The Politics of Food; Pass The Artillery

[Posted by Nance in full expectation of a classic Swash Zone food fight]

Last night's supper with grilled asparagus, whole wheat garlic
bread, and ripe peaches with grapes

I haven't written about veganism lately, but a couple of negative incidents this past week have brought my food philosophy back to the front burner. I am one of Michael Pollan's converts, still voting with my fork, to the occasional aggravation of friends and family. The politics of food is heating up, so please indulge me as I revisit my choice. Will I prosyletize? Not deliberately. And the title refers to my clever grandfather's term for silverware.

I came across an ultra-progressive blogger's piece making fun of the lame-o, piss-into-the-tide vegans who actually think what they put on their plate is going to make a difference when we can't even get a climate and energy bill before Congress. I wish I could find the article, but I haven't been able to find my butt with both hands since we got back to the East Coast. You'll have to take the word of this lame-o vegan: coming unexpectedly from what I had thought was a liberal source, it was raw enough to sting slightly and there are a lot more articles like it out there--more typically in the form of carnivore propaganda from Big Agra's brood and the Libertarians. Watch for it. (Oh, brother. Something else to get paranoid about, right?)

Not sure if it's true, but it sure
sounds impressive.

Second negative event happened while I was exercising. A woman about my age, whose politics is no secret, was talking about her grown sons coming home for a week with their families. One of the sons was headed for Afghanistan next month, and it was in sympathy for his mother that I extended an ear to her at all. She was planning menus of "real food" and proudly proclaiming that her kids "actually know what food is FOR!" She went on to declare that her boys don't diet or mince nutrients or worry their appetites with facts; there's steak and apple pie on their menu this week because, "in America, we have a RIGHT to eat that way. And why is Michelle Obama sticking her nose into the way REAL Americans eat?" I pulled my ear back in at that point. It wasn't a conversation worth having.

But it got me thinking. Why, at this age when most of my peers are declaring that their habits have been made sacrosanct by longevity regardless of their political leanings, have I gone to the trouble to make a real change at my house for the past year, one that runs against the tide of all the food mores I grew up with?

click to enlarge

I'll discipline myself to a bullet list, but I want to say first that it's not about being an animal lover. I don't volunteer for the Humane Society or make contributions to PETA or Save R Cats, although I'm not displeased that others make these issues central. And I do like this poster. I can find pets endearing and I would selfishly prefer that the species extant on the planet when I showed up here still be here when I'm gone, but that's about it. And that distanced relationship from animal protein food sources is enabled by the fact that it's hard to think of the sanitized and trimmed chunk of sirloin on the pink plastic tray, under the clear plastic wrap with the USDA stamp and bar code as Cow. My consciousness has been raised enough that I'm ashamed of that distance; for me, buying the chunk of sirloin is a vote for the whole CAFO/BigAgra/BigFuel business system. I just can't do that anymore. (Dear Friends and Family in the food business, I love you and this is entirely not personal. I admire your work.) So...

1. Climate. I believe BigAgra, which includes the livestock industry, has to change. I can actually put my mouth where my mind is on this one, so I do.  Read Michael Pollan on this.

2. Food is becoming a hot battleground for political debate. In the interest of exercising neurons by exploring opposing viewpoints, check out The Center For Consumer Freedom and the drumstick they're beating. Cruise through their links to The Epidemic of Obesity Myths (they can't have been watching the People of Walmart updates). Their animalscam.com states, "Led by PETA, the Humane Society of the United States, and other activist groups, the animal liberation movement does not seek to improve animals' lives. Its goal is to place unnecessary restrictions on ordinary people like you." I don't know anyone on the Left who sits around musing, "What new and unnecessary restrictions can I place on the ordinary people of America today?" I'm ordinary people and I vote with my fork, too.



3. Cost savings. Even with purchases from the Organic department and what Bubba Lion considers Specialty items like tofu and quinoa, our bills run about a third less than they did when meat and dairy were on the menu. In this economy, it's one way I can feel good about spending less. We look forward to growing more of our own food, although our space is limited.

