Zester Daily

Red wine blends are booming in popularity in the U.S., and I predict that in 2014 white blends will follow suit. The floral and citrus-scented 2012 Tenuta Sant’Antonio Scaia Garganega/Chardonnay is a bargain Italian example: dry, fresh, fruity, tangy and perfect as an apéritif or with steamed mussels. It also happens to be more interesting than you might expect for an under-$15 wine.

Satisfying white blends have a long history in European wine regions, and in the past few years innovative California winemakers have turned to Italy for inspiration.

The Veneto region in northeast Italy, where the Tenuta Sant’Antonio Scaia comes from, has a mild climate, thanks to nearby Lake Garda, and a winemaking history that goes back to the ancient Greeks. It’s a region of wine contrasts, home to Amarone, a unique red made by a labor-intensive process of semi-drying grapes, and mass-market commercial companies that pump out millions of boring bottles a year.

The Tenuta Sant’Antonio Scaia blends a familiar international variety with a local Italian grape that’s widely planted throughout the Veneto. Late-ripening, Garganega is the variety that dominates Soave Classico, which must be made in a specified district near the city of Verona. The grape resembles Chardonnay in that both vary widely in taste depending on where they’re grown, when they’re picked, and how the wine is made.

Garganega grown on the Veneto’s flat plains for quantity rather than quality becomes simple, mediocre plonk. At Tenuta Sant’Antonio, grapes are planted on rolling hills, yields are kept low, and bunches are harvested by hand, all in the name of quality.

The four Castagnedi brothers — Massimo, Armando, Tiziano, and Paolo — who founded Tenuta Sant’Antonio worked as viticultural and technical wine consultants before starting the winery in 1989. They bought land in the Valpolicella zone adjacent to their father’s vineyard property, joined the two, then planted grapes and began making wine.

The Castagnedis produce a wide range of classic reds and whites under the Tenuta Sant’Antonio label, and are best known for their more expensive, top-quality Amarones, Valpolicellas, and Soaves. They describe the Scaia wines (the word refers to stone flakes in the chalky soil where the vines grow) as “modern interpretations” of traditional classics.

Happily, this doesn’t include aging in oak, which overwhelms the Garanega grape. The 2012 Sant’Antonio Scaia Garganega/Chardonnay is fermented at cold temperatures and aged in stainless steel, which preserves fruit and crispy acidity. The wine is much better than the ocean of easy-drinking whites from the Veneto. While it doesn’t have the character and style of the very best Soaves, it does have a juicy, mouth-filling personality and an attractive, everyday-drinking kind of price.

Top composite photo: 2012 Tenuta Sant’Antonio Scaia Garganega/Chardonnay label and vineyard. Credit: Courtesy of Tenuta Sant’Antonio

As a forager who lives in a place with a definite off-season, I still manage to fill the winter months with wild food-related activities. Looking out the window of my Colorado office this month, the landscape alternates between snowy white and stricken brown. Today, the wind blew with such force that I found my trash can having a tea party with its friends two blocks from home. There just aren’t many wild edibles that I could forage right now aside from conifer needles.

Sure, I can pick handfuls of cold-hardy greens in the dwindling months of autumn and again when spring leisurely awakens. But the meat of my foraging season occurs between April and September, when plants grow with such urgency here at high altitude that I spend nearly all of my free time picking and processing at a numbing pace. During the foraging off-season, I’m still able to accomplish much as a wild foods enthusiast since it is the perfect time for study and planning.

When the wild plants are bountifully growing, I’m careful to preserve them for the winter. I dry big tins full of nettles and linden flowers. The freezer fills up with blanched greens, and the shelves get lined with stonecrop pickles and elder cordial. Rows of half-gallon jars filled with dried porcini are my pride and joy.

Foragers taking stock and studying botany

My goal is to eat from wild foods as much as possible for the entire year, especially from abundant and invasive weeds. Come late winter, I’m able to analyze my stocks. I take careful notes on which plants I’d like to harvest more in the coming year, and also which recipes or foods aren’t being eaten with enthusiasm. This helps me adhere to the second rule of foraging (the first being never eat a food you’ve not identified), never take more than you can use.

