Dija Know… Joe’s Restaurant Newsletter -152 Autumn 2019

“Dija Know…”
Joe’s Newsletter #152, AUTUMN 2019
Sheila   (archives available at JoesDining.com)

Local organic sun-ripened, heirloom tomatoes – oh my!

 

◆My favorite Santa Fe season is giving way to my runner-up season, Autumn.  Who doesn’t love Fall in Santa Fe?  The Farmer’s Market is exploding with veggies and fruits bursting with color and begging to be a part of your meal.  Roland is there every Saturday to pick the very best and to gossip with our local growers.  Unfortunately it hasn’t been the best summer for local tomatoes.  The spring cool weather reduced the harvest.  But we still (at this writing) are able to get enough of those sun-ripened gems for a limited amount of our famous Margherita Pizza and Caprese Salad.  Bear in mind, Roland never uses anything but the local seasonal tomatoes and our own house-made mozzarella.  No wonder people come from Italy for our Margherita!

◆ “For a Good Time Call Joe” tee shirtsare available for sale.  They are made in the USA of 100% organic cotton. $24.  We also have “Nobody Does It Like Joe.”
A tongue in cheek Joe’s tee is a great gift for the right person.

 

◆  A Tuesday night tradition at Joe’s – Spaghetti and Chianti Night.  $39 for two will get you Caesar Salad, Spaghetti with homemade slow-cooked Bolognese and a ½ liter of great Chianti.  Wadda deal!  The Bolognese sauce is made with our grass-fed-and-finished Berry Ranch beef.

 

◆Richard broadcasts theRichard Eeds Show live from Joe’s each 1stFriday of the monthfrom 1- 4 pm on Hutton 1260 AM KTRC. Richard knows everyone in New Mexico – no joke!  He keeps us abreast of all the New Mexico happenings.

 

◆The world fell in love with the burger.  McDonald’s spread the word and now the burger is the most bought, sold and eaten food item across the globe.  In a world where sound bites, tweets and four-word headlines form our opinions and shape our behaviors, enter the Impossible Burger.  Oh please…here we go again.  The bastardization of yet another real food.  (When did we have to start saying “real” to distinguish food from food-like substances?)  The Impossible Burger is the outrageously successful product of masterful marketing. It  is utter rubbish and has less than no value to the human organism (and please do not abuse your dog with it).  It is the epitome of highly processed GMO-based fake food.  (only my opinion!)  Monocultures of GMO soy, corn and other commercial crops have raped our top soils rendering them neutered of nutrient value.  (See last several issues for Allan Savory’s remedy to reclaim soil – Holistic Management: A Commonsense Revolution to Restore Our Environmentand other books and videos by this visionary).

Pat Brown is the CEO/owner of Impossible Burger.  On the recent podcast I draw this information from, in a raspy voice interrupting himself with frequent coughing bouts, he tells us that the product is extremely healthy and isn’t manufactured in a lab.  Hmmm . . . Ingredients include water, soy protein isolate (a highly processed form of fake protein), potato starch (highest glycemic part of a potato), vegetable oil, heme (the ingredient that makes it ’bleed’ derived from the roots of soy plants), xanthan and konjac gums, salt, and GMO yeast (which is often used to disguise the presence of MSG.)  Yummy…sounds like homemade to me!  It was tested on rats.  We don’t yet know the mortality rate or disease outcome rate of those rat tests.      Its biggest appeal will be to vegans, rendered vulnerable by their impassioned attempt to save the earth, save their health and save animals.  It is a far more complex issue than that but messing with our food supply as Big Ag (like Monsanto) and Big Food (like Cargill, Jenny-O) have done, will leave us with nothing but Soylent Green* to eat.  And, Mr. Brown is on his way to becoming shamefully wealthy along with the discredited Ben & Jerry duo.

What to do?  Support our local food supply and Farmers Markets with even more passion than before! And, need I say it, do not let the Impossible Burger pass your lips.  If eating a real meat burger is unacceptable to you, be honest about it and eat something else.  This fake burger has set a new standard for food hypocrisy.  Don’t fall for it.
*The title of a (great) sci-fi film starring Charlton Heston, made in 1973. The name comes from a combination of ‘soy’ and ‘lentils’.

◆DiJa Know?  Fewer monopolies but bigger and bigger.  CAFO (industrially farmed) animals have been subject to incredibly dangerous feeding programs.  Dangerous for them, dangerous for us.  They get sick.  They need drugs.  It becomes a part of their flesh.  And now an added layer of insult to these innocent beings (and us).  Drug giants Bayer and Elanco are merging.  One arm will be Bayer Animal Health.  What they are doing is creating another level of drug-pushing, under the guise of “animal health”.  They are contracted with CAFO operations all over the world.  Can you say “monopoly”?  Here are some of the names behind the massive amounts of GMO grains grown to feed imprisoned animals — Monsanto, (now owned by Bayer), Syngenta (now owned by ChemChina), DowDupont, Tyson, Cargill, Perdue, Jenny-O, and now add Costco.

