If you would like to receive our newsletter by email, please visit our Sign Up page. If you join our newsletter list, you’ll also receive occasional updates on breaking news and important alerts about what Sustainable Table is doing. (On average, you’ll receive one email every few weeks.)

Want to see past issues? Visit our Newsletter Archives to browse through old copies of The Pasture Post

The Pasture Post: Issue II

Happy Summer from Sustainable Table and welcome to the second issue of The Pasture Post. We hope your summer is relaxing, cool, and full of sustainable food!

In this Issue

News

New case of mad cow
Meatrix forum update
Eat Well Guide road trip
Film festival update

Actions

Meatrix Starbucks campaign

Special Features

Ice cream
Podcasts now available
Seasonal recipe

Coming Soon

More translations
Tibetan Meatrix world premiere

News

Mad Cow
Reported cases of mad cow have been more frequent in Canada than in the US, with 7 cases in Canada since 2003, and Canada has experienced recent cases involving cows born after the 1997 feed ban, raising questions about the effectiveness of the current ban. The USDA spends roughly $1 million per week on testing for mad cow, testing about 1,000 cows per day. Canada's surveillance program is much less extensive, with about one tenth as many animals being tested, even though the country has half as many cattle as the US. Canada is second only to Australia as a source of US beef imports. Read more on the Sustainable Table blog …

The Meatrix Forum
The Meatrix forum is back! Hackers brought down the site several weeks ago, but we’re now back and better than ever. There are almost 700 registered users in the forum, so go online to meet other people involved in the sustainable food movement or just let us know what you’re thinking at www.themeatrix.com/forum.

Eat Well Guide Road Trip
We headed south on the New Jersey turnpike early one morning in June, and, oh, the places we went! Read all about the 750 lb heritage breed boar we saw at Gryffon’s Aerie farm in Virginia, or the homemade biscuits they served us at Maverick Farm’s bed and breakfast.

After visiting some fantastic farms, stores, and restaurants (all listed on the Eat Well Guide) between NYC and Tennessee, we headed to Bonnaroo to set up our tent and show The Meatrix films to festival goers. They loved it! Check out the pictures on the Sustainable Table/Meatrix blog.

Film Festivals
Next month The Meatrix II: Revolting is being featured in both the Globians Film Festival in Potsdam, Germany and the Gloria Film Festival in Salt Lake City, Utah. If you live in those areas, check out the festivals and root for Moopheus, Leo and Chickity if you find yourself in Salt Lake or Potsdam this August!

Actions

The Meatrix Starbucks Campaign
Food & Water Watch’s Starbucks Week of Action during June 19th-25th was a great success. Nationwide, volunteers leafleted their local Starbucks store, asking the company to stop using milk produced with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH). In all, 25 cities, in almost every region of the country, participated in this effort to educate the public and increase the pressure on Starbucks to buy better milk.

As for the media, Ithaca, NY, and Greeley, CO, volunteers were particularly successful in getting the Week of Action covered in the local news. Overall, it was heartening to see so many people take time out of their day to work on this issue.

Starbucks could be a very important domino in the rBGH-free domino effect, as many companies have already stopped using rBGH milk, and a Starbucks switch could greatly increase that trend. Let’s keep the pressure on!

Missed out on the Week of Action? You can still take the message to your local Starbucks! Email food@fwwatch.org or call 202-797-6550 to receive free leaflets to distribute.

Special Features

Sustainable Table Feature Article
We all have memories of racing the heat to catch sweet and sticky dribbles of melting ice cream, and we all know the heart-wrenching loss of a scoop that has fallen to the ground, never to be licked again. This creamy treat undeniably resides in the belly of America’s food culture, and ever since its commercialization around the turn of the 20th century, millions of Americans have turned to ice cream as the logical conclusion to a delicious meal.

Perhaps the greatest testament to our undeniable love for ice cream is the $20 billion industry behind it, powered by the average American who eats around 5 1/2 gallons of ice cream per year, and over 90% of US households that regularly pick up a pint. Read more…

Check out Sustainable Table’s Special Features section to see our archive of features.

Harvest Eating Collaboration
Sustainable Table now features Harvest Eating and Chef Keith Snow’s podcast on our Sustainable Kitchen main page, where he provides a recipe and shows us how to cook it. Other exciting podcast projects are underway, so stay tuned!

Seasonal Recipe
We can’t get enough GRUB! If you haven’t heard of GRUB yet, it’s the new book by Anna Lappé and Bryant Terry, filled with great recipes and a ton of information about our food system. Visit eatgrub.org to learn more. Here’s one of GRUB’s fantastic summer recipes, perfect for your next cookout!

Shrimp and Veggie Kabobs with Mixed Herb Marinade

Preparation time: 20 minutes
Inactive preparation time: at least 3 hours, or overnight
Cooking time: 15 minutes

Marinade:

¼ cup fresh lemon juice
¾ cup fresh orange juice
¾ cup fresh lime juice
½ cup apple juice
2 tablespoons minced fresh basil
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley
2 tablespoons minced fresh rosemary
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 serrano chiles, seeded and minced
1 ½ teaspoons coarse sea salt
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil

Kabobs:

Sixteen 12-inch wooden skewers, soaked in water for at least 30 minutes
32 large shrimp (about 1 pound), peeled and deveined
24 cremini mushrooms, stemmed and cleaned
1 large red bell pepper, cored, seeded, and cut into 1-inch squares
1 large orange bell pepper, cored, seeded, and cut into 1-inch squares
1 large yellow bell pepper, cored, seeded, and cut into 1-inch squares
1 large onion, cut into 4 vertical pieces and then halved

Directions:

1. In a large bowl combine all the marinade ingredients and whisk well.

2. Add all the vegetables and the shrimp to the marinade, cover and refrigerate for at least 3 hours or overnight, stirring occasionally.

3. Preheat the grill or broiler.

4. Thread the shrimp and vegetables onto the skewers, use 2 wooden skewers per kabob to keep all the ingredients in place. Each kabob should have 4 shrimp, 3 mushrooms, about 2 pieces of each pepper, and several pieces of onion.

5. If grilling, place the kabobs on the grill, and if broiling, place the kabobs on a foil-lined broiler pan about 6 inches from the heat and cook for 4 to 6 minutes on one side, until vegetables start to char. Using a pastry brush, generously apply the marinade to all sides of the kabobs, and then flip over with tongs and cook another 4 to 6 minutes, until the shrimp are just cooked through and the vegetables are slightly charred.

And don’t forget to check out Food and Water Watch’s Shrimp Page to learn about the best, healthiest, and most sustainable shrimp you can buy.

Coming Soon

More translations!
We now have over 25 languages added to the Meatrix International site, most recently added are Romanian, Korean, and Hungarian versions of The Meatrix II.

Additionally, the International Action Pages are getting an overhaul, with new content and design. The first two are Brazil and Germany – which include an English translation so English speakers around the world can learn about global agriculture issues and the organizations working to preserve a healthy food system around the world.

Stay tuned to the Meatrix International site for new action pages for Canada and Italy!

And, we’ll be launching both a Mandarin and Tibetan Meatrix I in September – we’re currently looking into having a sustainable wine and cheese tasting benefit event in New York City to launch the movies. More details to follow on the blog….

and, finally….

Farewell to John Kerkering
This month we say goodbye to our Eat Well Guide Coordinator, John Kerkering. For two years he worked diligently on the guide, making sure that listings were accurate by talking to farmers, store and restaurant owners, and chefs across the US and Canada. His dedication makes the quality of the Eat Well Guide listings possible, and we’re grateful for the effort he put into the guide. We wish him the best of luck as he begins a masters program at Duke.