This year, I’ve found that I didn’t pick nearly enough linden flowers to support my love of linden tea. Because linden mostly grows as an ornamental locally, there will be no problem with harvesting more next year. On the other hand, I seem to be the only one who eats the wild mustard kimchi, so I will plan for a smaller batch come spring, even though the plant is an invasive and can be picked freely.

Perhaps the greatest luxury that down time affords me as a forager is the ability to study. I check enormous stacks of books from the library, everything from foraging guides to cookbooks, and novels, too. Seeing the words and projects of others fills my sails with inspiration and sends me off in new directions of exploration.

Snow-covered wild plants in Colorado. Credit: Wendy Petty

Winter is my best opportunity to dive headlong into the study of botany. I came to foraging through a love of food, so studying botany with seriousness after falling in love with wild plants is a bit backward. I wish I’d known more about botany from the outset. Being able to recognize similar characteristics among plant families and unlocking the meaning of Latin binomials opens the world of foraging and makes learning new plants infinitely easier.

Studying botany needn’t been intimidating. I highly recommend starting with a book called “Botany in a Day,” by Thomas Elpel. While you may not be able to learn it in a day, any tidbit you can learn about how to accurately describe plants can be very helpful. Being able to determine something as basic as whether the leaves on a plant are opposite or alternate gives you a huge head start in identification.

One of my favorite challenges of the off-season is going for walks and trying to identify dried brown plant remains, and trees without leaves. It’s one thing to be able to identify a plant when it is in flower, it is much more challenging to identify its dried skeleton. But if you can do so, it may help you scout a new location. The same goes for being abile to identify a tree by bark and bud alone. A fellow forager memorized all of his local trees in the summer, and in the winter, he’d practice identifying them by bark alone, calling out their names as he passed them on bike.

Filling notebooks with adapted recipes for foraged ingredients

The final piece of my off-season puzzle is brainstorming recipes. Often, in the heat of summer, I’m too busy teaching or processing large batches of wild foods to spend as much time as I’d prefer coming up with new recipes. In winter, I take the time to really consider my favorite ingredients, and how best to highlight their unique flavors. I have a notebook divided into four sections, one for each season. When I come up with a recipe idea, I write down the basic concept, and note where the idea originated. That way, come harvest time, when my attention is elsewhere, I’m able to open up to the appropriate season and see a list of recipe ideas, ready to go. I take the greatest amount of inspiration from my friends. Some of my closest friends right now are Persian, Mexican and Indian, and I can see the flavors they’ve introduced to me seeping into my own recipes. I love to look at a traditional recipe, as made by a friend, and spin it in my imagination with local wild ingredients.

It used to be that winter made me sad. Especially in the digital age, when I could see the harvests of people living in places where there is something to forage all year long. I’ve come to learn that my own off-season can be productive, even if I’m not able to harvest plants. I’m able to take inventory of my pantry, study botany and brainstorm recipes for the coming year, none of which I have time to do when the plants are exploding with the growth of summer.

Top photo: Dried foraged foods from the pantry. Clockwise, from the upper left and moving clockwise: porcini mushrooms, cota tea (sometimes called Navajo tea) bundles, sumac and nettles. Credit: Wendy Petty

When the temperature drops to zero and snow piles up in drifts outside my door (as it did last week), I want a rich, filling stew for dinner and a warm, generous red wine to match. The ripe, plummy 2011 Château de Saint Cosmé Gigondas is a classic choice, meaty and structured, yet fresh, savory and exuberantly fruity, with notes of blackberry and pepper. It was one of my highlights at a recent tasting with Gigondas producers at New York’s Rouge Tomate restaurant.

Gigondas is a village with a very pretty town square and an appellation in France’s southern Rhône Valley that produces only red wine. It lies in the foothills of the Dentelles de Montmirail, jagged limestone formations with 2,600-foot peaks that resemble sharp teeth or a rooster’s comb.

The wine, based on the Grenache grape, is often called the the poor man’s version of more famous and expensive red from Châteauneuf-du-Pape 10 miles to the south. It’s not a comparison producers like. At the dinner, Château de Saint Cosmé owner and winemaker Louis Barruol pleaded, “We want to be loved for what we are, not as a cheap Châteauneuf!”

In fact, the terroir in Gigondas is different from that of Châteauneuf, and wines from vineyards at higher elevations, like those from Saint Cosmé, can have more perfume and finesse, though usually less complexity. The blend of grapes must include no more than 80% Grenache, at least 15% Syrah and/or Mourvèdre, and up to 10% other Rhône varieties.