4. Interesting food. I've been cooking for others regularly for forty-two years. A new way to cook chicken?...not fascinated. But I've discovered a whole world of food via veganism and I'm only beginning. Cooking this way requires thoughtful attention to plant protein, so there's nothing boring happening in meal planning. I have some cool new cookbooks that don't have ribs on the cover. They don't feature bacon desserts either.

5. Health. My husband is managing his cholesterol without medication now. It's not as low as he'd like yet, but he says he doesn't miss the meat. He still eats lowfat yogurt and cottage cheese because he loves them, and he usually treats himself to salmon when we go out, but we do that rarely now due to the expense. I don't consume dairy or fish anymore, but I don't object to people who do. Each vote is personal. We eat only whole grains, avoiding products with more than a few ingredients. We avoid sugar and all but the healthiest fats. Our meals are colorful, beautiful, delicious, and satisfying.

6. While I've put on a few pounds since retirement (this laptop now permanently attached to my lap accounts for most of it), I don't intend to wind up looking like this if I can possibly help it.

Kill the cuts

There seems to be a difference between the ultra right as represented by Ayn Rand disciple and 'free markets cure all ills' cult leader Alan Greenspan, and the ultra right as personified by the rabble rousing opportunists who feed the vernacular conservatives of America. Dilatory though he may be in admitting that free markets are no more free or self steering than a car without a driver, he's none the less not as retarded as people who claim to see Russia over the horizon, staple tea bags to their hats and shriek about tax increases they didn't get. He does, albeit slowly, question the ad hoc axioms upon which he bases his theories and thus, through doubt, he thinks, he learns, he changes.

Amidst the tumult of irate e-mails calling President Obama a liar for personally having raised the cigarette tax ( a tax is a tax, after all ) and a communist for unleashing THE BIGGEST TAX INCREASE OF ALL TIME, which actually is nothing of the sort, it's refreshing to hear Greenspan utter:

"I am very much in favor of tax cuts but not with borrowed money."

What he's dismissing is the lifeblood of Republican economic policy and has been at least since the Reagan administration: tax cuts pay for themselves. It's policy that along with a huge increase in government agencies, military spending and a war now having cost more that World War 2 was supposed to be paid for by tax cuts, but failed. It was paid for by borrowing from foreign sources with our independence as collateral.

A rational person must have noticed by now that it doesn't work and never has worked and virtually always precipitates a recession. An irrational man, a Fox man, a Conservative man, even a Libertarian man, chants liberaliberaliberal, constructs straw stuffed scapegoats and tries to distract us with fairy tales about the President's religion and parentage.

"The problem that we've gotten into in recent years is that spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous."

said the Former Federal Reserve Chairman on NBC yesterday. It's axiomatic in our new propaganda soaked world that fixing a problem is far less effective and more expensive than hiding it under foamy lipped hysteria, and so the tax cuts that were designed to expire this year by the Republicans who wrote them into law, become a surprise betrayal by Obama. Those liberals are betraying us by following the law we wrote!

The tax cuts, that if renewed will cost us $2.2 trillion to $3.8 trillion over the next decade and put us that much further in debt, since no, they will not pay for themselves as has been demonstrated but will further impoverish the nation but to the benefit of a handful of people and corporations. But that debt must be thought of differently than any debt incurred in extending unemployment benefits and the glaring hypocrisy must never be acknowledged. For are we not conservative?

"You don't agree with Republican leaders who say tax cuts pay for themselves?"

asked David Gregory on Meet the Press.

"They do not."

was the emphatic reply.

No Muslims here!

I have to be thankful to the Anti-Defamation League, for without them, I might not be living here and they've done much to silence the skinheads and neo-Nazis and Jew haters that would still kill us all if they could. They've done much to get Church printing presses to stop printing the infamous "protocols" fraud and making them stop teaching that kill Christian babies for their blood. But as I've said countless times, being persecuted doesn't make one virtuous.

The ADL has jumped on the out of control bandwagon, protesting the building of the "Ground Zero Mosque" which isn't a mosque and isn't at Ground Zero. I don't know how to describe that without displaying it as offensive to the freedom of religion which is one of the few things an American can point to as being fundamentally American in origin, albeit no longer unique.

