Dying for a Cookie

The toll house cookie dough disappeared off the store shelves in June. I had no idea what was going on. It's still gone and I now have more information. It's a little frightening.

Bill Marler is an attorney who specialize in food poisoning cases. His client is a woman who's been hospitalized for months and is probably going to die. It appears to be linked to eating raw, pre-made cookie dough.

The culprit is EColi and it's caught everyone by surprised. No one expected such a highly processed food to be contaminated with fecal matter, which is how EColi is spread. And despite a voluntary recall by Nestles and continuing investigation, Marler says no one is still certain how it happened.

But it's clear our mass produced food addiction is starting to come back to bite us. There has been contaminated spinach, contaminated peanuts, peanut butter, peppers. There's lots of proposed safety legislation on Capitol Hill and it's mostly focused on making food easier to trace when it's found to be a problem.

The issue of how the contamination happens in the first place isn't getting a lot of attention yet. Factory farms grow food on a massive scale. One bad apple can, indeed, spoil the whole bushel. Germs in one place quickly spread throughout a facility.

Factory farms raise animals in filthy, inhumane conditions that now are proving to lead to not only bacteria, but antibiotic resistant germs that have adapted to a constant low dose of preventative antibiotics. An easy solution, according to an expert I spoke to this week, is to give the animals more space, clean up the waste and let newborns spend more time with their mothers so they can naturally ingest more infection-fighting organisms.

Where did your salad ingredients come from? Was it your neighborhood farmer or a factory farm in another country? Do you know if it's safe? If you eat meat, where does it come from? What kind of conditions existed at the farm or at the processing plant?

We want our food when we want it. We have no patience with seasonal restrictions. We want it cheap, convenient and plentiful. And the indications are growing that the price we may pay is very dear indeed.

Peaceable Kingdom Is Coming - Pass It On

Did you see the climate change issue differently after watching Al Gore's
"An Inconvenient Truth"? Then you are the audience for a new film that's about to be released by NY-based filmmakers Tribe of Heart.

It's a movie that will change the way you see farm animals. I saw it as part of their pre-release audience testing. It is called "Peaceable Kingdom, The Journey Home".

Filmmakers Jenny Stein and James LaVeck have made a powerful film on a controversial issue, but they've kept a compassionate touch. Rather than strident demands for change, they've focused the film on livestock farmers whose own lives transformed when they began to question what they were doing. The answers to those questions haven't been easy, and their conclusions have cost them friendships and a great deal of money. But those answers have also created amazing relationships with animals they once considered food. The softening of their hearts is reflected in their faces.

Tribe of Heart goes to farm animal sanctuaries and introduces us to farm animals in a way many of us have never experienced. Once you've gotten to know them, it is impossible to believe they are any less individual, sentient creatures than the pets we love.

There is inescapable evidence that our factory farm, mass produced food system is dangerous. The latest recall involves the most benign food of all - cookie dough. Tribe of Heart goes behind the scenes, showing the creatures at those farms, showing the conditions in which they live and the way they die. These are tough scenes to watch, but open your own heart. Realize that what you eat, what you ate at your last meal, came from those conditions. Be brave enough to see where that food that's presented so neatly wrapped at your cavernous grocery store really comes from. If it raises questions in your own mind - all the better.

Open yourself to the possibility of change. "Peaceable Kingdom - The Journey Home" is a great first step.

Thought Trails As a Baby Sleeps

The picture was taken through our front window. Miss Jane Doe, as we called her, was apparently dropped off by her mom very early in the morning and told to stay put while mom ran off to do a few deer-errands.

She can't be more than a week old - her body is just about the same size as our fat cat's, though her legs are impossibly long.

I watched her all day, compulsively checking on her through the window to be sure she was okay. We have coyotes here. In fact, the first week I lived here, before KB got here, I heard a deer being killed under the weeping cherry on the other side of the house. I have never heard anything so horrific, ever. I hope never to hear it again.

So my concern was legitimate, and I was fully prepared to go out and defend her with a baseball bat if necessary.

It wasn't.

She stayed curled up in a ball all day, occasionally waking to look around, once standing up and peeking out from her sheltered spot behind the flowers, then blinking and curling back up to sleep some more.

By ten pm, we were worried. She was still there. It was getting colder. I'd already gone online and saw that the number one rule with "abandoned" fawns is to stay away. But what if mom didn't come back?

It was a rough couple of hours - an attempt to distract myself with television led me to an insultingly simplified yet hope-crushing view of the future on some network. The gist was that climate change would be creating disaster, even with heroic attempts to address it, and things were going to be pretty damned grim even in my own children's lifetime. Thanks. That helps.

I've been fighting a sense of hopelessness for a while, and it's shaking my sense of myself as an optimist and an idealist. The issues are so huge and humans have such basic errors in their assumptions that solutions seem like an incredible longshot.

Take food, for example. Do we really understand the cost of what we eat? No, no, no, I'm not some holier than thou vegan fanatic. I should be vegan. I can't be holier than thou since I know the reasons why and I'm still not doing it.

But Jenny Stein and James LaVeck came over recently to show KB the nearly-final version of Tribe of Heart's new documentary, "Peaceable Kingdom". It tells the story of the transformation of three farm families who suddenly questioned the assumption that everything in the world is here to serve humanity.

What if Man isn't the crown of creation? What if we treat animals like sentient beings? Can we then even bear to think of what we do to them?

But challenging that assumption is massive - it goes against even what many religions have institutionalized: God put Man in charge and everything in it is here to serve his needs.

That's put us where we are. That removes us from the web of interconnectedness that is our ecosystem, and entitles us to exploit all resources for our own comfort and gain. Drill, baby, drill. Suck up all that oil so we can drive. Breed those animals so we can eat. Develop that land so we can shop. Test those toxins on animals so we're safe. Dump that waste someplace and to hell with the consequences because we NEED that nuclear energy, that chemical, that drug, that plastic, that road, that fuel.

And we DO need much of it. That's the problem. We have created an insatiable society and to step back into the environmental web and take our places as equals rather than rulers, we'd have to completely change how we live.

What are the odds of that? We are some of nature's most helpless creatures with a talent for technology and a massive sense of entitlement.

See why I'm discouraged? It feels to me today like society is hurtling toward its inevitable end while most of us are yelling "faster, faster!" It just doesn't make sense, but I guess that's what denial looks like.

So that's where my head's at and it's not pretty. But there is one bit of good news.

Miss Jane Doe, after worrying us for several hours, quietly disappeared sometime around midnight. I'm hoping that means Mom finally got home.