The Living Clean Guide to Avoiding Glyphosate and Other Bad Stuff in Foods (Part 4) – Fats & Oils
Kerrygold Butter.
Butter
I like Kerrygold (which is a pastured Irish butter) a lot, but it is not perfect with regard to my toxicity concerns since about 3% of the cows’ diet is reported by the company as coming from GMO feed.
Still, about 90% of the cows’ feed consumption is from fresh grass, resulting in a bright yellow, creamy and flavorful product that likely is very low in mycotoxins and that I prefer over the American organic butters that I have had.
Even better is Double Devon Cream butter, from northern England. I have encountered it in a few stores but have been able to find almost no information about it. The style is very similar to Kerrygold, but it is even creamier and yellower and cleaner-feeling. It’s a little pricey but I still buy it when I come across it.
Recently I have been eating goat-milk butter from St. Helen’s Farm, which is located in York, England. I think it is just terrific – very clean and creamy and flavorful, with just a tiny bit of goat-type tang to give it a little more interest value.
I was interested to see on the St. Helen’s Farm website that all the goats are kept in a large airy barn and fed mostly with crops that are grown on the farm. The website makes the argument that the goats are more protected from disease this way, and they certainly do look happy in the website video. The more that I learn about dairy, the more that I think that while it certainly is important that animals be eating clean and non-moldy feed, having the feed source consist solely of fresh grass is not the only way or even the best way to accomplish that goal. Carefully growing and storing your own high-quality feed crops – as St. Helen’s Farm does – seems like it works fine too, for instance.
(Note that pale color of the St. Helen’s Farm butter even after carotene color has been added is not much related to the feed issue – rather, dairy products made from goat milk are always naturally quite white no matter what the goats are eating.)
I also have tried Collier’s butter, from Wales, and thought it was quite good too.
In general, I am feeling really good about butter that originates from the British Isles, and would not hesitate to purchase any brand from there if I happened to encounter it.
I tried Anchor butter (a grass-fed product from New Zealand) in the coffee at a Bulletproof conference a while back, and I liked it. Anchor also has a 100% organic version that I would like to try. I have never seen any Anchor butter at all in any stores though.
Oddly, Kerrygold products are not stocked by UNFI (the big natural foods distributor) and thus tend to be available only in regular grocery stores. Natural food stores often stock only American organic butters, which usually are not nearly as yellow and rich as Kerrygold. Still, as long as they are made from good milk and cream – such as that produced by Straus, Kalona SuperNatural or Sierra Nevada – those lighter-colored butters almost always are very good too.
Double Devon Cream Butter (2, 3)
St. Helen’s Farm Butter (2, 3)
Ghee
Ghee is butter with the milk solids removed, leaving only the clear fat. It also is known as “clarified butter.”
Some people who cannot tolerate butter do fine with ghee, and it is better for high-heat cooking. It also has the advantage of not needing to be refrigerated.
It is pretty easy to make ghee from fresh butter, but packaged ghee is convenient. In addition, when I compare what it would cost to make ghee myself from Kerrygold butter, the ghee products on the market don’t seem all that terribly expensive.
Pure Indian Foods used to be pretty much the only grass-fed ghee on the market. I bought a small jar of it back in 2012 and did not feel compelled to order more for my own use (though I did think at the time that it had some potential as being useful for those camping without refrigeration).
Now the market is flooded with grass-fed ghee products. The most prominent of these is likely Bulletproof Ghee, and so recently I gave that a try.
The product is certified organic as well as grass-fed. The color is bright yellow, and it feels really clean to me.
However, in experimenting with ghee again, I did not think it was nearly as good as just using plain butter in Bulletproof coffee (all the foam is missing). And I do not like it as much as I do regular butter (or a combination of regular butter and red palm oil) on popcorn.
Like butter-lover Julia Child though, I do like ghee for sauteeing vegetables at moderately high heat. While regular butter burns very easily, ghee holds up nicely at higher temperatures, allowing the vegetables to get a little browned and tasty. Then I usually add some regular butter at the very end, for additional creaminess and flavor.
I also like ghee for giving sunny-side-up eggs a buttery flavor when being cooked over relatively high heat (allowing the whites to get crispy while the yolks stay relatively uncooked).
(I’m not especially worried about theoretical dangers of eating foods that have become browned with regard to the resulting acrylamide or Maillard’s reactions being toxic, by the way. Humans have been enjoying foods charred over fire for so long that I have to believe that we are adapted and/or designed to be able to deal with that toxicity in ways that we are not able to deal with, say, glyphosate toxicity.)