To what do we owe the self-righteous attitude behind it? We're furious at a group of terrorists almost small enough to fill a school bus and most of whom are dead: so furious that we don't want anyone to worship the God of Abraham in a different way within our sight. So furious that we will ignore the prohibition against establishing a religion as permissible or not permissible or restricting the rights of one as opposed to another. If Muslims have no right to a community center in New York, they have no right to a community and if they have not that, we have not reason to see this as a country worth supporting

CROUCHING TOWARDS EXTINCTION

Virtually all species of marine turtles in the world are classified as highly endangered, and some are on the verge of extinction. In all instances, human interference in their life cycle is to blame, such as beach front development, light pollution on their nesting sites, injuries from boat strikes, drownings in nets (also known as 'by catch'), and unsustainable over harvesting of their eggs. It is estimated that only one in every ten thousand turtle hatchlings will make it to adulthood. The following photo essay tells the story:

On this beach in Costa Rica, over harvesting means there will be no hatchlings this season to replenish the species. A species that has survived 200 million years will vanish. Thanks to my friend Jim L. for supplying the photos.

Banking On The Widow's Mite

Get ready to chew gravel in the parking lot in sheer fury: an investigation of several large national insurance corporations has been launched by NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for what, in my opinion, amounts to the most cynical sort of war profiteering I can imagine. Eight insurers are suspected of managing the insurance payouts to military widows in such a way that the insurers continue to make a profit on benefits that belong to the deceased serviceman's family.


According to CNN,

The attorney general's office said it appears some insurers tell families of fallen military personnel that policy payouts will be placed in an interest-bearing account. But the bulk of the interest benefits the insurers, and the cash is not placed in banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Cuomo's office said.

His office said insurers place cash in their corporate accounts, reportedly earning up to 4.8 percent interest while paying families as little as 0.5 percent interest.

 Eight insurance companies have been subpoenaed, including Prudential and MetLife. Prudential's practices are offered as an example of the way this scam feature works: the beneficiary receives what appears to be a checkbook from JP Morgan Chase to access their benefits; however, according to Cuomo's office,

"Instead, Prudential must send money to JPMorgan Chase before the checks can clear," the attorney general's office said. "Prudential beneficiaries are also not informed that, under a 2008 law, they have one year to place the death benefits in a Roth IRA and earn tax-free investment gains for the rest of their lives. Thus, real financial harm is suffered by Prudential's lack of disclosure."

 So, to break it down, they keep the death benefit and earn corporate interest on it, pay a lower interest rate to the beneficiary (who believes the money is earning a "competitive interest rate"), pocket the difference, and control the gate through which the money flows (possibly slowing that flow if it benefits the corporation?). Scummy. Slime. Bags.


Both the Veteran's Administration and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' office are looking into the investigation. And, of course, we're taking all this with a grain of gravel, since Cuomo is running for the governor's office in New York.

Add-On:

Muslims hate dogs

Shortly before I left the Midwest for Florida, a local Methodist Church with a largely Korean congregation was spray painted with the message: "Chines go home." Swastikas were spray painted on sidewalks and a leader of a self-styled Evangelist Church murdered a black Football coach and shot up a car containing two local Korean-Americans in protest of the growing ethnic diversity of America. Yes, it was an upscale suburb of Chicago and yes, most people were appalled. Since then, we've become more inured to such things, and since then, major political groups have become indistinguishable from what was a demented, lunatic fringe. The largest news disseminator in the country has become a preacher of the same kind of rage -- and we listen as disciples at the feet of wisdom.

I can't act surprised to see a similar fear and loathing phenomenon pervading my Florida neighborhood. No shots are being fired, but it's hard to come away from any social gathering without that sick, sinking feeling in my stomach resulting from some offhand remark about Mexicans. What must they be thinking of me? Is anyone really a bigot as concerns only one group? I think not. Is such bigotry confined to the uneducated? Hardly: the Beck Brigade contains the majority of millionaires I know and none who have anything to worry about from some undocumented day-laborer hanging around the Home Depot parking lot. Yet they do. They worry themselves sick that our government is being taken over by Black people who will make sure that no other black people will have to work for a living any more. They worry themselves sick that American Muslims will somehow institute Sharia and set aside the constitution, while they themselves see that tattered document as an impediment to Christian sovereignty.

