You are eating horsemeat: or there are 450 places where something could go wrong with your food

Horse meat.

Pig bung.

Rockfish.

What do these three things have in common?

Or maybe your first question is "what the eff is pig bung?" Let me explain. This week, three stories came to my attention. Two because they're making headlines, and one because it was on "This American Life" two weeks ago and I only just listened to it this morning.

Horse meat: Europe is horrified to discover that its beef supply has some horse meat in it. In some cases traces, in some cases up to 80%. Of what was supposed to be beef burger meat. Salon does a great job of covering the issue and it implications.  Now the fact that horse is being eaten is not what should horrify in my opinion, though I suspect for many people that is the case. What should horrify is stuff like this, from Salon:

"While the explanation of where some of the horse meat could have come from is straightforward, how it got to dinner plates is not. As Lichfield explains, “It came from abattoirs in Romania through a dealer in Cyprus working through another dealer in Holland to a meat plant in the south of France which sold it to a French-owned factory in Luxembourg which made it into frozen meals sold in supermarkets in 16 countries.”

Leading to: "There are 450 places where something could go wrong before your food gets into your hands."

Foodie miles

It seems like whenever I travel somewhere I come back and say how I ate up the local food and am super psyched to come back to the variety of NYC.

I just spent a few days at a resort in Jamaica where the only good food was the jerk chicken, peas and rice, and plantains they served every day for lunch and dinner. When it was all hot, it was divine--but buffets are tricky.

Anyway, with all this talk of food miles, and competing studies about local food's ability to leave a smaller carbon footprint, I got thinking about foodie miles. What if I calculated the carbon footprint of the trips I've taken to eat the world's treats? Hell, I traveled all the way to Singapore --to see my friends, natch--but basically to eat at hawker centers. I think this gives me an F minus in the personal food miles department.

What is your farmy restaurant really serving you?

This piece by Jane Black really caught my eye, especially in the wake of my attendance at a young farmers conference last week at Stone Barns. She examines a restaurant in the DC area called Founding Farmers and how they are riding the local sustainable gravy train--sometimes making good on their promises, and sometimes not so much so.

It made me think about a fascinating workshop I attended at the conference, one about the relationship between farmer and chef, and led by some of the kitchen staff at Blue Hill at Stone Barns--those cooks who are responsible for purchasing and building relationships with farmers. Let me start by saying that those guys are as real deal as it gets (if you ever accidentally step on a pile of money and decide to make it yours, treat yourself to a meal at Blue Hill at Stone Barns). This is not a post in which I expose them for being fraudulent or farm-washers.

That being said: I think a lot of diners there have misconceptions about the experience. Think all the food is grown there and at their Berkshires farm? Think again. A quick look at the math would help you see that they just can't produce enough food on site to feed all of their diners. As a result they are purchasing from an additional 40 farmers or so, give or take. And the seafood? Do you think there is seafood in Westchester? They are flying it in from Nantucket etc. Also flown in on a regular basis? organic but industrial carrots, onions etc. used to make stock.

I think it's a question of, as a diner, removing blinders from your eyes. Just because you want to believe that the tomato on your burger is local and seasonal (because damn, a tomato slice on a burger is a fine thing indeed), just because you want asparagus risotto in January (a perfect dish when done right, no?) ask yourself: are tomatoes in season around here? Allow yourself to see the truth. Sometimes the restaurant is misleading you and sometimes you are contributing to the deception by misleading yourself.