Upsetting the Applecart

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Mead

There aren't a lot of pictures of Tarek el-Tayyib Mohamed Ben Bouazizi. In most of the pictures that do exist, he's not recognizeable. Hell, he's not recognizeable to most Americans even in the picture above. But his short life, and the way he left it, has completely changed the face of global politics.

Different versions of Mohamed's story conflict with each other; some say he had a computer science degree, others that he never made it through high school. What is known is that he was 26 years old and living in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, with his widowed mother and six sisters. Unable to find employment, he worked for most of his life (from age 10 onward) as a street vendor, selling fruits and vegetables from a cart. Despite police harassment, theft, and a tendency to give away free food to those even poorer than himself, Mohamed was able to provide for his family and send his sisters to school; he was even putting one sister through university, and was saving up for a truck to expand his business.

Enter the police, stage left.

Stories conflict here too. We do know that a police officer named Faida Hamdi stopped him on the morning of December 17, 2010. Some say she demanded a bribe, others say she demanded a permit (which authorities in Sidi Bouzid agree that he didn't actually need), many say she overturned his cart and confiscated his property. Mohamed's family claims that she insulted his deceased father, spit at him, and slapped him in the face. For a young man victimized by corrupt officials throughout most of his life, it was the last straw. He appealed to his government officials, who ignored him until he doused himself with either gasoline or paint thinner and set himself on fire. Eighteen days later, he died of his burns.

This is why the Arab world is under revolution now. It began in Tunisia, where thousands of Mohamed's peers took to the streets in his name to fight for change. Corrupt government, high inflation, high unemployment, widespread poverty - it all came to a head when Mohamed couldn't take anymore, and his peers decided they didn't have to, either. President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled his office a short time later.

This inspired similar revolt in Egypt, but also in Yemen, Algeria, Bahrain and Kuwait, Jordan, Pakistan, Mauritania, Syria, Morocco, and now Libya. Even Saudi Arabia is getting into the act. Civil unrest appears to be spreading into Europe too, after a Moroccan street vendor with a story remarkably like Mohamed Bouazizi's torched himself in Sicily, sparking protests across Italy as well as Greece and Albania.

Bizarrely, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been getting a lot of credit for his network's part in the revolution; a man in Egypt even named his newborn daughter "Facebook". Though the mayor of Paris plans to name a park after Mohamed Bouazizi, his memory seems to be fading in favor of the rich and powerful, as tends to happen.

Me, I'm sitting here wondering when we're going to follow suit. Corrupt government, high inflation, high unemployment, and widespread poverty all sounds pretty familiar to me. Sure, there's the protests in Wisconsin - but come on, y'all, union benefits? Seriously? We have Morningland Dairy and Estrella Family Creamery playing the part of our own Mohamed Bouazizi, with the FDA in Faida Hamdi's role; Wisconsin even had an Amish farmer, Emanuel Miller, tormented by the USDA in violation of his First Amendment rights exactly two years to the day before Mohamed lost his business. Why weren't we marching then?

And why aren't we marching against our own federal government, who spends almost 700 BILLION of our dollars against our will to maintain unwanted occupation of about 160 foreign nations after our elected president promised - and failed to deliver - "change"? Or our USDA, which once served farmers but now works to subjugate them to oppressive corporations like Monsanto? Or our own Congress, which takes a pimp's approach to demanding an ever-increasing share of the little we have while slapping us with more and more restrictions on our Constitutional rights?

All across North Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean, people are fed up and working for change, all because one guy pushing a fruit cart decided enough was enough. I hope an American fruit farmer doesn't have to set himself on fire before we decide we've had enough, too.

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This is getting ridiculous.

It's been a busy time for me these days, which is why I haven't been blogging as much. It's been a busy time for the FDA too - the jackbooted thugs are out in droves once again, holding children at gunpoint, confiscating hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of inventory from small family farms, illegally stealing computers and office equipment without warrants, and generally doing what they do best, which is eliminating the competition for Big Ag.

The current target is raw dairy, and cheese in particular. It started with an illegal raid on the private food buying club Rawsome Foods in California. I'll let you read the article so I don't clutter this space by repeating information, but this baseless raid resulted in the (illegal) confiscation of certain raw cheeses produced by Missouri's Morningland Dairy. Those samples sat around for 30 days - a few months after leaving the dairy - and then one of them somehow tested positive for listeria even though none of the dairy's thoroughly-tested equipment was contaminated. No, I'm sure no one tampered with that sample...

So anyway, now the FDA is out to destroy Morningland Dairy. This tiny family farm has been prohibited from making or selling any cheese since August, and they've been ordered to destroy over $250,000 worth of product, which would completely put them out of business. For six weeks they were forced to dump their milk - remember, we live in a country where children are suffering from malnutrition in an economy that makes it difficult for many people to buy whole foods, and six weeks' worth of fresh milk is a lot of nourishment to feed the sewer. Eventually Morningland was permitted to sell the milk for pasteurized, homogenized distribution, which nourishes no one, may cause heart disease, and does not generate a significant profit for the dairy, but they take what they can get while the government holds them hostage.

Now they're after another farm, the Estrella Family Creamery in Washington state. Same shit, different day - the FDA shuts down the dairy and orders the destruction of massive amounts of high-quality cheese that carries no pathogens whatsoever, ostensibly because someday it might.

It should be noted that the Morningland Dairy has been in operation for over thirty years, and the Estrella Family Creamery for nearly ten, and not one person has ever been sickened by their award-winning cheeses. Can Kraft say the same?

It's worth contrasting the FDA's actions here with their handling of the recent salmonella outbreak at Umpqua Dairy, a pasteurized-homogenized industrial "milk" company here in Oregon (they sell their products at supermarkets throughout Oregon, Washington, and northern California). Back in August, the state of Oregon issued a press release warning that 23 people had been infected with salmonella as a result of consuming Umpqua's products. Two of them were hospitalized. If you're waiting to read about the FDA raiding and shutting down Umpqua in the name of public health, well, so am I. Instead, a voluntary recall was issued, and government officials bent over backwards to soothe the public about how low the risk of illness actually was.