"Islam is not a religion. It is a worldwide political movement meant [sic] on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law...."

reads an anonymous e-mail tied to a California Tea Party group. Where I live, such a thing is likely to be as sermon to the converted. It's a tenet as firmly adhered to as that "Obamacare" depends on "death panels" to keep costs down and that the US constitution is meant to subjugate all people under Christian law. But there are no Mosques here, not Islamic community centers as there are in other parts of the country. In California, in Tennessee, in New York and elsewhere, the bigoted scum that is America is being called upon to disrupt prayer with loud protest and being encouraged to bring dogs: because Muslims "hate dogs."

When I was a young man, traveling and studying in Europe, I heatedly defended my country against pervasive charges of racism and bigotry and imperialism, pointing to the strides being made in the 1960's. I was wrong, I was a fool and I wish I had not been. We have been jailing people for their political thoughts since the beginning, we replaced slavery with repression and subjugation, we've had laws reducing the rights of one ethnic group after another. We've denied entry and we have expelled citizens for their racial origins. We whine about invasive government while we use it to invade the lives of millions. We've made a straw devil out of those who have worked to undo the intrinsic hatred that is American culture. We have, save for a few glorious moments, been cowards, bullies and barbarians as likely to tear our own countrymen apart as the enemies, real and imagined, from without. There is no patriotism, no sense of a common goal, only flag waving and warriors at war -- and fear, always the fear.

Have we forsaken our ideals or did we ever really have any beyond "every man for himself" and "fuck you?"

THE BOOK OF JOBS – Revised Global Edition

Earlier this week, Robert Reich posted this article, The Great Decoupling of Corporate Profits from Jobs. His observations and conclusions: Corporate profits are up; the largest 500 companies have stashed away an estimated $1 trillion in cash; but the winnings are not translating into jobs at home. Why?

American corporations are investing in regions where the profits are coming from: Overseas. They are investing in low-wage markets, investing in laborsaving technologies, paying dividends to shareholders or buying back equity, and rewarding themselves with fat bonuses.  Forget trickle-down economics, Reich says:  No amount of profits or tax cuts will create more jobs.

Reich offers a grim but accurate assessment of the current situation, but he hardly scratches the surface.

"Start-Ups, Not Bailouts,” says the eminently more-opinionated-than-informed columnist for the New York Times, Thomas Friedman, who is still stuck in the skunkwork days of garage start-ups that turned Apple Computer into a household name. What Friedman and others do not grasp is that the bristling days of Silicon Valley are forever gone.

In this BusinessWeek article How America Can Create Jobs, Andrew Groves, who served as Intel’s CEO from 1987 to 2005, knows what blunderbuss pundits do not; he knows his business:

American companies discovered that they could have their manufacturing and even their engineering done more cheaply overseas (…) The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn (…) Some 250,000 Foxconn employees in Southern China produce Apple’s products. Apple, meanwhile, has about 25,000 employees in the U.S. That means for every Apple worker in the U.S., there are 10 people in China working on iMacs, iPods, and iPhones. The same roughly 10-to-1 relationship holds for Dell, disk-drive maker Seagate Technology, and other U.S. companies [such as Dell, Microsoft, HP, and Intel as examples].

When Apple sells an iPhone, is it considered an American product or an import? How much of our so-called Gross Domestic Product is actually domestic?

Here’s an inconvenient truth. The next generation of whiz-bang products will also be made in Asia, and the high-tech sector that drove the American economy in the 1980s and 90s will no longer generate jobs at home. With 90% of the work force located overseas, a rose may still be a rose, but American products are no longer American products. For every consumer dollar spent, most of the revenue stream will support overseas economies and an overseas workforce.

