I saw this entry posted over at Docudharma and thought I'd share the link to it. I'll post as much as I can, but really, it's worth checking out the entire entry. It's by the user known as FreeSociety.

The total vacuum of any principled leadership from President Obama, has inevitably produced the most directionless, anti-consumer, Insurance Monopoly boondoggle fraud imaginable -- which is now masquerading before Congress as "reform".

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Sorry I haven't had the time to gardenblog. I've been, well, in the garden too much, and too wiped out after canning and harvesting to do pics. But I have some. I missed a period for good pics but I'll show some results instead. First up: Fleurs. Hecate has some going still, and I do too:
Mums did well, if a tad slow, this year. Nice and bright.

Baby pumpkins. So cute there's no need to carve them.

So I guess I hit a nerve with my food fight post, or rather, several of them. I think it's worth breaking down some of the comments and sub-discussions into a longer series. One topic that seemed to bring out the very Correntian best in folks: how we define "obese."

Reader Jeff W points us to this helpful link from the CDC, in which they have determined that there have been "noticeable increases" in the number of overweight or obese people in this country. Reader Aeryl questions the methodology with this link. Other comments in that thread had other definitions and methods to measure the size and number of "healthy" bodies.

I'm a long way from my scientific research days, but I'll say that generally, I think obesity is both a "nature" and a "nurture" issue. On the Nature side: I fully recognize that the FSM has been kind to people in my family; we're generally tall and thin with only a modicum of exercise effort and don't tend to "overweight"-edness until quite late in life, if at all. I doubt I could find the link for it now, but I recall reading a fascinating report about a group of indigenous people from South America, recently relocated from their ancestral lands to a reservation. Apparently, in a single generation they went from thin and fit to outrageously overweight. The report's conclusion was that they had evolved to live on a fat-poor diet for thousands of years before being relocated and fed "government cheese" instead of their previous natural, "jungle food" diet, and as a result their bodies were incredibly efficient in terms of fat storage. "Too" efficient when fed a more modern diet, and thus their current obesity.

I'm tossing out those two examples and asking for your thoughts, because before we can make policy progress on the "nurture" argument, it's important to correctly frame the "nature" part.

How do you define "fat" and "obese?" How should government, for the purposes of health and food policy? How important is identifying obesity as a public health "problem?" Then there are questions about how Big Industry (Fashion, Food, the Exercise-Industrial Complex, etc) define "fat." Definitions generated by the discourse of the Patriarchy play a role as well.

And once again, consider this an open thread for recipes, especially those good for people who want to reduce or change their body's shape. Warning: I will delete comments that are inappropriately insensitive to people who don't conform to mainstream body shape standards. Consider this is a safe space for people of all body shapes to contribute.

First, some detail for the gardeners, in case you want to go right out and deal with this: Late blight is the fungus that caused the Irish potato famine. Here's a slide show that shows what to look for on tomatoes. The fucking rain (at least on the East Coast) has created moist and cool conditions that are ideal for its spread. The fungus spreads through the air, goes after both tomatoes, potatoes (and peppers and eggplants), and can take down a garden in 3-5 days. Whether or not it originated in the big box stores, they are a likely source of infection now. Finally, copper fungicides work (that's been my experience with mildew on winter squash, though I combine that with milk spray) though wear a moon suit when you use the stuff. The Oregon Extension Service recommends cleaning your tools with bleach. Penn State master gardeners say don't rip out plants, because that spreads the spores, and recommend alternative procedures. If anybody has better information, please share it!

* * *

Yikes. "Spores in the air." Sounds like a horror film! And just like a hospital with superbugs can infect all its patients, an infected Big Box store could blight an entire bio-region, and destroy your garden, even if you didn't personally buy an infected plant. Isn't it great how, even if you're working to become self-sustaining and grow at least some of your own food, the corporations can still fuck you up? Reuters:

Seems like their alumni are everywhere, infecting whatever they touch! Natasha Chart:

So Michael Taylor, Monsanto's former lawyer and a fan of adding extra pus to the nation's milk supply by way of giving all our dairy cows chronic mastitis from rBST/rBGH, has indeed been hired to the newly created position of Deputy Commissioner of Food with the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.

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And then sell your microwave [or at least don't use it to nuke processed food].

Times:

Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients. In this case, ConAgra could not pinpoint which of the more than 25 ingredients in its pies was carrying salmonella. Other companies do not even know who is supplying their ingredients, let alone if those suppliers are screening the items for microbes and other potential dangers, interviews and documents show.