It all makes you wonder what the FDA's true agenda is - public health, or industrialization? And it also makes me worry about the Food Safety Modernization Act, currently before the Senate. This act, designed by Monsanto's own Michael Taylor, would give the FDA unprecedented and unconstitutional powers and allow them to act completely without judicial oversight. This bill would spell death for organic farming, farmers' markets, and small local food. (Monsanto's own power and influence would also, of course, increase exponentially, delivering the last nail in the coffin of family farms.) As Hartke says of the FDA, "If they get more power through S.510, they will regulate the family farm and real food to death and give you Cheez Whiz and Twinkies as government approved food."

That's not what I want or need. Think hard when you cast your ballots next week, and remember - if we don't speak up for Morningland or the Estrellas now, who will speak up for us later?

UPDATE: As of today, it looks like Morningland is going to court. It also appears as though it is a crime in the state of Missouri to request justification before obeying a government order to commit suicide. This has terrifying implications for all Americans... whatever happened to due process?

Terrifying.

Well, I'm back. I've got some pleasant settling-in things to talk about, but first I need to mention the ever-increasing threat of the passage of the Senate's ironically-titled Food Safety Enhancement Act (what a perfect example of Orwellian doublespeak).

Click this link to get the info.

Then call your Senators, your local newspaper, and all your friends and family. We need to raise holy hell over this. If EVER there was a time to step up and scream "NO!" - this is it.

The High Cost of Cheap Eggs

Mine:

Theirs:

Kinda says it all, doesn't it?

If you haven't already seen the excellent 2005 documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, drop what you're doing and go watch it. Now. Every American needs to see it, and most of the rest of the world does too.

Now that you're back... I had to share this excellent article, "The Price of Cheap Wal-Mart Eggs." While this is not just a Wal-Mart problem (and invoking the name of the Evil Empire unfairly lets other less infamous retailers off the hook), the article does explain the reason why cheaper is NOT better when it comes to food production. Be sure to follow the links within the article.

And just for contrast, a funny story:

Our hens have a clearly established pecking order, with Lucy on top, Jane in the middle, and Lana far below both of them. This means that Lana rarely gets to enjoy any of the treats. Jane is fine as long as she gets hers, but Lucy will go out of her way to make sure that Lana doesn't get any treats at all, even if it means she herself misses out. (Notice in the picture above how Lucy and Jane enjoy that nommy corncob while Lana hangs back for the grass.)

So the other day, I was pickling beets - ten pounds' worth, so I had a huge bowl of peels and trimmings to take out to the hens. They dove right in and spent much of the day nibbling at those beets. Later in the afternoon, Keith stepped outside to check on the garden, and was startled to see Lucy looking like a lion at a carcass. The feathers all around her mouth and face were dripping red as she gobbled those beets.

At this point, along comes Lana, deciding to see if she can step in and have some beets too. Lucy roared up onto her tiptoes, wings spread, bloody beak open like a velociraptor from Jurassic Park; Lana shrieked and bolted across the yard, and Keith said for a second he almost did too.

I'm happy to report that our little dinosaur is no longer beet-stained, although the inside of the coop kind of looks like they're all dying from massive internal bleeding. But it's not true. In our case, though not in Wal-Mart's, it's just beets.

I pray that more healthy chickens may soon quarrel over fresh veggies on a sunny summer day.

Yes, I Can! (A Lot.)

I have a hunch that very soon, I'm going to have enough grapes to share a few.

We need to get some carboys and get ready to make some white wine, I think!

I've been canning like it's 1899 these days. More corn salsa, some more peach salsa coming up... I've also put up blackberry jam, ginger-blackberry chutney (which is really too thin and runny to be called a chutney, but it'll taste good poured over baked brie at the dinner gathering I'm having tonight), some cherries in wine, and more.

We've been picking blackberries almost every day, since they're growing wild and abundantly all over the neighborhood; on Wednesday we went up to Sauvie Island to pick blackberries and lie on the beach for awhile. It was a nice break from work and cooking, but the canning work continues. Every time I get caught up, we go to the farmers' market or find a blackberry bush, and I'm off again.

I'm hoping to get started on pickles and tomatoes this week. I recently learned that the FDA, in their infinite... uh, wisdom, requires all tomatoes and tomato sauces to be canned with BPA in the can lining. Even the organic ones. As a woman who's hoping for pregnancy, I'd rather steer clear of BPA when I can, so that means I need to put up tons of tomatoes now because I use the heck out of canned tomatoes in the winter! Thank you, FDA, for giving me still more busywork. You never fail to impress me with the deepest depths of your competence.

And the pickles. Ahh, pickles. I'm currently looking at a 10 lb bag of beets we got for $9 on Sauvie Island, which is destined to become beet pickles and beet relish. And the pickling cucumbers are coming in, so I'll be putting up some dills as well as bread and butter pickles, which Keith has requested since we sampled some awesome bread and butter pickles at the farmers' market.

I had wondered just a month or two ago if canning season would come at all. Hilarious.

Chicken Processing (Warning: Bloody)

Don't read this post or look at the pictures if you're squeamish!

On Sunday, we processed five of the seven chicks that were hatched in our garage back in April. One was too small to be worth killing, and the other was a Thank You gift to Dawn, the woman who brought her two kids into town to show us how to do this. (She preferred a live pullet to lay eggs, so that one also lived.) It only took us a couple of hours to completely process all five birds, but it most certainly made for an interesting day.