Some of the other ghee brands now on the market include Ahara Rasa, Ancient Organics, Banyon Botanicals, Dr. Jay’s, Fourth & Heart, Pure Traditions and Simply Ghee. In addition, Organic Valley makes a ghee that is marked as organic but not as grass-fed under the Purity Farms brand name.
A grass-fed ghee tasting could be informative.
Pure Indian Foods Grass-Fed Ghee
Animal Fat
Clean lard, tallow and other animal fat has become a hot category in the health world. I’ve been using my leftover bacon grease and chicken drippings to cook with for a while, but now there are quite a few smaller individual farmers and larger food companies who are selling various kinds of animal fat to use for cooking.
It’s important to note that because many toxins tend to be especially stored in the fat rather than in the lean meat, using animal fat for cooking should only be done if there is certainty that the animal was raised in exceptionally clean ways. Fat from animals raised in non-optimal ways will be especially toxic and should be discarded, even if the lean meat is being eaten.
I recently tried out the beef tallow and the pork lard from Epic, a natural meat snacks company purchased a little over a year ago by General Mills. I also bought a jar of beef tallow from Fatworks, a smaller company specializing just in the production of animal fats.
In looking at the Fatworks website, I would like to give them an A+ in terms of transparency about what the animals are eating. For the beef tallow, they state clearly that “Our beef tallow is crafted from 100% grass fed, pasture raised cows.” For the lard, they state: “Fatworks only uses Pasture Raised non-GMO, hormone and antibiotic free pigs. Please note that this is the case NO MATTER IF THE JAR SAYS PASTURE RAISED OR NOT!!!” On another part of the website, they state: “We only source our pork and beef, lamb and buffalo from pasture raised farms and we receive receive affadavits from each farm stating that they are pasture raised and that they do not feed GMO feed to their animals….So what’s in the feed you ask? It’s a high quality NON-GMO mix of grains and soy…Conceptually we would love, love, love to rid soy and even grains from all animal food supply, but this would literally starve the animals on pasture. It is currently possible to feed without grain supplementation only on very, very small farms, most of which are not USDA certified.”
Epic, on the other hand, does not provide any definite information about exactly what the animals used to create the fat in the jars ate. For the beef tallow, the jars and the website state that the cows were “grass fed,” but there is no reassurance that they are 100% grass fed. The information about the pork lard just states that the pigs were “pastured,” without making any specific mention of feed.
On the FAQ page of the website, Epic states its belief that 100% grass fed is best without ever committing to the idea that any of its products (except for a certain percentage of its bars as marked) actually are ever going to meet that standard. There is no mention on the website that I can find suggesting that Epic products are organic or that the animals that are used to make the products received only GMO-free supplemental feed – only the repeated assertion that wild is better than organic.
Moreover, Epic suggests numerous times on the website that the company is committed to using animals “from nose to tail,” which would seem to suggest that all animals that they are using for some products would have the potential of being included in other products as well. That is a concern for me because for a least one pig product – the pork skins – Epic acknowledges that some of the meat that it is using has received feed that is not GMO-free: “A blend of organic, non-GMO, pastured and antibiotic free pork combined with simple seasonings is the foundation for this simple yet nourishing approach.”
I tried writing to Epic to get further information on exactly what the animals used for each of their products eat, bringing up my concerns about glyphosate, but did not get a response back.
Now, all this being said, I thought that the two jars of Epic fat that I purchased were fine. I used them to fry potatoes and to add some extra flavor to grass-fed burgers, and I compared the Epic grass fed tallow product directly to the 100% grass fed Fatworks tallow product. The Epic tallow looked different than the Fatworks tallow (it actually was closer to being liquid at room temperature and was more yellow), but in terms of feeling clean and taste, the Fatworks product and the Epic product were very similar. The Epic lard was very good too, resulting in potatoes that I thought were even tastier than the ones fried in tallow and that also seemed clean to me.
But still, based on my very negative experiences with regard to feeling that several of the other Epic products that I tried were really toxic, and based on the lack of transparency from the company in terms of stating clearly what the animals that they are sourcing have eaten, and based on the mix of positive and negative reviews of the Epic fat products on the Amazon website, I am feeling concerned enough about this issue that in the future I am going to be inclined to buy animal fat products from other companies rather than from Epic.
A couple of other companies who are supplying what seems that it may very well be very good animal fat are Massa Organics (which started raising pigs solely to provide clean fertilizer for the fields on its ultra-organic rice farm) and Proper Foods for Life (which states clearly on its website that none of the animals used for its tallow or lard products receive any GMO feed).