Saint Cosmé Gigondas

Built on what was once the site of a Roman villa, Saint Cosmé is the most ancient estate in the region, with cellar vats that were carved into rock in Roman times. The Barruol family has owned the property since 1570, and Barruol, who took over in 1992, is the 14th generation.

Saint Cosmé produces several single-vineyard Gigondas bottlings in addition to this standard cuvée, which includes a greater percentage than usual of the gnarled old vines around the château. Tucked into the hills above the valley floor, the vineyards are shaded by the Dentelles, which helps preserve the wines’ bright acidity. A regime of aging in old oak barrels keeps them from being too oaky.

I plan to savor more 2011 Château de Saint Cosmé Gigondas again very soon. The end of winter is a long way away.

Top composite photo: 2011 Château de Saint Cosmé Gigondas bottle and label. Credit: Courtesy of Château de Saint Cosmé

Who would have thought, 30 years ago, that New Zealand would be producing Pinot Noir with an international reputation? It has all happened in an incredibly short time, so that several of the original pioneering winemakers are still involved in the industry. And a recent tasting in London and New York demonstrated just how successful Pinot Noir is in New Zealand.

This was a tasting that I could not possible miss: three decades of Rippon Vineyards Pinot Noir, beginning with the 1990 vintage, which I tasted as a vat sample the very first time that I went to New Zealand. Rippon Vineyards in Central Otago was one of the first New Zealand vineyards that I visited. It is the most fabulously beautiful spot, with breathtaking views over Lake Wanaka toward the Southern Alps. Central Otago lies on the 45th parallel, which makes its vineyards some of the southernmost in the world — there is not much land between Otago and Antarctica. Whereas most New Zealand vineyards are on the country’s east coast, Central Otago enjoys a continental climate, with harsh winters and warm summers. Schist is the dominant soil at Rippon.

These days, Nick Mills makes the wine at Rippon, but it was his father, Rolfe, who was the true pioneer. Rolfe’s grandfather bought the land in 1912, and Rolfe began planting vines in 1975.

“It was all very much a learning curve, experimenting with many different grape varieties,” Nick said. “Pinot Noir was just one of several. And nothing was known about different clones. You got cuttings from other growers, and there was a strong element of self-sufficiency and indeed isolation.”

The first commercial wines of Rippon were made in 1989, and in 1990 a talented Austrian winemaker, Rudi Bauer, took over for a few years. (He now has his own estate, Quartz Reef.) Back in 1990 there were just six wineries in Central Otago; nowadays there are 120 wine growers, though not all with their own winemaking facilities.

New Zealand Pinot Noir has regional variations blossom

At the time that Rippon was getting started, Chard Farm and Gibbston Valley were also experimenting with Pinot Noir, among other grape varieties, in Central Otago. And at the bottom of New Zealand’s North Island, Larry McKenna, who had arrived in Martinborough in 1986, was busy putting Martinborough Vineyards on the map for Pinot Noir, alongside his neighbours at Ata Rangi and Dry River.

Nick Mills and his wife, Jo, at Rippon.
Credit: Briar Hardy-Hesson

Elsewhere on the South Island, there were pockets of Pinot Noir in Nelson, Waipara and Marlborough. Today, Pinot Noir is the most widely planted red variety in the country, and the regional variations are becoming more apparent. I generally find that wines from Central Otago are riper and richer, from enjoying long hours of summer daylight, while those from Martinborough are more savory and maybe more structured.

But back to Rippon. Carrying on the family tradition, Nick studied winemaking, including a course on biodynamics, in Beaune and worked with winegrowers in the Côte d’Or. Sadly, Rolfe died in 2000, and in 2003, Nick’s mother suggested that it was time for Nick to come back to Rippon and take over responsibility for the winemaking.

He talked of how his winemaking has developed. “There are so many things to consider. Whole bunches? Do you add the stems? Are they ripe? You need to understand your fruit.” He certainly shows that he does with this range of wines, which tell the story of the family land.

Read the detailed tasting notes.