I was a bit anxious in the morning, worried about how it would go. We went to breakfast with some friends of ours, but first I whipped up a pie crust, and when we got home from breakfast I channeled my anxiety into a strawberry-rhubarb pie. It was just coming out of the oven when it was time to get our day started, so it cooled in the kitchen as we worked outside.



This is the killing cone, which we borrowed from the Urban Farm Store for free and hung on the fence. Underneath it are two gut buckets - one for the feathers and guts, and another to catch the feathers and heads during processing. We had planned to slit the birds' throats in two places, which is what Joel Salatin and some others recommend, but beheading turned out to be much easier. You can behead a chicken with a filet knife, or a paring knife! I had no idea!

We were joined not only by Dawn and her kids (who seemed to have a healthy respect for the process, but were not the least bit squeamish about it), but also by our friend Kelley, who has been primarily a pesco-vegetarian for many years and whose toddler daughter had never eaten meat before. Kelley also has egg-laying hens and has been debating whether to raise meat birds next summer, so this whole process was kind of a trial run for both of us to see if we could handle it. While we waited for Dawn to arrive, we sipped beer and wondered if we would pass out or scream.

Then it was time.

Dawn's teenage son processed the first bird, and then we did the rest, though Keith had to do all the killing of the other four (Kelley and I weren't quite ready for that yet). It was easier to get ready than I thought it would be; you simply hold up the chicken by its feet, and after a couple seconds of flapping around, the blood goes to its head and it loses consciousness. Then you slide it headfirst into the cone, so that it's neatly contained and the neck is easily accessible.



Then, you take your filet knife (or paring knife) and in one quick stroke - THWACK.



Now you leave the chicken there for a couple of minutes to bleed out. This is pretty quick and a lot less gory than I anticipated. There is a surprisingly small amount of blood in a chicken (and thank goodness for that). When it's done, you take your headless chicken, as Kelley does here...



...and dip it in some hot water for a second or two. This makes plucking a lot easier. Despite the blood and guts, I think the plucking was my least favorite part - most of the big feathers just come off in handfuls, but then you have to pick off all the little pinfeathers, the fluffy ones around the legs, and the soft hairy ones on the roosters, and you have to do it without ripping the skin. Two of them, we tore the skin and decided to take Dawn's advice and just skin them. It's a lot easier but you don't get the delicious chicken skin that way. So most of them, we plucked.



Ready for butchering now? This is when you cut off the feet, neck, and oil gland, and trim the wings. Here's Keith and Kelley double-teaming this process, while I helpfully snap pictures.



Now it just looks like meat! This is when you eviscerate them, cutting around the vent and scooping the guts out. Most of the innards come out easily in one scoop with your hand, but you do have to dig around in there for the trachea and esophagus, and you have to use your nails to pry the lungs off the ribcage. Those lungs really stick! And they're so very tiny, just about the size of a man's thumbnail. Hard to believe they can crow and cackle as loudly as they do, with those teeny little lungs.

If I were true to my heritage and the spirit of this process, I'd have saved the livers and hearts to fry up or cook into stock. But this is me, and I don't like organ meats. So they went into the gut bucket with the rest of the guts.



Rinse out the bird, take a good look to make sure you got everything out...



...wrap the bird in a plastic bag, and you're done!

It all went really quickly. Neither of us passed out; we handled the whole thing really well, despite not being ready for the killing ourselves. Keith did the killing just fine. There was one unpleasant moment when he hit the bone of one chicken and took two or three loud squawking strokes to decapitate it, but generally we all performed quite well and didn't let the carnage get to us.



(I do have a picture of the inside of that bucket. I decided against posting it. I also have some video footage, which I also haven't posted, but if y'all express an interest in seeing it, then I'll upload it for you.)

When all five birds were processed, Kelley took hers and went home to her family. Keith got the deck cleaned up...



...while I got started on dinner. Remember the Cuckoo Maran rooster, in the foreground of Saturday's picture? He woke me up on Sunday morning crowing enthusiastically, and on Sunday evening I rubbed him all over with schmaltz, sprinkled him with salt, and stuffed his cavity with salted lemons, fresh herbs, and elephant garlic. I roasted him up, made a lucious gravy with the pan juices, and served him with hot potato salad and that amazing gravy.



Kelley made beer can chicken with hers that night, outside in her lovely yard.



The verdict? Obviously the chickens were tiny, as these aren't bred for modern meat production and they take more than a year to reach full-size. Next year, we may get meat birds that grow faster. Each bird made multiple meals for our two families, though, so we can't complain about size.

The meat itself was quite chewy; I later learned that it's better to refrigerate the birds for 24-48 hours after processing to relax the meat. (Rigor mortis makes for chewy muscle!) So the next ones I cook should be much better. Despite the chewy texture, the flavor was incredible. We've got a running joke in our culture about the taste of chicken, or rather the lack thereof, but this chicken had a distinct and delicious flavor that must be what caused our ancestors to domesticate this bird in the first place. Think of the best European chicken stock you've ever had, then solidify that flavor into meat. I really enjoyed it.

On Tuesday I took the leftover carcass from my roasted chicken, all the lemons and garlic that were in it, some veggie trimmings and fresh herbs, and the chicken necks from Processing Day, and I made stock. I now have quite a lot of really awesome stock that I can use for a long time to come. And I still have two more chickens in the freezer!

So I feel pretty good about Sunday's work. It was deeply spiritual in a very earthy way; this is what eating meat is supposed to be like. I wonder if a lot of our social disconnect with murder and violence is rooted in this detachment from the death we eat. Factory birds, drugged and diseased, dismembered by machines and wrapped in plastic at the supermarket... Yeah, I can now say I consider that to be far more barbaric than the natural way. I have finally looked my meat in the face and taken responsibility for it, and I found it to be a positive and uplifting experience.