My experiments did reinforce my belief that cooking with good animal fat is a real pleasure and that it is worthwhile to seek out really high-quality products to use for that purpose.
Also, although I have yet to try duck fat, in some respects that seems to be the best fat of all, and so I’m looking forward to experimenting with it soon.
Massa Organics Rendered Pork Fat
Olive Oil
A big problem with olive oils (especially Italian ones) is that they very often are adulterated with cheaper oils.
(Hint: Real olive oil will turn totally solid if you put it in the refrigerator. I once bought an expensive oil from a specialty olive oil shop on the main street in Telluride that did not get solid at all, so this does seem like a big problem to me!)
Because quality in the olive oil category is so unreliable, looking directly to growers rather than purchasing supposed olive oils in supermarkets or specialty stores makes a lot of sense.
My favorite olive oil is from Berkeley Olive Grove, which grows Mission olives in Oroville, California. (The name is due to the olive grove having been started by a group of UC Berkeley professors in the early 20th Century.)
Berkeley produces greenish olive oils that have a rich, grassy, clean taste and that seem to hold up well to heat. I buy their oils by the gallon so that I don’t feel the need to skimp (a gallon will last me nearly a year). I especially like their citrus-flavored oils, but everything that I have tried from them has been terrific.
Casa Rosa Farm is a similar tiny California grower selling excellent-quality olive oils (including flavored oils) by the bottle or in bulk.
Oils of Paicines (another California company) also makes highly regarded olive oil, priced more on the high end.
Big Paw – which I highly recommend for balsamic vinegars and salad dressings – also produces some reasonably good-quality California olive oils with many interesting flavor additions.
Here is a list of some additional California olive oil producers selling what likely are very good products.
Bionaturae, Jovial and Bragg are larger companies that I trust to be selling real olive oils, and their products have felt fine to me.
Berkeley Olive Grove Mission Olive Oils
Coconut Oil
My experience with coconut oil is that the quality can vary substantially across brands, apparently in large part due to mold contamination of the coconut (including the coconut shell) occurring prior to the oil being pressed.
Choosing a brand that has focused on eliminating this kind of problem on the supplier end and thus is selling clean product is important.
I was really happy to discover the Carrington Farms brand, for instance. It has felt really clean to me and also is available at a low cost via Amazon.
I also have a lot of experience with coconut oil from Nutiva and Dr. Bronner’s. Those products are also very good but much more expensive.
I’ve received some good reports about the coconut oil produced by Wilderness Family Naturals but have yet to try it.
Brain Octane Oil is a particular kind of MCT oil made by Bulletproof. It is super-filtered to reduce contamination, is liquid at room temperature, has no noticeable coconut taste, and is suggested to have many health benefits.
I use Brain Octane Oil nearly every day and believe it to have been quite helpful to me. I especially have liked it for diluting wild oregano oil and other quality essential oils for internal use.
Other Oils
My general feeling about nuts is that it is much more important that they have been maintained under good storage conditions to prevent mold growth (and subsequent mycotoxin contamination) than it is that the nuts are marked as certified organic. While organic nut oils are extremely expensive (if you even can find them), I have had good experiences across the board with the several different non-organic nut and seed oils that I have tried so far from La Tourangelle and so plan to experiment more with this brand.
I first came across Bella Vada at the Palm Springs farmers’ market a number of years ago and was really impressed by the company and by the quality of the avocado oil. It is now available through Amazon.
Nutiva’s Red Palm Oil is a beautiful product and the company’s website makes a persuasive case that it is responsibly sourced. It has a nice taste and feels very clean to me. Recently I’ve been using it on popcorn and like it a lot that way. The company also makes a high-quality hemp seed oil that I have tried.
Flax oil, fish oil and sunflower oil tend to go rancid very easily, and so freshness is important. They should be purchased from quality-oriented companies such as Barlean’s or Flora, stored in the refrigerator, and used up quickly.
Kadoya’s flavorful toasted sesame oil is from Japan and (though not marked organic) seems to be high-quality and clean. Their Hot Sesame Oil is nicely flavored with chili and no other ingredients.
A brand of organic sesame oils (toasted and untoasted) that I have not tried but think may have potential is Kevala.
Wilderness Family Naturals also offers red palm and sesame oils that I have not yet tried.
Flora Pumpkin, Flax & Sunflower Seed Oils
La Tourangelle Toasted Sesame & Pumpkin Seed Oils (2)
Nutiva Hemp Seed & Red Palm Oils
Links on this page are in orange (no underlining).