NEWSFREE RANGE FARMING

Most chefs pair a beef dish with a nice glass of red wine. Some Canadian ranchers are making it easy on cooks and diners — they're putting the wine right into the meat itself.

Last November, Jandince Ravndahl of Canada's Sezmu Meats started feeding her cows one liter of red wine a day, the equivalent of about one glass for humans. Ravndahl claims the cattle enjoy eating the red wine mixed into their feed, and that the resulting beef tastes more tender, almost like it's self-marinated. "Once they have it [red wine], they're happy to have it again," Ravndahl told the Vancouver Sun. "They moo at one another a little more and seem more relaxed." Well, sure. All those moos are probably because bovines are pretty buzzed.

Ravndahl's grass-fed, wine-drunk beef is taking off among the culinary elite, with prominent chefs like Ned Bell ordering the meat. And while red wine and grass-fed beef are two great tastes that undoubtedly taste great together, wine-fed beef threatens all the recent progress made in the sustainable meat movement.

There's something extremely satisfying about cooking a meal from scratch with food you can trace back to the farms they came from. It enhances my appreciation of what I'm eating like nothing else, and it's not just because the ingredients are fresh. But just like most people, I occasionally find myself far from home and hungry, wishing for something quick, easy, and filling.

That's usually when I begin to crave fast food, and although I've sworn the stuff off, that doesn't mean I don't wish that occasionally there was something that met me halfway and provided some grass-fed goodness on the go. Los Angeles does sport a 100 percent grass-fed hot dog cart, Let's Be Frank (which treated me to my first hot dog in years), but there's just one truck, and it only shows up on certain days. But soon, I may have a more reliable option: a fast food chain offering organic, pastured beef is about to open a franchise here in LA.

Elevation Burger offers not just a sustainable beef patty, but fries cooked in "100 percent heart-healthy olive oil." The joint also offers ingredients that are "fresh, sustainable, and local when practical." Elevation Burger recycles, donates its used oil for biodiesel, pursues LEED certification for its restaurants, and uses energy-saving appliances. The chain is also rapidly expanding. So is this greenwashing, or is it sustainable, humane meat's ticket into the mainstream?

Years ago when I used to live in northern New Mexico in a small Airstream trailer huddled up close to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, I had the great privilege of having a herd of bison as my neighbors. The majestic creatures grazed a huge expanse of land belonging to Taos Pueblo.

While I was living there, I knew of a few projects that were trying to bring bison back to the land on northern New Mexico Pueblos, and that an InterTribal Bison Cooperative was working across the country on similar efforts. This is no small feat considering bison were slaughtered to near extinction, decreasing in number from an estimated 60 million across the U.S. to only a few hundred.

It's exciting to see bison returning to their natural habitat, but unfortunately, some folks have other plans for the animals now that their populations have improved. I was shocked to read recently that bison are now being moved to feedlots. Andrew Gunther of the Animal Welfare Institute writes about seeing bison, which are undomesticated animals, crammed into feedlots. "They were fed an unnatural corn- and grain-based diet that is not only alien to them but which leads to unbalanced conditions in their digestive systems, which then acts as a haven for E. coli O157:H7," he wrote. "They looked neither strong nor majestic, but confused and defeated."

If you haven't yet heard, Chelsea Clinton's getting married to her fiancee Marc Mezvinsky soon, and it seems they will be serving quite the sustainable menu to her guests. There will be options that are vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, and for the omnivores, a nice, organic, grass-fed, free-range steak.

Alright, so maybe this isn't the most hard-hitting piece of agricultural news, but I think that anything that raises the profile of alternative, sustainable food choices, or even gets people talking about such food choices, is a great thing. When I mention to friends and family that I write for a sustainable food blog, they always ask me what they should be eating. Since I'm prone to animated lectures on the topic, I usually try to stick to Micheal Pollan's quick advice of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Although I can't resist elaborating that they should probably cut out factory-farmed meat and fast food entirely.

Food issues have risen in the public's consciousness to the point where people are starting to ask a lot of questions, but it seems to me that there aren't a lot of answers being given. It's still shocking to me that most people don't even know that there is such a thing as "grass-fed" meat ("Isn't all beef grass-fed?" they ask). So when I see someone as high-profile as Miss Clinton promoting the grass-fed goodness, it makes my sustainable foodie heart skip a beat.

Honestly, I'm asking: Why are folks who support the conventional way of growing crops and meat so very threatened by a relatively small cadre of people who want to buy food that's grown a different way?

I ask these questions in reaction to one specific Big Ag supporter, Richard Keller, editor of AgProfessional, which Keller describes as "a magazine dedicated to serving ag retailers, crop consultants, and farm managers." Keller recently published an essay on the CattleNetwork site in which he calls local food advocates "today's hippies." His prose drips with so much disdain for locavores that you could sop it up with a biscuit.

Keller sneers at "upper-class individuals" who hire gardener-entrepreneurs to turn their yards into food gardens, a practice he calls "having the lowly servants feed their masters." Next, he sets his sights on crop mobs, those groups of volunteers that do farm work for a day to help small farmers who have trouble affording enough labor, expressing his objection to the fact that this work is "often done as a party." I know, Keller. Crop mobsters are no better than those pesky seven dwarfs who "whistle while they work."