And that strawberry-rhubarb pie I channeled all my earlier stress into? I am pleased to say it didn't taste like stress at all. Once dinner was done and the kitchen cleaned, that pie tasted a well-earned reward for a good day's work (or a couple of days, if you count the day that Kelley and I spent picking and freezing the strawberries last month).



(I just noticed how many of my happy blog posts end in pie!)

Unbelievable. (Well, it's not, but it SHOULD be.)

I just read this post about corruption in the dairy industry, and watched the videos there at the link. Most riveting was the second video, which I found so compelling I'm sharing it here:



If you do nothing else today, WATCH THIS VIDEO. It's the most enlightening ten minutes you'll spend. And, though it probably shouldn't be, it's shocking. I'm not the least bit surprised that Monsanto knew about the harmful effects of bovine growth hormone and its other drugs, nor am I surprised that the corporate media covered it up. But the lengths that corporate media will go to, and that the government will go to, to aid and abet the deliberate poisoning of our population (especially children)... well, I don't have a strong enough word.

And make sure you stay tuned for the ending.

Interesting that Canada, the UK, and the rest of the civilized world has banned the use of bovine growth hormone (known as rBST) in dairy production because it causes cancer and a host of other harmful effects. But in *this* country, we have a government that not only permits rBST, but encourages it, and penalizes those who avoid it.

Case in point: Dairy farmers who wanted to label their milk as being "rBST Free" were BANNED from doing so by the FDA, after Monsanto's lawyers and lobbyists objected to the honest labels. Dairies are now free to use the "rBST Free" label, but they have to include the disclaimer, "No significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rBST-treated and non-rBST treated cows" - in other words, they're required to lie on their own packaging. And who wrote the disclaimer? Why, that would be Michael Taylor, then-FDA Deputy Policy Commissioner, who was one of Monsanto's attorneys before he joined the FDA, and who returned to Monsanto's employ when his "service" at the FDA was done.

Monsanto is now lobbying aggressively at the state level to ban "rBST Free" labels so that consumers are unable to choose. They're pretty threatened about this issue, since consumers have voiced their preferences so loudly that many sellers have stopped using or offering dairy treated with rBST - Tillamook Dairy, Ben & Jerry's, and Starbucks banned rBST, as did Kroger, Publix, and Safeway, and even Wal-Mart's generic brand of milk is rBST Free. So Monsanto is losing money here, most definitely, and they're sending out their most vicious dogs to corral the herd. And the FDA is one of those dogs.

Moral of the story: You cannot trust federal regulators with the safety of your food. Monsanto is working overtime to destroy our options, to render us dependent on their poisons, and to purchase our government and media. Check those labels, and keep your eyes open, and don't let the dogs herd you into the corral. That corral is attached to a slaughterhouse.

What a difference a century makes.

(Click the picture to see a bigger version and read the text.)

Remember when hard times and war meant we LIMITED our consumption, and did more for ourselves? When we had a patriotic duty to learn to be self-sufficient, frugal, and creative with the things we had? When the government encouraged people to be independent?

Yeah, I don't either. I'm too young. But I've read about it, and every so often I stumble across something like this, and it makes me wonder when we lost our way... and if we can ever collectively find it again.

Article: "Sour Milk"

I just had to share this article:

Sour Milk:
Big-box dairy farms bring manure and misery to some Central New York communities
by Rebecca Lerner

This is an excellent illustration of the destruction wrought by factory farming, even on those who aren't participating in it. The next time you reach for a package of mass-produced cheese or milk (hey look, it's only $1.99!), think of this story.

"Scandalously Close" Relationships

I was listening to the radio yesterday and I heard Obama decry the "scandalously close relationship" between the oil companies and the regulators who were supposed to be keeping them in check. Apparently (surprise, surprise) the inspectors and other regulators enjoyed the gifts and other perks of a happier relationship with those companies, so instead of scrutinizing their activity and preventing risk, they rubber-stamped whatever the companies asked them to and looked the other way so that Big Oil could sell out all of our health and safety for a buck.

I was not the least bit surprised to hear this, but apparently the American public is scandalized. Good! We should be. And let's not limit it to Big Oil. Who else do you think enjoys a similar relationship with regulators and inspectors? Big Pharm, perhaps? Big Agriculture? You think the FDA and the USDA might have a similar pattern of greenlighting whatever they do with a wink and a nod?

Turns out, they do. Drugs with very serious side effects go through the FDA based on half-assed research funded by the drug company itself. It didn't end with Thalidomide. The USDA was itself promoting the practice of cannibalism in cows - that's right, feeding the guts, fat, and other waste of cattle to OTHER CATTLE as cheap filler in feedlots. Did they promote this practice because it's good agriculture? Of course not, it just made a bit more money for the corporations behind the feedlots. Of course, it turned out to cause Crutzfeld-Jakob disease, a very nasty and incurable brain disorder that causes a horrible death in humans who eat the infected meat. But what the hell, money is money.

Did you know that if you switch a corn-fed cow to a grass diet for a mere two weeks before slaughter, you completely remove all traces of E. coli from its system? But over 20,000 people are infected with E. coli every year in this country, and every year several (including many children) suffer death or paralysis from it. The USDA doesn't require a grass diet for cattle, or even finishing on grass, because Big Ag turns a better profit on corn feedlots. Hell, the USDA even prohibits farmers from testing more than 10% of their herd for bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow disease") or E. coli O157:H7 (the deadly strain) - that's right, a farmer who wants to market his meat as safe after testing 100% of his herd was prohibited from doing so by the USDA, because large corporate feedlots couldn't afford the expense of doing same, and it would've been "unfair" competition.

So when you hear the USDA or the FDA carrying on about "safety," think of the oil companies. Think of nice gifts for federal inspectors, the bonuses, the cuddly relationship between our government safety officials and the profit-at-any-human-cost pigs they're supposed to be protecting us from. Think about that murderous gusher pumping thousands of gallons of oil into an ecosystem that may never recover, and livelihood destroyed, and human lives lost because safety officials looked the other way for money. Then think very hard about who you trust to protect you.