Top photo: Rippon Vineyards. Credit: Briar Hardy-Hesson

After splurging on plenty of great (and expensive) wines during the holidays, I’m ready to retrench. At $15, this bright, juicy 2011 Lohsa Morellino di Scansano is the right kind of deal, a medium-bodied red packed with generous flavors of cherry, raspberry, earth and spice, and intriguing aromas of dark cherries and violets. It’s yet another example of the fine values to be found in Italy’s less well-known wine regions.

This red comes from the Maremma, a hilly coastal strip in western Tuscany on the Tyrrhenian Sea, where the local name for the Sangiovese grape is Morellino. Wine was produced there back in Etruscan times, but it wasn’t until Bolgheri, the northern part of the Maremma, gained prominence as the home of Super Tuscan wines like Sassicaia that anyone looked farther south and discovered Morellino.

Thirty-five years ago there were only about 10 wineries that grew their own grapes in the district of Scansano, which includes 3,700 acres of vines in most of the towns in the southernmost area of Tuscany. Now there are several hundred wineries, fueled by a mini-land rush of buying and planting.

The reputation of the wines climbed, which is why the Morellino di Scansano appellation finally gained DOCG status starting with the 2007 vintage. Few wine drinkers, I’ve discovered, understand what those letters mean — Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita — and often don’t realize they stand for Italy’s highest quality wine category. Rules govern everything from where the grapes can be grown to which ones must be used. To be labeled Morellino di Scansano, a wine has to contain at least 85% Sangiovese and come from a historic area that surrounds the medieval town of Scansano. Unlike most DOCG wines, Morellino is usually released less than a year after the harvest, which translates into fresh, lively reds. This one is aged for eight months in old oak casks.

Lohsa sets the table

The Lohsa Estate in Magliano belongs to the Carletti family, which established the beautiful Il Poliziano winery in Montepulciano, farther north in Tuscany, in 1961. Federico, son of the founder Dino, like so many restless enologists, wanted to experiment in other regions, and he expanded the family holdings into the Maremma in the 1990s as an independent “Terre del Poliziano” project. He produced his first Morellino in 1998.

The 2011 Lohsa Morellino di Scansano is a simple wine, but it has an enticing, gulpable charm. The appellation’s sunny mild winters, cool winds from the sea in summer, and stony soil all combine to make reds that are softer, rounder and more succulent than other Tuscan wines from the same grape, like Chianti. In other words, they’re delicious, especially for the price, which is why they’re wildly popular in Rome’s wine bars.

Top composite photo: A view of the Lohsa Estate and label for 2011 Lohsa Morellino di Scansano Terre del Poliziano. Credit: Courtesy of the Lohsa Estate

These are notes from a tasting that spanned three decades of Rippon Vineyards Pinot Noir.

1990 — This was the second commercial vintage of Pinot Noir, made from vines planted in 1982. A very warm vintage, with an early harvest. Medium colour, with an evolved rim. Quite a soft vegetal red fruit nose. A silky palate, with ripe red fruit, depth and texture with a good balance. A touch of fruitcake on the finish and a dry finish. Extraordinarily lively for a wine that is 30 years old, proving that New Zealand Pinot Noir can age.

1991 — A slightly cooler vintage. Medium colour. Some velvety vegetal notes on the nose. A very perfumed palate, ripe and rounded; mature and silky. A lovely glass of wine.

1992 — Again, a slightly cooler vintage. Quite a deep young colour. Intense ripe red fruit on both nose and palate. A firm streak of fine tannin to balance the fruit, and still quite youthful.

1993 — Another cooler year. Quite a deep colour, ageing slightly on the rim. Quite a firm dry nose with red fruit, and on the palate some depth, with a vegetal note balancing some red fruit. Quite a dry finish.

1995 — The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1994 had a serious impact on subsequent vintages. A very cool year, but the wine does not taste unripe. Quite a light colour. Very vegetal nose, with some silky red fruit. Elegant fruit on the palate, silky and ripe, with a balancing streak of tannin.

1998 — Quite a light colour. A firm dry note on the nose, with a streak of hay. Ripe fruit on the palate, quite rounded and ripe, with more depth and texture that the nose would indicate.

A new decade at Rippon vineyards

2000 — From now on vine age starts to have an impact. Quite a deep colour. A smooth silky nose. A touch raisiny on the palate, but with some soft tannins. A warm finish.

