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The Times published this Cargill-damning story a few days ago, set against the narrative of a 22-year old woman whose bout with E. coli-tainted beef paralyzed her for life. Likening the U.S. beef industry to roulette, the writer takes us on a tour of the reasons industrially farmed beef is such an unsound product. One of the best passages follows:

Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen. The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

The article goes on to say that the USDA allows companies to devise their own safety plans. We are not in good hands, friends. I urge you to join me in speaking up and asking questions about our food system while partaking in a local one whose participants and producers you know, or can easily meet.

Stephanie Smith, 22, paralyzed by E. coli

Lest you chalk Stephanie’s condition up to “one in a million”-style bad luck, I submit for your consideration that 940 people were sickened in this same 2007 outbreak traced to a Cargill plant. Remember seeing it in the news? Me either. Funny, the bigger you get, the better PR men you can afford.

Cargill is paying for Stephanie Smith’s medical treatment in advance of any legal settlement. If that’s not an admission of guilt – or at least a playing-it-safe strategy that implicates responsibility – color me stunned.

Visiting Cargill’s corporate website yields this language: Some Cargill products are only approved for use in certain geographies, end uses, and/or at certain usage levels. It is the customer’s responsibility to determine, for a particular geography, that (i) the Cargill product, its use and usage levels, (ii) the customer’s product and its use, and (iii) any claims made about the customer’s product, all comply with applicable laws and regulations.

There is a map of the world showing the company’s ubiquitous reach. One eventually gets to the page that explains everything. No shock or awe here.

But what’s puzzlin’ you is the nature of my game.

I was deeply disappointed to see McDonalds among the list of restaurants for the Go Texan Restaurant Roundup this past week. It is in such poor taste on so many levels that I’ve chosen to boycott the event altogether.

In visiting the website, one can read that to qualify, establishments must be located in Texas and serve Texas products.

“The GO TEXAN Restaurant Round-Up is the perfect opportunity to celebrate the restaurant owners and chefs who care about serving the freshest local ingredients and who pride themselves on Texas quality,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples said.

While McDonald’s spends over $100M on Texas-produced beef annually, that beef is processed with animals raised in other states. One cannot point to a burger and say with authority that it was raised (in its CAFO), slaughtered, processed and transported all within Texas – and served in a Texas store. Traceability has long been a spectre over the fast food industry, and with this particular marketing initiative (Texas beef) the cows have come home to roost. My attempts to contact McD’s corporate for any sort of comment have been unanswered.

If, due to my inquiries, or this posting, I do receive an answer, I will still not be satisfied until I’ve personally been given a tour of the “Texas raised beef” system McD’s claims, from living cow-in-a-CAFO to burger. This, of course, will not be granted, because factory feed lots and processing facilities, under the guise of being “proprietary” and necessarily “sterile” are verboten to consumers’ eyes. The fact is, many of us have seen Fast Food Nation. It, combined with Food, Inc., FRESH and others forthcoming, has and will make a difference. You can’t let people in to see how the beef gets cooked; they might not want to eat it anymore.

I got no sympathy for the devil.

Now, let’s enjoy a little Rolling Stones!

Having recently sat through two meetings, one of which was a group of enviro-activists, in which someone pipes up with the serious suggestion that we let Wal*Mart play in our sandbox, I feel compelled to remind everyone what might be inappropriate about such a partnership.

It would be boring to cite the treatment of vendors and workers, illegal immigrant frame-ups and the displacement of local businesses across the country. I’m also over the giant’s attempt to “go organic” followed closely upon by its “local” campaign, somewhat sadly undertaken by field directors sent furtively to investigate just what this local-you-speak-of might be at farmers’ markets (!)

My chief complaint with Wal*Mart is that it undermines civilization. Witnessed less than a year ago on Long Island, the trampling of Wal*Mart employee Jdimytai Damour, 34, early on the morning of Black Friday, that spectator sport of American consumerism; as well as this week’s baby-slapping by a complete stranger in a Georgia Wal*Mart. He has been charged with felony cruelty to children. What does it say about a place in which such sociopathic behavior can occur in different areas of the country? The cheapening of material goods without regard to how they arrived on the shelves; the implicit suggestion that big-box retail, because of its ability to offer the lowest prices (Always!), has the right to run generations-old businesses out of town; all ultimately reduces customers to animals.

Would people ever turn up in droves like this, before sunrise, to help their neighbors? Possibly, if a hurricane or other natural disaster were at hand. But to me, this images holds a mirror to our culture. What if we were caught on camera every Nov. 28 or so standing in line to serve the poor? Would we still feel a void so great we thought we could fill it with all this STUFF?

Over the weekend I attended the American Community Gardening Association annual conference in Columbus, Ohio. Franklin Park Conservatory was our venue, and it was strikingly beautiful.

Did you play with Lite-Brites as a kid? I did. As I was passing through a hallway toward the Chihuly glass exhibit, I spied this little boy pushing lights into a giant Lite-Brite interactive screen. I thought about how the building we were in so closely resembled the U.S. Capitol that the boy was right to use red, white and blue in his rendering.

That same afternoon, I was given the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to tour the Scotts Miracle-Gro corporate headquarters and garden. Employees are given the opportunity to plant in the on-campus food garden, which we were told is 1/3 organic. It was interesting to see Miracle-Gro’s conventional and organic products being utilized in such close proximity. Had I been charged with the product, I’d have created completely separate gardens. Then again, I’d not have planted a garden meant for chemical usage in the first place.

Our tour guide could not have been more gracious, and I want to temper my comments with the understanding that while I appreciate having been allowed onto the site, I do not agree with many of the business decisions taken by this corporation.

Please look at this zucchini. It has not only been allowed to grow to an unholy size but has broken through its white picket fence. For me, the giant, renegade vegetables served as a cautionary tale – not a success story. One elderly lady in our group remarked that she would not want to use a product that would cause her vegetables to grow so large, as it seemed unnatural and might decrease the nutrient density. This was all without mentioning the chemicals.

While there was evidence of the Miracle-Gro organic variant in use, from the branded bags of soil to the reasonably-sized produce, the conventional loomed around nearly every corner. There was even a totem of sorts:

Tomatoes so enormous they had toppled the plants and pumpkins which were beginning to compete for a cameo on the Charlie Brown Halloween special were some of the garden’s offerings. Employees are to donate the majority of their produce to a local food pantry. On the day we visited it seemed as though the employees might have been on deadline for a new variant. Which makes sense, given the 24 pesticide products Scotts was ordered by the EPA to recall earlier this year.

Passing by what we were told was the Chairman’s garden, I knelt to get a closer look at the plaque. “Better Living Through Chemistry,” it read.

As I notice more and more instances of greenwashing across sectors, I think about how corporations can’t become something they aren’t, from the inside-out. In this case, a great American brand, having looked around and seen that the world has changed – that people actually do care what we’re putting on our lawns and gardens, and that the runoff from those treatments affects our watersheds – very much wants to compete in the new world of organic products. The problem is, we already associate this brand with what it does best.

I would encourage you to buy your dirt from local businesses which have long built their soil and compost without taking the easy route. In Central Texas two of my favorites are Natural Gardener and GeoGrowers.