The need for real food, underscored.

I'm in L.A. for three weeks, doing film work. One thing about working on set is the 14-hour days (often longer), plus the commute each way in L.A. traffic (and we're staying in the South Bay, across town from everything), and the set food. Urrp. That set food...

Catering and craft service on a film set are designed to keep people as full as possible for as cheaply as possible. There's nothing wrong with this, except that the people involved are often not actually invested in food or cooking, so they often rely on prepackaged ingredients to assemble for the crew. After a week of returning to an on-set diet after a full year of cooking my own, I've noticed headaches, sluggishness, and skin problems. We've both noticed our sense of general well-being is not what it is when we cook food from natural, organic ingredients. Add to that the fact that even the water in L.A. is loaded with toxins and poisons - your choices are filthy, foul-tasting tap water or water that has sat in a plastic bottle leaching chemicals - and it's no wonder health problems are so rampant in this town.

Another interesting thing I noticed: A lunch based on white flour and non-organic, nutritionally deficient ingredients leads to relentless snacking all day. The body craves all the nutrients it didn't get with the meal, so you wind up stopping by the craft service table every time you walk past it and grabbing whatever you can. But that's more junk food, so by the end of the day you've consumed thousands of calories and you still haven't been nourished. This is why we, as a society, are fat.

The sad thing is that most people living on a packaged diet are completely unaware of the trouble it causes. Keith and I lived this way for years and never noticed, but once we moved to Oregon and started cooking real food with real organic ingredients, Keith noticed he didn't feel good whenever he went back to set work. Now I'm here and I can definitely confirm it.

I'm not complaining about the food on this one particular show, you understand. This is an industry-wide problem that merely reflects our national misconceptions about food. Too often we assume that assembling packaged products is a fine substitute for cooking, and the end result is just as good as food. Experience shows that it most decidedly isn't.

Imagine the things we could accomplish with a well-nourished society! One thing's for sure, we'd probably spend a lot less on healthcare. It even makes you wonder if the crime rate would drop when people felt better. We'll never know unless we try, but it's going to have to happen one home at a time. If you're eating with labels every day, try cutting it out for awhile and see how much more alive you feel.

And then send me some of that nourishing, organic, real-live FOOD. I miss it.

Joel Salatin on the Revolution

I just had to share this article - actually an excerpt from Joel Salatin's foreword to The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America's Emerging Battle Over Food Rights. If you don't know Joel Salatin yet, you should - and if you know me, then you know him, because I admit to devoted fellowship in the First Church of Salatin, Farmer. I know I talk about him a lot. Have been ever since seeing him in Food, Inc. and reading his groundbreaking, revolutionary book Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal.

It's not just his farming technique, it's his worldview, his classically American belief in liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Joel Salatin is at the forefront of a movement which recognizes that a corporate-controlled government oligarchy is NOT equipped to decide what we should eat, how we should conduct free enterprise among neighbors, or how we should nourish our families. I'll raise a glass of my grey-market, life-affirming raw milk to that philosophy - especially as Congress moves forward on current legislation which would effectively ban organic farming and farmers' markets (yes, really).

So anyway, the article. I can't repost the whole thing here, so click the link to read it.

I drink raw milk (sold illegally on the underground market)
by Joel Salatin

Excerpt:

Isn't it curious that at this juncture in our culture's evolution, we collectively believe Twinkies, Lucky Charms, and Coca-Cola are safe foods, but compost-grown tomatoes and raw milk are not? With legislation moving through Congress demanding that all agricultural practices be "science-based," I believe our food system is at Wounded Knee. I do not believe that is an overstatement...

Indeed, what good is the freedom to own guns, worship, or assemble if we don't have the freedom to eat the proper fuel to energize us to shoot, pray, and preach? Is not freedom to choose our food at least as fundamental a right as the freedom to worship?

Is it not, indeed. Jackbooted government thugs are harassing Amish farmers like Daniel Allgyer and Emmanuel Miller while Monsanto contaminates our groundwater and other corporations infect our children with E. coli and diabetes. And Congress, predictably, comes down on the side of its corporate sponsors.

Joel Salatin is right, we are absolutely at Wounded Knee. Voting out the incumbents and casting real votes for freedom this November, that's not just about taxes or Obamacare or who looks better on TV. This election is about our very survival, our fundamental right to choose nourishing, life-sustaining foods. There's nothing more basic, or more important, than that.

Treats? Realism? Help me out here.

I found this article interesting:

What's Really In Your Food?
Learn the truth about these four fast-food favorites.
By David Zinczenko & Matt Goulding, Men's Health

It's not groundbreaking news, to be sure. We all know that fast "food" is not actually food, but laboratory-designed chemicals mixed with barely edible processed ingredients that once were food, if such a word can be applied to diseased, abused, malnourished animals. What interested me more than the article was the comments, especially this one by "AC Vader":

I realize some people don't have the will to cut back but it's actually pretty easy to avoid this stuff. I'm never the one to say completely eliminate it from your diet because I think that is unrealistic for most. But I don't think eating this stuff 2-4 a month is that bad. In fact I think it is pretty healthy to "treat" yourself every once in a while.

I hear this sort of thing a lot, that it isn't "realistic" to avoid the manufactured garbage and eat food. This mentality is echoed in several other comments, such as those who responded to the contention that a milkshake should just consist of milk and ice cream by squealing, "But look what's in the ice cream!" Ice cream itself SHOULD contain milk or cream, sugar or honey, and whatever fruit or other food you want to mix in with it. But packaged foods and corporate marketing have so deeply and thoroughly infiltrated our culture that we now assume that everything originally comes out of a box. I guess that's why so many people assume that it's "unrealistic" to stick to eating real food.