2003 — Nick’s first vintage. He compared it to 2001 in Burgundy, neither a warm nor a cool vintage. Medium colour, beginning to evolve. Quite an elegant dry raspberry nose. And on the palate, some fresh vegetal and raspberry fruit, with some texture. Medium weight, with a fresh finish.

2005 — A small yield thanks to a cool, windy December during flowering. Medium colour, evolving a little. Quite a firm dry nose, and also on the palate. Firm raspberry fruit, with a note of acidity as well as tannin. Quite tight knit, with a fresh finish.

2006 — This was a warm year. Medium colour, with a dry vegetal note on the nose. The palate was quite rounded, with some texture and dry raspberry notes. Quite fleshy, and still very youthful, with good length and depth.

2007 — The smallest yield in the last decade thanks to spring frosts and a windy December, but an excellent ripening season. Quite a deep colour. A firm nose, with fresh dry raspberry fruit. Good acidity. Some elegant texture and a refreshing finish. Very classic. One of my favourite wines in the tasting.

2008 Mature Vines — A hot summer giving a good yield and healthy grapes. The first vintage of this cuvée, from the original vines. Medium colour. Quite a firm dry raspberry fruit on the nose. The palate is still very youthful, with fresh tannins, and dry raspberry fruit. Firm and textured, with ageing potential.

2009 Mature Vine — Medium colour. Quite fresh and ripe, and again on the palate fresh, ripe fruit with some balancing acidity and tannin. A warm note on the finish. Good depth.

2009 Emma’s Block — Medium colour. Elegantly perfumed nose. Medium weight, with rounded ripe fruit. Elegant and fragrant.

2009 Tinker’s Field — Quite fresh intense fruit on the nose and palate. Rounded raspberries; elegant with depth. Lovely texture and concentration, with a long firm finish.

2010 Mature Vine — A warm summer. Good colour. Rounded concentrated nose, and on the palate, lovely texture with concentration, ripe fruit and structure. Smooth tannins and great length. A broader wine than either Emma’s Block or Tinker’s Field.

2010 Emma’s Block — Quite deep colour. Rounded nose, and on the palate great texture with ripe fruit and balancing tannins. Ripe, concentrated and youthful with a tight knit finish.

2010 Tinker’s Field — Deep colour. Ripe perfumed fruit and on the palate, more structured, with firm tight knit red fruit. A youthful concentrated finish. And a great finale to a historic tasting, which amply demonstrates how suitable Central Otago is for the production of that most temperamental of grape varieties, Pinot Noir. Rolfe Mills had the vision to realise the potential of grape growing in countryside that had been dedicated to sheep farming, and his son Nick has the passion to continue to stretch the boundaries of Pinot Noir.

Top photo: Rippon Vineyards. Credit: Briar Hardy-Hesson

The Greater Los Angeles area hasn’t had stone milling for more than a century, but bakers Nan Kohler and Marti Noxon are addressing that lack. The partners held an open house in November for family and friends at their new enterprise, Grist & Toll, in Pasadena.

Kohler and Noxon, who also is a screenwriter and producer, are part of a larger effort to rebuild regional American flour mills. As artisanal baking becomes more popular and bakers become more sophisticated about quality, locally sourced ingredients, the mills contribute to America’s baking renaissance.

The afternoon was a celebration of flour. In the parking lot, baker Michael O’Malley fed loaves into his mobile bread oven. He belongs to the Los Angeles Bread Bakers, a Meetup group with 800 members, some of whom prepared dough for the event with flour that Kohler ground on a small mill at her home.

The breads vanished more quickly than they baked, sitting on a table under a tent just long enough to be cut and devoured. While cooling is acknowledged as the last and some say crucial phase of cooking in artisan bread baking, there was no waiting this day.

Inside, plenty of snacks gracing the small retail space disappeared, too. The flour, however, sat quite still. As the Osttiroler, a type of pine-planked Austrian mill that is quite beautiful, took its first turns and ground California wheat berries into flour, people stared in reverent interest. Some walked up to the bucket of flour and touched the light red stuff, running it between their fingers and over their hands. But mostly people just looked. How often do you get to watch this ingredient get made?