Yet the supply chain for ingredients in processed foods — from flavorings to flour to fruits and vegetables — is becoming more complex and global as the drive to keep food costs down intensifies. As a result, almost every element, not just red meat and poultry, is now a potential carrier of pathogens, government and industry officials concede.

Urk.

I'm reposting and updating this from last year, for the top of the gardening season for most folks.

Our good friend MadSat, is still in Iraq, and still safe, and thankfully, he still has access to blogs.

MadSat is a rather remarkable beekeeper and bee remover (among a host of other amazing skills and talents). He sent along a great recipe to encourage and feed bees in a very healthful way.

It was so good ( posted my experiences with it last year), I want to share it here, with better measurements from MadSat:

It's springtime in DC. Michelle Obama and the Bancroft Elementary School students are busy:

_{Daily Mail Photos}

The London Daily Mail takes note:
"First lady Michelle Obama got her hands dirty has she planted the first fruit and vegetable seedlings in the new White House garden.
She pulled on brown gloves and a red waterproof and trainers and got down on her knees to help plant alongside a group of 25 eager fifth-graders from a local school.
And she said the Obamas could be enjoying salads fresh from the garden within weeks.
Designed as a year-round kitchen garden, the L-shaped plot on the South Lawn will produce herbs such as oregano, sage and rosemary, vegetables including lettuce, chard and peas, and blueberries and raspberries."  Read more…

I'm looking out on my eight garden beds in the back yard. The strawberry and asparagus bed is wintering-over just fine. I cut the asparagus ferns down a week ago, when they finally turned brown, and fell over. Now, they are ready for sending up new stalks, which I will be able to harvest this year. This past year, each crown sent up at least twelve stalks, so, I expect this year to be a real good year for them. I just pulled and started dehydrating the parsley that I had growing with the asparagus. The strawberries seem to not realize that it is winter. I picked a good, hardy variety, and they are green, and still sending out new shoots, which I need to snip back every few weeks.

Michael Pollan for Secretary of Agriculture! Pollan wrote a letter to Obama on food policy (posted on here: "Sun food is local food"), and it turns out (kudos to the staff) that Obama actually read it. I'll start with the exchange, and through circuitous paths arrive at some suggestions on method for a critique of the coming Obama administration, ending where I started: with food.

Pollan's letter is worth re-reading in full, but here's an excerpt:

It may surprise you [Obama] to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food.

You will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

[1] After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study.

[2] You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.

[3] The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food.

And (via Green Daily) we read Obama's response in his interview with Joe Klein:

The President (or the President-Elect) won't think you don't love him if you get out in the streets and demonstrate. Sometimes he needs that "pressure" to get Congress's attention and action. When the AFL and CIO asked Roosevelt for what became the Wagner Act, he said "Go in the streets and make me do it." And they did. When Martin Luther King asked Kennedy for the Civil Rights Act, JFK said "I have an election coming up. I can't initiate this Act. Make me do it." So King and his people went to Birmingham and got busy. We all love Obama to pieces, but he might appreciate a little heat from us now and then. Walter Ebmeyer. www.richaredifferent.wordpress.com.

This time, instead of toxic financial products, where bad mortgages were sliced and diced and processed into powder and ended up contaminating everything, it's toxic milk products processed into powder and contamination everything:

Tainted milk crisis hits more global companies

SHANGHAI, China - Snackers, beware: Your favorite chocolate or creamy treats might contain milk contaminated with melamine.

The list of companies facing potential recalls grew Friday as reports of foods tainted with the industrial chemical melamine, which has been blamed in the deaths of four Chinese infants, spread to a widening range of products.

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I've got a peck of beautiful Roma Tomatoes from the garden tonight, and I am going to dice and freeze them.

Here's The Safe And Easy Way To Do It.

It's really simple-- you don't even need to skin them.

Who knew?

The industry pressured the Bush administration years ago to limit the paperwork companies would have to keep to help U.S. health investigators quickly trace produce that sickens [and kills, you shitheads] consumers, according to interviews and government reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

The White House also killed a plan [oh, it's plans that are metaphorically killed, and not people. Fucking Village] to require the industry to maintain electronic tracking records that could be reviewed easily during a crisis to search for an outbreak's source. Companies complained the proposals were too burdensome and costly, and warned they could disrupt the availability of consumers' favorite foods.

The apparent but unintended consequences of the lobbying success: a paper record-keeping system that has slowed investigators, with estimated business losses of $250 million. So far, nearly 1,300 people in 43 states, the District of Columbia and Canada have been sickened by salmonella since April.