I still don't get it though. Why is it unrealistic? It takes me just as long to make a sandwich as it takes to drive to McDonald's, wait in the drive-thru or the line, order the so-called "food," and pay for it. Actually, I'm pretty sure the sandwich is quicker. We all know it's healthier, and we're all in agreement that homemade tastes better - even the people who've never set foot in their own kitchens rave over my homecooked food and say they wish they could cook. Well, they can. Like my mom always says, "If you can read, you can cook" - recipes and cookbooks aren't privileged information or anything. So why not?

Which brings me to the other part of the comment I quoted above... that it's "healthy to treat yourself" to processed garbage food. Is there anyone out there over the age of seven who honestly enjoys McDonald's as a TREAT? (And the kids only like it because of the marketing, not because of the food itself.) We all know what McDonald's tastes like, and it's tasteless, sickly stuff. The whole point of it is the fact that you can just cram it into your craw and not feel hungry anymore. What part of that is a treat? What happened to chocolate, wine, cinnamon rolls, fresh berries in summer?

Is our culture really so far gone that we can't conceive of food that never had a bar code on it, and a lump of chicken-flavored guar gum fried in genetically-modified canola and shoved at you by a snarling teenager counts as a treat? Please tell me there is more hope for us than that!

Faith vs. The State

The front page of my local newspaper, The Oregonian, greeted me on the porch this morning with a screaming headline: Sentence is warning to church. I knew immediately what it was about, even without the large photo of police leading a middle-aged, heavyset couple through a crowded courtroom. Jeff and Marci Beagley are going to prison.

I've been following this case in the news for the past few months. The Beagleys belong to a religious sect called the Followers of Christ, which doesn't believe in modern medicine. In June of 2008, their 16-year-old son Neil (in the photo at age 14) died of kidney failure. Turns out he had a congenital urinary blockage that was only treated with prayer, which didn't work. His parents, Jeff and Marci, were charged with criminally negligent homicide for what is being called (inaccurately, in my opinion) a "faith-healing death."

In their defense, Jeff and Marci did ask Neil if he wanted to go to the doctor, and he refused. Of course, he'd been homeschooled within the church since third grade and had little to no contact with the sinful world, so he was likely far more afraid of hell than he was afraid of dying. And, while not a child, at 16 he was still a minor, taking some of the decision out of his hands. His death came only a couple of months after the death of his baby cousin Ava Worthington, who was Jeff and Marci's granddaughter and who also could likely have been saved by modern medicine. 2008 was not a good year for this family.

The Oregonian is pleased as punch with the guilty verdict, reporting today with palpable satisfaction the sentence that Jeff and Marci Beagley received yesterday: 16 months in prison, plus three years of post-prison supervision. This sentence is intended to be a strong message to the Followers of Christ that they should "soften" their stance on medical treatment - in other words, get in line with the mainstream and fall in with modern medicine.

It's hard to argue with that at face value. Neil and Ava are not the first children to die in their faith community. It's easy to think, "Well, yeah, these kids would be alive today if their parents had taken them to the doctor, so of course they're criminally negligent." It becomes a bit more difficult to agree with 16 months of hard time when you see the grief and early age etched deep in the lines around the Beagleys' eyes. It becomes really hard, however, to agree with this sentence when you consider the long-term implications.

First Amendment religious freedom issues aside, do parents have a right to set the limits on their children's medical care? This is a serious issue raised by this verdict, and one I haven't seen the local media discussing. We're a fairly liberal (and libertarian) West Coast state, so we tend to go along with crunchy hippie values, and we tolerate the more conservative values more than they would in, say, Seattle or San Francisco. Oregon was founded by refugees from the mainstream and we take a certain measure of pride in that. I do worry, however, that this ruling has set a dangerous precedent. Fundamentalist Christians aren't our mainstream, but what happens when we hold the hippies to the same standard we just set?

Take the current controversy over vaccination. I'm not completely anti-vax, but I don't think it's a coincidence that so many children suffer symptoms of heavy metal poisoning and autistic behavior soon after they're injected with massive cocktail doses of barely-tested shots. No, I don't want to see kids die from the measles, but I don't want to see them brain damaged from a chicken pox vaccine when most kids get through the chicken pox just fine on their own. Other people disagree with me on both sides. I know a lot of people who believe in vaccination as the savior of mankind, and I know people who would sooner inject themselves with formaldehyde than inject their babies with an MMR. For the time being, we as a society have agreed that parents have the right to make those decisions as they see fit; even though vaccinations are technically required for schoolchildren (11 required vaccinations in Oregon), we concede to "religious exemption," which is as often as not invoked by atheists and agnostics for reasons having little to do with faith.

Or take homebirth, which is very big in Oregon and which I myself hope to someday take part in. Our state's health plan for the low-income uninsured covers homebirth and midwife care, putting us at the forefront of a movement that gains more momentum every day. Every unnecessary C-section, every contribution to the USA's rising maternal mortality rate (largely due to hospital-acquired infections), every torn woman with scars from "purple pushing" flat on her back turns more women away from the medicalized birth experience. Currently we respect a wide range of birth options, from unassisted homebirth to scheduled C-sections, with birthing centers and licensed midwives in between.

Or hell, take diet. The USDA makes no secret of its disdain for raw milk, home canning, private animal slaughter on family farms, or traditional growing methods. They do, however, tolerate them and I have just as much right to give raw milk to my (hypothetical) children as my neighbors have to feed their children McDonald's. But for how long?

You see where I'm going with this? Big Pharm is getting bigger by the day, and look at the "health" bill currently in Congress if you deny the power of insurance companies and the medical establishment. Once healthcare becomes taxpayer-funded, that brings the government in further, and we know who they work for. (Hint: It isn't the taxpayer.) Will those parents who refuse full-scale vaccinations, those parents who birth at home, those parents who put up cranberry chutney, be put on trial if something goes wrong? It is a sad fact of life that sometimes children die, whether or not the medical establishment gets involved. Isn't that tragic enough without prosecuting the parents for decisions they made, for better or worse, with their children's well-being in mind?

