn things, they have multiplied in just a few weeks to devastating levels. Our yields are ¼ of what they should be. So though we have enough for the CSA to get a couple of pounds, and some for the house, there isn’t nearly the amount we’d hoped for. Still, the heat has given everything else in the garden a boost, and we too feel buoyed up by the bounty we’ve harvested in just a few short hours; excited to share it with the CSA members. We spend the rest of the day picking litres of raspberries for the house.

September

It’s 5:55 AM on a Friday in early September. The sky outside the trailer is the dusty dark blue of a half-realized dawn. We eat our oatmeal in bites between pulling on layers of clothing; the portable heater is whirring on the counter. It’s 5 degrees outside.  We fill our travel mugs with coffee or hot chocolate and complete our morning chores as quickly as possible, careful not to get sprayed by the hose when filling the chicken waterers: the damp will keep you chilled until break at 10:00 AM. It’s probably past our 6:15 AM start time when we get into the garden; it’s so much harder to move quickly without the sun cheering you on.  We leave the carrots for the CSA, same with the potatoes. The last planting of lettuce is not quite ready; everything has slowed down since the temperature dipped a week ago. We pick chard, sweet and cooking onions, cauliflower, and beets.  I’m on leek duty, 10 bunches, and its slow thanks to heavy soil and elastics snapping against numb fingers. The zucchini, cucumber and patty pans must wait until the temperature has risen a little and dew has dried to be picked. Jen tells us we’ll start next week’s harvest at 7:00 AM so that we won’t have to break up harvest, a very welcome announcement. The late fall turnips have their first picking. A few bunches of parsley are put together. They don’t sell well, but they still look nice next to the cash box at market.  We grab about 4 lbs of garlic from the racks drying in the bottom of the barn. Then we all head for the green house to harvest tomatoes. The cherry tomatoes have slowed down some, but we still get about 10 lbs of them. The really boomer right now is the heirloom tomoatoes. Pink beauties, green zebras, black krim, red beefsteak, and bright orange valencias fill our crates, an incredible display of colour. We’ll take over 50 lbs to market. We are done harvest by break-time, and around that time the sun finally breaks over the mountains into the valley and we can hang up our sweaters till evening comes.

Metamorphosis

This morning as I got dressed, I took a good look at myself. Under my nails there is dirt that I can never seem to completely get rid of. On the sides of my thumbs and pointer fingers the skin is rough and soil seems to have made a permanent home in the cracks. There are calluses on the pads of my hands from carrying buckets and feeders and pushing loaded wheelbarrows.  On my right forearm are the fading chicken scratches from when we loaded them in to the trailer to go to slaughter. On my left forearm is the burn from the frypan handle received while cooking supper for 8 people last Monday has finally scabbed over.  My lower back displays an inch-thick sunburn, like a some sort of rural tramp stamp, from a harvest day where the bottom of my shirt did not quite reach the top of my pants while I was bent over harvesting kale and swiss chard. On my right upper arm a bruise from loading the truck to go to market is forming and on the back of my right calf a well established bruise from dragging irrigation pipes still proudly wears purple and green.  My left ankle displays a neat swath of thistle scratches I got while picking raspberries. My sport sandals have left a wicked tan on the tops of my feet, the once shiny blue nail polish on my toes has been mostly worn away and my heels show cracks where harvesting peas or beans in my bare feet has caused the skin to dry out. The tan on my face is contained mostly to the area below my eyes because my forehead is usually shaded by my ball cap. And mosquito bites pepper the skin on my body much like my freckles brought out by the sun.

Lisa gathering Swiss Chard and Derek in the onion patch on harvest day last week.

Beneath all this, strong shoulders from lifting hay bales, hauling buckets, and packing crates to the cold room. I have strong hands from milking 2 gallons out of the cow and pulling weeds for hours on end in the garden.  My legs are strong from hours on my knees planting, leaning on the digging fork, forcing flexinet posts into stony ground, running gates for the tractor and from the constant necessity of walking across the acreage of the farm.

No matter what clothes I choose this morning of my day off, or if I decided to do my hair and put on some makeup, I wear the uniform of a farmer now and I can’t help but notice how comfortable I am in this skin. 

Chickens Chickens Chickens...Done!

Wow - hard to believe the way time is flying past here on the farm. We are still adjusting to the switch in mid-July to the summer harvest schedule: 6:00 AM - 2:30 PM. This is avoid the hottest part of the day, and harvest the vegetables while they are still cool and crisp in the morning. It has been hard to get up at 5:30 everyday, but worth it to be able to go to town for a swim or have a nice long nap before dinner.

Derek with a Batch 1 chick in May

In mid June, chores were switched up and I moved off of looking after the laying hens to helping Derek with the meat bird, aka broilers. This meant feeding and watering the birds still in the brooder, building chicken tractors so that we could put them out on pasture, and keeping a close eye on the flock. Once the birds were on pasture, this also involved dragging the tractors 2-4 times per day and moving the flexinets as needed (a very frustrating job on stony ground).

Building Chicken Tractors for the meat birds

Adding the moisture barrier to the tractor frame

The Final Step: Shade Cloth

Derek tries out the new digs for his chickies

Yesterday was the end of our posts as guardians of the meat birds. Not because it was the end of the month, but because as of yesterday, all of them are dead. Yay!

Batch 1 at about 2 weeks

What? Not the reaction you were expecting?

I have to say I am beginning to understand why one of the joys of farming is the seasonality of it. Looking after 300 birds as they are getting up to 12lbs live weight takes a lot of work and constant care, especially in summer heat hitting nearly 40 degrees.

Chickens on pasture, enjoying the tractors and fresh grass

On July 18th, the first batch of chickens (the ones derek starting looking after during our 2nd week at the farm) and some of the larger birds in Batch 2 went to My-Les Poulty for processing. This is a government inspected facility that the farm sends approximately 1/2 of their birds to so that they can be sold at the farmers market. The other birds are processed on the farm, using the same procedures but sold to friends and family at farm gate for a slightly lower price. We processed the second half of the chickens yesterday. What a day.

But over 200 chickens are now in the freezers and that means we didn't have to lock them up last night (Mom: believe it or not, Derek and I were asleep BEFORE 10:00pm) and we were actually able to sleep-in today (Sundays are always our day off, but we still have get up early to check on our animals before heading off for the day)! Of course, Mokah still wanted to be let out at 5:30. But being able to stay in bed until 9:00am was such a luxury today! Tomorrow the chores will be split and traded so that Derek and I are once again assigned animals to care for. 

I had a wonderful sense of accomplishment yesterday as we all sat on the back stoop, exhausted from the long days work. Adam had bought the crew cold beer for the end of the day (club soda and blackberry syrup for me!) and we all sat, stunned by how much had been accomplished. We had all feared that the day would go slowly and we would have to stop and finish the work on Sunday. What a relief to have made it to the end of that work day with a clean(and then scrubbed and disinfected) slate.