Getting back to our local flour roots

All flour used to be local. Before advances in transportation and technology centralized grain production in the United States, if you wanted flour, you got it from the local miller. During the 1800s and 1900s, milling centers shifted around the country, following the paths of waterways and railroads. At different points, Kansas City, St. Louis, Minneapolis and Buffalo, N.Y., held the crown for flour production. Currently, the U.S. milling industry processes 900 million pounds of wheat a year, but it is too soon to predict the output for Grist & Toll.

Michael O’Malley checks on bread in his mobile bread oven at Grist & Toll. Credit: Amy Halloran

However, demand for fresh flour is evident. The mill is part of a nationwide trend to re-regionalize grain and flour production. There are a lot of reasons why these staples are crucial as people rebuild local food systems. In an interview at Jones Coffee, around the corner from the not yet open mill, Kohler considered why.

“For so many years, flour has just been a filler ingredient,” she said. “It gives something body and structure, and helps your cookies and cakes rise, but we haven’t had the ability to think of it as a texture building block or flavor building block until very recently.”

The conversation about alternative grains, she said, is fairly recent. Maybe only the last five years, the baking community has started to think of flour as a potentially influential flavor player.

“The most important stuff was your butter, your chocolate, dried cranberries or nuts,” she said. “No curious baker said why, and does it matter, and how can we find out?”

Now, however, the ball is rolling. Last year at the MAD symposium in Copenhagen, Denmark, Stone Barns chef Dan Barber asked more than 300 of his peers to consider the potential of wheat.

For much longer, a number of projects around the country have been working to promote the use of local grains. Skowhegan, Maine, has an Osttiroler stone mill, too. The Somerset Grist Mill is in the former county jail, making flour and rolling oats from grains produced in Aroostook County. Some farmers there are shifting from potatoes to grains to provide raw ingredients for the enterprise.

That Maine project is community driven, started by people who wanted their area to be known for more than New Balance sneakers and logging. Central New York has a farmer-miller-baker partnership serving artisan bakers and consumers in the region, as well as the New York City market. New York’s Farmer Ground Flour is a farmer driven enterprise undertaken by Thor Oeschner as he saw the land he rented gobbled up for real estate.

Grist & Toll fits into the list of baker-driven ventures, like Wild Hive Community Grain Project, Don Lewis’ mill in New York’s Hudson Valley, and Carolina Ground, the mill started by Jennifer Lapidus that uses grains from North and South Carolina.

Conversations about grains

Most baker-initiated projects, though, center on artisan bread baking, and Kohler’s focus has been pastry. A home baker who used to work in the wine industry, she turned her passion for pastry into a farmers market operation. That passion took another leap, and she ran the bakery for a restaurant.

Grist & Toll also plans to make education a part of its mission. “The beautiful thing about flour is I’m not just creating this product for a select consumer or group of people,” Kohler said. “Flour, even though it’s been missing from this farm-to-table conversation, it touches everybody, every household, every restaurant, school.”

Grist & Toll will be open for limited hours during the holidays and plans its full grand opening for after the first of the year, but the pallets of organic wheat grown in Santa Barbara County ready to mill hint at what this operation means: more control over what types of wheat are being planted, fresh flour hitting local kitchens, and conversations about grains that go beyond the big fat fear of gluten.

Top photo: Homemade bread. Credit: Sue Style

Forgive me if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s recent announcement to control antibiotic use in food animals didn’t have me reaching for the Champagne.

For while the FDA’s recommendations to phase out the use of antibiotics as growth promoters and proposal to require veterinary approval of all antibiotic use on farms sound like a good idea, their voluntary nature will result in nothing more than business as usual when it comes to farm antibiotic abuse. Call me a cynic, but leopards don’t readily change their spots. For years, food animal industry lobby groups and drug companies have aggressively denied any link between antibiotic use in farming and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Yet the very same groups have all publicly welcomed the FDA’s recommendations. Why? Because they know they are wholly inadequate.

I won’t go into the limitations of the FDA’s proposals here, as several respected commentators have already done a very good job of that. But suffice to say that despite decades of mounting scientific evidence that the routine non-therapeutic use of antibiotics on industrial farms is leading to the development of life-threatening multiple antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the end result is nothing more than a strongly worded FDA “recommendation” for action, without any mandatory requirements or enforcement measures to stop the intensive farming industry from putting profit ahead of human health. The same old abuse of these life-saving medicines will continue on industrial farms across the U.S., just under a slightly different guise.