I'd hazard a guess that the same judge who sent Jeff and Marci Beagley to prison for their son's death would not imprison the doctor if Neil Beagley died of an infection he got in the hospital during surgery to treat his urinary blockage. While modern medicine has done much to improve our longevity and quality of life, we run a very real risk of becoming slaves to a corporate-funded establishment. Even the doctors themselves are not in full agreement on everything; new information changes the rules every day. So should parents be allowed to use that information themselves, without input from the (human, fallible) experts? Should they be allowed to opt out altogether? Or should we further elevate the medical profession above the near-godlike position it currently holds, giving it even more authority over society's children than the parents have themselves?

It is my deepest wish for Jeff and Marci Beagley to find peace in their hearts for the choices they made, even though I myself do not agree with them. And I also hope these larger issues are raised upon appeal. This isn't about a fundamentalist sect in rural Oregon, this is about all of us - especially we who pride ourselves on our independent streak.

Luddite, indeed.

So the evil empire just jacked up our internet service bill again, and now we really can't justify paying $50 a month for a service that wastes our time more than it contributes to our lives. So... we're thinking of cancelling our internet.

*gasp* "No!" you cry. "I cannot LIVE without reading this blog!"

Fear not. Coffee shops with free wireless internet abound in this fair city, and if I know us we'll still be online two or three times a week. But I refuse to pay for it any longer when it wastes so much of my time at home, and we don't really need it. I get the newspaper delivered now, so that's what I can read over breakfast to get the news, and with all the work there is to do around this house (plus a lot of writing I want to get caught up on), I will be glad to be rid of the distraction.

This is a big step for me though, as my biggest weakness is my internet addiction. I anticipate heavy withdrawals soon, ha, but I do think it'll be better for us both in the long run.

And I know I'm going to be very busy soon, as the tomatoes are already sprouting and I have seeds to order and peppers to plant and a fence to build and grass to kill and so much to do outside...! Today I'm running out for a flourescent light for my tomatoes. They sprouted a lot sooner than I thought they would and they're stretching out way too high looking for sunlight, which they aren't getting in our spare room! (But in the spare room, they're also warm and not being trashed by cats, so...)

Big Pharm - Working Hard to Keep You Sick

I just had to share this excellent article:

The Pharmaceutical Industry Toasts Your Ill Health
By Ed Steene

Please read it carefully and think hard about that flu shot, that hand sanitizer, that pasteurized milk!

"I'm from the government..."

Here in Portland, we have the most delicious tap water in the country (and yes, I know Memphis makes a similar claim but when I go home to visit, that stuff tastes like pool water from all the chlorine). It's been proven in study after study to be the cleanest metropolitan water in the USA. This delicious, clean water comes from an open reservoir (see pic) located in a wilderness area with no humans, no cattle, and hence no threat of harmful contamination. The sun's natural UV radiation kills dangerous bacteria, and good minerals flourish in this environment. This system has worked since the reservoir was built in the mid-1800's and continues to work well today.

Enter the government, and its corporate backers.

Now the EPA, at the urging of a multinational corporation called Montgomery Watson Harza Global, Inc., has decreed that our water be buried, filtered, and chemically processed, at a cost of several hundred million dollars. You can read all the background here, but the long and short of it is that we stand to pay three or four times the price for inferior, potentially dangerous water. This isn't a sexy issue like abortion or health insurance so it's not making the news, which means it has quietly built up a momentum that is going to be difficult to stop now. Moreover, the proposed water changes seriously threaten Portland's world-famous independent brewing industry, as you can't make good beer without good water (excellent explanation here).

Coincidentally, when this came to my attention I was in the middle of reading an excellent book with the beautiful title Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal. Written by Joel Salatin, a true prophet of the modern age, this book is not only about farming; it's an indictment of big-government interference and the way it destroys innovation. Call me a conspiracy nut if you will, but we live in a day and age where the rules of commerce have been arranged to favor the large multinationals at the expense of smaller independents. Newcomers can't even get started in many industries, and smaller businesses are pushed out of existence by complex regulations.

In no area is this as problematic as it is with food and water. Our most basic needs are now threatened by an Orwellian "food safety" system that poses an unprecedented risk to actual food safety. Why take the cleanest water in the country and destroy it in the name of safety? Why prosecute Amish farmers under a system supposedly meant to protect consumers from diseases that proliferate in the corporate system, not on independent family farms? Meat and produce from independent farms has been demonstrated time and time again to be cleaner, more nutritious, and safer than anything from the corporate system (to say nothing of its superior flavor). Grass-fed beef has ZERO E. coli in its system; in fact, you can even destroy E. coli in a corn-fed cow by switching her to a grass diet for a mere two weeks before slaughter. But changes like this aren't required or even mentioned by government agencies, because they would cost Con-Agra too much money.

So children die, and innocent vegetables like green onions and spinach wind up contaminated by animal diseases somewhere in their journey through the factory food system. Why does the FDA/USDA respond to what is clearly a corporate-food threat by working harder to make us more dependent on corporate food? And why does the EPA respond to a clean, healthy water system with a mandate to destroy it?

Ronald Reagan (himself a questionable friend to the little guy) once said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" We're hearing those words all too often now, and all of us should indeed be terrified.

Food Insecurity on 9/11

Well, here we are, eight years to the day since the dawn of our Brave New World. I remember like it was yesterday - how the patriotic response was to go out and buy an SUV, buy new furniture, fill up your gas tank as often as possible, spend money. Didn't matter if you had the money or not, just spend. The credit explosion led to the credit collapse and now here we are in an "economic crisis." You'd think we'd have learned about thrift and responsibility.