◆  GMO soy, corn, wheat and cotton are highly subsidized crops.  Di Ja Know?  By far most of the “farmers” who receive these subsidieshave no dirt under their manicured fingernails.  In fact most of them live in urban centers and hardly visit their land.  And the winner is …  DeLine Farm Partnership in Charleston, Missouri, who received $2.8 million in MFP(Market Facilitation Program) payments!!  As well,  82 farms received more than $500,000 each in MFP funds.*  These funds are also available to relatives of owners, even if they have absolutely nothing to do with the farm.  The burden to the tax-payer aside, the impact on our growing lands is devastating.  As mentioned ad nauseum in these newsletters, giant swaths of one single crop (monocropping) is anathema to the way farming and ranching “should” be and can be carried out.  Forests and grasslands must be a part of the irregular patchwork quilt of truly restorative and (surprising!) profitable farming.  Nature abhors straight lines.  Native grasses, trees, insects, pollinators, rodents, reptiles, predators and prey all contribute to enriching and restoring our growing lands.  We must learn to work with, not pre-empt all of nature and I guarantee she will give back.  Otherwise we are facing a dustbowl of inconceivable proportions.
* as reported by The Environmental Working Group

◆  I struggle with this question all the time and recently journalist Anahad O’Connor read my mind and wrote an article “Is There an Optimal Diet for Humans?”The article discussed a study published in the journal Obesity Reviews which found that most likely, there is no single perfect diet for human beings.  Just look at the variety of traditional diets. The Samburu people in Kenya consume mostly milk and meat with almost no plant foods.  The indigenous Pima of Arizona ate 80 percent of their diet from carbs including mesquite, acorns, and wild plants.  The indigenous Inuit thrived mostly on protein and fat.  There was very little plant food in their environment.  O’Connor states that there are a few key commonalities that help individuals thrive.  “Almost all of them eat a mix of meat, fish and plants, consuming foods that are generally packed with nutrients and do not lead to rapid spikes in blood sugar.”  Two things appear common to all these traditional diets – they were unprocessed and unrefined, and they prized certain parts we mostly eschew now – innards, brain, lung . . you get the point.  It’s often called “nose to tail” and applies to seafood as well.  I’ve tried my share of popular diets as they came along.  Not so much lately but as a young athlete/dancer I was obsessed by fitness and weight maintenance.  Vegetarian did not supply my body’s rapid repair needs.  Of late I have been experimenting, to a limited degree, with the carnivore diet (Dr. Paul Saladino, Dr. Shawn Baker and many others espouse this).  And, I have to say, it feels great.  Hard to stick to?  Yup – after all, I own a restaurant with really good food!!  So let’s just say I’m doing a “carnivore-ish” diet. Keeping carbs very low and upping my grass-finished meats, pastured eggs and in my case cheese.  What I have noticed – my cravings are waaayyy down.  We’ll see.  But as radical as it sounded at first to me, the science does make sense and if one can really do it,  it is also one of the best elimination diets for those suffering elusive allergies or difficult conditions.  One of my favorite recent books on how to eat optimally is Eat Rich Live Longby Jeffry Gerber MD.
Gerber details the metabolic science behind high fat, medium/high protein, low carb.  It’s a whole new (or ancient!) trend in the search for the optimal human diet, and worth looking into if you have tried all the rest.
Here at Joe’s we plate with good healthy protein portions.  (unless you request otherwise!), believing our bodies need those protein and amino acid building blocks.
Back to what O’Connor says, “the one thing that I have noticed throughout all of the different diets I’ve tried is that I never feel good when I eat too many refined carbs and not enough… protein.”

I just hope that you all from, Vegan to Carnivore,  who seeking health can find what works for you, supplying all that our marvelous bodies need to stay active, energetic and mobile for all our years!

◆  DiJa Know? Dollar storessuch as Dollar General and Dollar Tree (which also owns Family Dollar) are becoming a primary source of food for many families.  These chains feed more Americans than Whole Foods, Walmart and McDonalds combined.  (OMG!) The problem is that these dollar stores do not carry fresh food.  It is highly processed, subsidized and GMO “food-like substances,” that we now know cause chronic health conditions, if quickly or slowly.  Targeted in low-income areas, they compound high obesity and diabetes rates in low income families.

 

  Joe’s will give you $10.  What’s the catch?  Well the way we figure it, if you cut out the middleman by NOT using a credit card, we can give that back to you and then some.  Credit cards cost the retail merchant about 3-5% and extra time & paperwork.  Now let’s be real – in today’s world one cannot function without one.  But there are a few (legal) alternatives that reduce our dependency on the Big Banks and actually save us all money.  We have a couple of suggestions: (1.) Joe’s Check List –If you are a “regular” and wish to pay by check, please ask your waiter to get you on the list.  (2.) Joe’s gift card– purchase  $100 gift card with cash orcheck orsilver orgold coin, get a $10 free bonus! Your $100 gift card will actually buy you $110 worth of meals at Joe’s.
  

◆A sweet treat or impromptu gift for your dear ones?  Joe’s melt-in-your-mouthFrench chocolate truffles. Y

 

◆  Some of the farmers & ranchers who supply Joe’s: They get their seeds from heirloom seed banks, family and friends, their fertilizer from animals and compost and their agronomic advice from tradition:  Monte Vista Organics, BerryBeef Ranch, Lotus Farms, Jacona Farms, Green Tractor, Camino de Paz, Synergia Ranch, Romero Farms, Shepherd’s Lamb, LaMont’s (now Beck & Bulow) Buffalo, Sweetgrass Co-op,  Susan’s Sprouts and others.

Giggles – Greg’s Jokes !

 

  • A blonde walks into a library and approaches the librarian behind the counter. “I’d like a burger medium an order of French fries and a coffee to go, please.” The librarian a little surprised says, “you do know this is a library, don’t you?”  The blonde lowers her (his?) voice to a whisper, “I’d like a burger medium an order of French fries and a coffee to go, please.”

Joe’s Dining
2801 Rodeo Rd (at Zia Rd) Santa Fe, NM   87507  505-471-3800       www.JoesDining.com
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