So why should you care? Here are 10 things we all need to think about before we allow Big Ag to continue squandering antibiotics in food animal production.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least 2 million Americans are infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria every year, and 23,000 will die as a result.

1. There are two major factors driving the dramatic rise of antimicrobial resistant diseases. First, we’ve become too complacent about eating food from animals routinely given antibiotics. Second, we take far too many antibiotics when they are not actually needed.

2. We’re embroiled in an apparent “war” against bacteria, with antibiotics routinely given to livestock, the inappropriate prescription of antibiotics in humans, and the widespread inclusion of antibacterials in toothpaste, soap and even clothing. But all we’re doing is encouraging antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Andrew Gunther. Credit: Courtesy of Animal Welfare Institute

3. It might surprise you to know that we each carry more than 4 pounds of friendly bacteria in our gut. The number of bacterial cells in and on our bodies (about 100 trillion) outnumbers the number of human cells by a whopping 10 to 1. These organisms play a vital role in maintaining our health and without them we’d be dead.

4. We need to trust our natural immune systems to protect us from disease, resorting to antibiotics only when absolutely necessary.

5. When it comes to antibiotics in farming, we use more antibiotics per pound of meat produced than any other nation in the world. A staggering 80% of all antibiotics produced in the U.S. are used on food animals.

6. It is widely accepted that disease outbreaks are inevitable in the cramped and stressful conditions found on most factory farms. But instead of improving conditions, the animals are given low or “subtherapeutic” doses of antibiotics in their feed or water, whether they need them or not, to prevent disease and maximize productivity. For example, most chicks receive two antibiotics, lincomycin and spectinomycin, for the first few days of their lives because they are forced to live in environments where respiratory diseases would otherwise be inevitable. In other words, intensive livestock systems are actually designed around the routine use of antibiotics. It’s the only way to keep the animals alive and growing.

7. In June 2013, Consumer Reports found potential disease-causing organisms in 90% of ground turkey samples purchased from stores nationwide. Many of the bacteria species identified were resistant to three or more antibiotic drug classes.

8. While good food-hygiene practices are essential when handling and cooking raw meat, an accidental spill in the refrigerator can now result in potentially untreatable, yet entirely preventable, life-threatening antibiotic-resistant diseases. Safe handling instructions must never be used to justify farming systems which actively encourage antibiotic-resistance or to absolve companies of any responsibility for the illnesses or deaths that result.

9. The major meat industry bodies claim there is no conclusive scientific evidence that antibiotic use in farming contributes significantly to an increase in antibiotic resistance in humans. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t agree and is calling for the responsible use of antibiotics, where “These drugs should only be used to treat infections,” whether that’s in humans or animals.

10. When it comes to the responsible use of antibiotics in farming, the U.S. livestock industry is already years behind the European Union, where antibiotic use on farms is strictly controlled. Europe’s livestock industry survived this change without any dramatic reduction in efficiency of meat production and the cost of food in Europe didn’t skyrocket as a result. So why not here? New legislation — The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2013 (PAMTA) — would end the inappropriate and indiscriminate use of antibiotics in intensive farming in the U.S. Are your representatives supporting it?

This isn’t about blaming farmers and vets: They’re simply responding to the contractual demands of Cargill, Purdue, Tyson and others that dominate our food supply. No, this is about waking up to the real costs of so-called cheap meat. We’re talking about farming systems that are not only designed around the routine use of antibiotics to keep billions of animals in such abysmal conditions alive and growing, but which knowingly encourage the development of life-threatening antibiotic-resistant diseases.

I somehow doubt that any sane American would willingly allow the squandering of these potentially life-saving antibiotics simply for cheap meat. Because when you sit down and really think about a future where antibiotics will no longer be effective — and where common diseases such as strep throat may kill our loved ones unabated — there really is no such thing as cheap meat, is there?

Got you thinking? Animal Welfare Approved farmers only use antibiotics to treat sick animals, just as in humans. We also know that if farmers use antibiotics responsibly the risk of antibiotic resistance is absolutely minimal. The result? Pain and suffering in farm animals is minimized, the risk of disease is reduced, and the efficacy of antibiotics — for humans and livestock — is protected. You can find your nearest supplier at www.AnimalWelfareApproved.org.

Top photo: Cattle grazing. Credit: Stephen Ausmus / USDA