But no. According to Fox, frugal Americans are now the enemy, directly responsible for our slow recovery. It's still our patriotic duty to spend money we don't have and become ever more dependent on the corporate system. Meanwhile Congress is working hard to render us even more dependent on a larger, industrialized agricultural system with the tragically misnamed Food Safety Enhancement Act. (Read more here.) Even though the USDA has agreed that centralized, long-distance industral production is one of the greatest threats to food safety, this bill (which has already passed the House and is before the Senate as I type), would further centralize production and drive small farms out of business.

Worse yet, it doesn't differentiate between commercial and home production, so this "Administrator" to be determined would have the right to enter your own home kitchen or garden with no judicial oversight and hold you to the same standards as industrial food exporters. If that's not unconstitutional I don't know what is, but Con-Agra and Monsanto can afford to keep it away from the Supreme Court for long enough to drive small independent farmers out of business.

It should go without saying that any "Food Safety Enhancement Act" supported by Con-Agra and Monsanto is not going to be about food safety at all.

We know already that the proper response to economic crisis is to tighten our belts, and the proper response to a food safety crisis such as the current one is to take responsibility for our own food production. But Corporate America is working hard to make money by convincing us all that black is white. It began the full-force push eight years ago today and now it's poisoning not only our food, but our Constitutional rights and our way of life.

Contact your Senators today and tell them to vote against HR2749. Our lives depend on it.

On "Food Porn."

We woke up early to resume the waiting game this morning, but still no word from the escrow people. If we don't sign today or tomorrow, we have to put in Extension #5. I'm trying not to get stressed out like last week though; yesterday I suffered a debilitating migraine and I'd really rather not go through that again.

So today I got up after a good hard sleep, snuggled the kittens, had a nice long bubble bath while sipping iced ginger-lavender tea, and then decided to treat my man to a nice breakfast since he was so great yesterday at holding me up while the migraine tore me down. Fresh-from-scratch butter biscuits with vegetarian chicken gravy, his favorite, and a side of fresh berries from the farmer's market and tiny tomatoes from our garden. Fresh-ground Stumptown coffee with hazelnut milk for me too, of course. With a breakfast like that you get up from the table feeling that anything the day might throw at you is okay.

While I mopped up the last smears of gravy with those buttery biscuits, I read this excellent article by Michael Pollan: "Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch." The author of The Omnivore's Dilemma (which I just began reading this morning) and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (which I just received today as a wonderful birthday gift), Pollan here examines the celebrity culture around the Food Network as compared to the more quaint and accessible charm of Julia Child's early 1960's broadcasts. It's an odd paradox we have here in our culture, obsessed with health and yet less healthy than we've ever been, fascinated with food and yet reluctant to let ourselves really enjoy it. Why indeed do so many Americans prefer to watch strangers cook food they'll never eat, rather than go into the kitchen and try cooking for themselves?

It got me to thinking about something Anthony Bourdain said awhile back, "Food is the new porn." He wasn't wrong. Our cultural fetishization of cooking is very similar to the way we've detached and fetishized sex. Both have become subjects of relentless fascination when it comes to watching or reading about other people doing it, but in everyday American life both have become a cheap quick fix. Spice Channel or Food Network, the message is the same: It sure looks good, but it's not for real people.

I wonder how we got that way, since those two drives are the basic forces behind every form of life on this planet. When did they go from pleasures to be freely enjoyed, relished, and even lived for, to guilty pleasures we can only freely enjoy from the spectators' stands? I've just finished reading Under the Tuscan Sun, an excellent book about the way of life in small-town Italy, and the most interesting part of it to me was the way Italians are free to live their lives for the things that make them happy. Food, family, relationships, life. I know I prefer to live that way myself, but I mourn for the wider American culture that has instead shunted those things to a short time slot in the exhausted evening, somewhere between "America's Next Top Chef" over a Stouffer's frozen dinner and a fitful sleep to prepare for another day of making another corporate CEO richer. No wonder so many marriages end in divorce and so many networks can make money selling an image of family life to those who are not living one.

Is there a way to reverse this trend and bring Americans back to life? Or is this just the extreme end of a culture we've been building towards for centuries, when the first Puritans declared European siestas to be an indulgent waste and pushed for a life "beyond" our bodily needs? Do you think things are changing for the better, or the worse?

Actually, *No* Word on the Hizzouse.

Sat around all day yesterday waiting to go sign but the bank is screwing around. Apparently our paperwork is all computer-generated and computers did what they do best yesterday and went down. I'm really glad we didn't put in notice at the beginning of the month in anticipation of moving on our first planned closing day, or we'd be homeless right now. As it is, we'll pay yet another month in exorbitant rent and hope for a closing on some day next week or next year.

I'm really annoyed with the place that computers have taken in our society (and yes, I'm typing this on a MacBook). Everything exists to serve the machines. Everyone knows we want the house, the seller wants to sell it to us, and we can afford to pay for it. But it takes six weeks of plugging everything into the machines just so before we can have it. Somehow the computers think it looks better for Keith to buy the house alone than with me, so we take me off the mortgage even though my income contributes to the payments - it makes no sense, but The Machine Says So and we all capitulate. And now that everything's in place, the machine throws a tantrum, so we can't even generate a piece of paper without it. People are completely incapable of doing business without a machine telling them how to do it. It's maddening, absolutely maddening. Common sense and ingenuity have been replaced by algorithms.

So we're going to try to have a nice weekend now that the heat has dropped back down into the double digits. We moved out of the living room and into the rest of the apartment again last night. I'm on my way to eat Chinese food and paint on pottery with a friend. Tomorrow we'll go to the farmer's market for our shopping and also attend a demonstration on how to build a chicken tractor. And on Monday, we'll start the waiting game all over again. Please cross your fingers that the God Of The Machine smiles upon us soon.