Under pressure in 2003 and 2004, the White House agreed to dilute record-keeping proposals by FDA safety experts

Here is the list of the corporate criminals*:

... there is absolutely no mention of two alternative solutions to buying tomatoes supplied from the contaminated corporate food chain: growing your own, and buying local. How odd. Or not:

The tomato scare may be over, but it has taken a toll — it's cost the industry an estimated $100 million and left millions of people with a new wariness about the safety of everyday [that is, corporate] foods.

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll finds that nearly half of consumers have changed their eating and buying habits [but never growing habits] in the past six months because they're afraid they could get sick by eating contaminated food.

They also overwhelmingly support setting up a better system to trace produce in an outbreak back to the source, the poll found.

The people who feel that way include the growers.

Now shut the fuck up and buy more square-shaped, cardboard-tasting tomatoes produced by a system so brutal to its workers and so uncaring for its consumers that it "produces" the following scenario, as the night the day:

... not least because salt is bad for my hypertension, but I'm going to grill some hot dogs on a nice square grill Leah sent me. (Thank God it came pre-cured!). Very Fourth-y!

And -- surprise -- organic ketchup and relish really do taste better. And, amazingly, my own giant food store, Hannaford, has a house organic line, so the prices for the better stuff are in line with the bad stuff.

As I understand it, "organic" is a process-based standard, and has, really, nothing to do with "local" as such. That is, the organic vegetables in Whole Foods -- how well I remember the free cheese samples at Whole Foods in Philly when I was unemployed and living on canned beans -- could still come from 1500 miles away, and be grown, for all you know, next to a toxic waste dump or in the airshed of a toxic industry.

Why, yes! Yes, you can!

Due to circumstances beyond our control, this series has been on hiatus for a while. The flooding in the Midwest included the river behind my house, and while fortunately, I had no major water problems in my home, my backyard was a soggy mess. Even after the water receded and a week of dry weather, the ground was still too wet to work. The maple seeds however, found the environment much to their liking.

(Click here for previous posts in this series)

This is what my garden normally looks like by this time of year.

I think I've spotted an actual desiring machine in the field! Scientific American:

Splenda is not satisfying—at least according to the brain. A new study found that even when the palate cannot distinguish between the artificial sweetener and sugar, our brain knows the difference.

At the University of California, San Diego, 12 women underwent functional MRI while sipping water sweetened with either real sugar (sucrose) or Splenda (sucralose). Sweeteners, real or artificial, bind to and stimulate receptors on the taste buds, which then signal the brain via the cranial nerve. Although both sugar and Splenda initiate the same taste and pleasure pathways in the brain—and the subjects could not tell the solutions apart—the sugar activated pleasure-related brain regions more extensively than the Splenda did. In particular, “the real thing, the sugar, elicits a much greater response in the insula,” says the study’s lead author, psych­ia­trist Guido Frank, now at the Univer­sity of Colorado at Denver. The insula, involved with taste, also plays a role in enjoyment by connecting regions in the reward system that encode the sens­a­tion of pleasantness.

“Looking at the connection between the taste areas, Splenda is stronger,” Frank says. He suggests that when we taste Splenda, the reward system becomes activated but not satiated. “Our hypoth­esis is that Splenda has less of a feedback mechanism to stop the craving, to get satisfied.”

"The reward system becomes activated but not satiated..." What could go wrong?

It’s been a cold, wet spring in Wisconsin and I’ve been busy with my land in Missouri, so my garden planting is far from finished. But that’s given the plants started indoors ample time for hardening off in preparation for setting into their final destination.

In the Spring, your skin needs time to acclimate to being exposed to bright sunlight, and your plants do too. Getting plants accustomed to outdoor conditions is called hardening off, and it’s very important to follow this step or all of your efforts getting your plants started will be for naught.

(Click here for previous posts in this series)

Took a walk in the woods after work today with the following results:

Thought that some of you who may not be familiar with morels would like to know what they look like.

Don't worry! It won't be tested! CNN:

The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority.

"They want to create false assurances," Justice Department attorney Eric Flesig-Greene told a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

See, the problem is too much information.

In a prophetic moment, Jack Webb speaks as the voice of Hillary Clinton supporters trying to explain to the rest of the Democratic Party why marijuana (Obama) is wrong for the party. Notice how he brings up Koolaid...

Now to find where he prophesies the coming of RuPaul.

As your seedlings sprout in your flats, the first greens to appear are the “seed leaves” or cotyledons. They produce food for the plant as it begins to grow true leaves and are usually distinctly different in appearance from the plant’s leaves. If you are starting your seeds in flats, once the second set of true leaves start to appear it’s time to begin potting up – transplanting your seedlings from the flats into individual containers or cells of multi-packs.