Mobs of folks wielding pitchforks and shovels are storming small farms across the nation. But I assure you, they're not angry, nor are they hunting witches, ogres, or any other kind of monster. They just want to revolutionize agriculture.

They're crop mobs, a new phenomena that's taking off everywhere from major cities to small towns in rural America. How it works is this: A group of agricurious people organizes informally, usually through Facebook or some other form of social media. Once a month or so, organizers email the group with the location of a small, local farm. Members looking to get their hands dirty and pitch in for the day then descend on the farm, and voila, a crop mob.

The original Crop Mob started in North Carolina in 2008, and since then the movement's been growing almost as fast as the produce volunteers plant. According to USA Today, there are more than 30 crop mobs throughout the U.S. The relatively new Twin Cities Crop Mob lists 160 members on its Facebook page, while the original North Carolina mob boasts more than 400 members on its email listserv. Of course not all these members show up to every event, but most mobs consist of anywhere from 10 to 50 participants.

If you've been around the sustainable food block, you may have run across a term that sounds a little too sci-fi to relate to agriculture and a little too earthy to be about anything high-tech. The mystery term of which I speak is "biodynamic agriculture." If I've already lost you, trust me, you're not the only one who doesn't have a clue what it's all about.

Biodynamic ag has its roots in Germany, where an Austrian scientist and philosopher named Rudolph Steiner engaged in a series of discussions and lectures in 1924. The ideas embodied in his legendary lectures formed the basis of biodynamics. The concept he developed, as the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association succinctly puts it, is "a unified approach to agriculture that relates the ecology of the earth-organism to that of the entire cosmos."

While it may sound like we're actually talking sci-fi after all, the idea of biodynamics arose out of a concern for the most earthly element around us—soil. After chemical fertilizers were introduced at the turn of the last century, some of the more observant and sensitive scientists out there began to notice a change in soil quality, according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service. Biodynamics was thus the first ecologically minded, grassroots response to chemical-intensive farming.

In the prisons of New York, an empowering program is changing the lives of inmates, one class—and plant—at a time. The Bard Prison Initiative is a college program taking place in five penal institutions, three long-term, maximum-security and two transitional, medium-security prisons. Two-hundred student-inmates participate in a rigorous, full-time liberal arts curriculum that garners them either associate's or bachelor's degrees.

Since Bard College started the program when the government slashed funding for prison education in the mid-1990s, not a single graduate has returned to prison after being paroled, according to Marion Nestle, who recently gave a commencement speech to incarcerated graduates at Woodbourne Correctional Facility.

Why was a nutritionist and food safety activist called on to give the address? Well, as part of the curriculum, students of the program grew a garden to provide fresh food to both the prison population and local food banks. Nestle, who was awarded the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service by Bard College, emphasized to the students how gardening is an excellent expression of the values of liberal democracy they had learned in the classroom.

Let's hear it for hot days, iced tea, and swimming pools. Let's also give a cheer for all the summer's eating joys: ripe fruit exploding from trees, farms bursting with life, and plenty of lovely days for outdoor fiestas.

Don't let the dog days pass you by without celebrating the food of your community. This season offers the best excuses to enjoy the fruits, so to speak, of local farms' labor and to host events that support sustainable food. Here are some ideas that might inspire you to get a little bit of quality, sustainable foodie fun out of your summer.

Host Cook-outs: There's nothing more summery than a good, old-fashioned cook-out. This can be a great way to showcase foods from local farms, especially grass-fed meats produced by small farmers. Nothing will taste better on the grill than a hamburger created in a way that nourishes the soil as much as it does the hamburger-eater. Throw in some special foods from your area, whether it be watermelon or cranberries or oranges. Provide a few local beers and other drinks, and it will be a special event indeed.

A new study may make sustainable foodies feel like they've got egg all over their faces. According to scientists at the National Cheng Kung University School of Medicine in Taiwan, free-range eggs are not as healthy as conventionally produced eggs.

Taiwanese scientists tested levels of pollutants in cage-free eggs and compared them to pollutant levels in regular eggs. According to their research, free-range eggs contained 5.7 times more dioxins and other environmental pollutants than conventionally produced eggs. Dioxins are hormone-disrupting toxins that can cause reproductive and developmental problems, immune system damage, and cancer. While most of people's dioxin exposure does come from food, it's definitely not an ingredient you want swimming around in your omelet.

But while this study examines a worthwhile topic, it fails to put the whole situation into context. Free-range chickens get to roam around outdoors, nibbling on plants and insects, so it makes sense that they might be exposed to more environmental pollutants than caged chickens, who spend their whole lives trapped inside. But the story doesn't stop there: Because free-range chickens get outside, some research shows that their eggs boast health benefits over conventional eggs. Mother Earth News conducted a study comparing free-range and traditional eggs. The publication found that cage-free eggs contained about one-third less cholesterol and one-quarter less saturated fat than regular eggs. Free-range eggs also boasted higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin A, vitamin E, and beta carotene.