Want more bad news? Alternative energy technologies – the so-called job-driving engines of the future (which include advanced batteries, photovoltaics, and wind power) – will most likely be outsourced too. For instance, all commercially produced photovoltaic panels, originally invented in America, come from China.  Lithium-ion batteries, the all-important component of the electric cars of the future, will most likely come from Asia:

(Click on graph to enlarge)

Yes, everyone knows Asian labor is cheap.  How cheap, you ask?  If it takes 10 overseas jobs for every domestic one to bring an American product to market, there is an inverse relationship in worker compensation.  For every dollar spent in America, you can always find someone somewhere who can do the same job for ten cents or less. An M.D. in Mumbai, for example, can read your MRI scan for one-tenth the cost of an American expert.  Yes, this is no exaggeration.  Every American job that can be exported WILL be exported … even M.D. and Ph.D. level jobs in the medical and pharmaceutical industries (which also means your highly sensitive financial and medical records, including your social security number and other personal data, are also going abroad). Why bother studying for an advanced degree when the only jobs left will be those that cannot be exported … flipping hamburgers or waiting on tables.

Why should American corporations give a damn about American workers when their customers are no longer on Main Street but worldwide.  Globalization has freed them from the encumbrances of citizenship.

Arizona burning

"The law was made for man, not man for the law"

-Jesus of Nazareth-

He's "not going to put up with any civil disobedience" said the notorious Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff on Good Morning America. No doubt he expects to see some, as the infamous Arizona "show me your papers" law goes into effect tomorrow. Protest is all "hype" anyway and it's "a crime to be here illegally and everyone should enforce" it. Everyone?

It sounds like fun and I can't wait to start enforcing the law myself -- I mean all the laws, of course and since I have the firepower, why not stop every blond person I see and make him prove he's not Canadian? It's all a cowboy movie to sheriff Joe Arpaio, so why shouldn't I play along? But, of course, it's not the law in general that we should all enforce, it's the infamous Arizona law reducing the rights of anyone looking to any Arizona Cop like he has Native American ancestry.

But why pick on this comic book villain? The idea is widely popular, particularly in the old Confederate states, where good manners, big hearts and small minds go hand in hand. Civil disobedience is, in fact, just what we need to clog up the courts and disable and embarrass the damned fools who pretend it's all about the law and not a distraction to hide another expansion of police power. We need just what was so effective in the 1960's; thousands and thousands of people to flood the streets of Arizona looking illegal. We need a spectacle: sit-ins, marches, civil disobedience, dogs, water cannons and an impotent, sputtering, apoplectic, beer-belly Joe looking like the Dukes of Hazzard relic he is.

Now, before you reach for some more canned rage: no, I'm not in favor of allowing undocumented workers to remain, or letting people overstay their visas, just don't tell me we have to become a brutal, inhumane police state to correct the problem and if it isn't all based on racial purity, tell me why we don't know or care how many Canadians or Englishmen are working here and living here without benefit of citizenship.

Of Childhood Innocence and Rice Fields

I think that intensity is both my gift and my flaw. I am passionate about those things in which I believe but sometimes the passion is so intense that I forget to breathe. I think that I'm perhaps too hard on my fellow humans. I get frustrated with our disdain for the pursuit of the intellectual and angered by our obsessive selfishness. Every now and then I realize that it's time for me to stop and smell the roses, to embrace the moments of joy, to be awed by our creativity instead of appalled by our destructive impulses.

My nearly 19 month old great nephew is the joy of my life. I entertain him by blowing bubbles; he lets me know when he wants more bubble blowing by walking over, placing a small hand on each of my knees and announcing, "Bub." He never tires of trying to capture those spheres of soap and water, and I never tire of blowing them.


When he's at my house, he likes to follow me around whenever I leave the room. Generally the trip is to the kitchen in response to his announcement, "Eat, eat," his shorthand for, "I'm hungry." He makes me laugh at the way he walks close to the open refrigerator and peers inside as if seeking hidden treasure. His new favorite thing is to drink out of my cup, a blue and white 28 oz monster cup. My job is to hold the cup as he sips out of my straw. Most of the time, it contains water, but once it was a bit of mango juice. His face lit up and he did a little jig as he tasted it.


I hope that he will be creative. His grandfather Bob, my sister's husband, is a talented musician, so he's got creative genes.


The creative impulse may be humankind's saving grace. We make grand wars but we also make grand music and art. We paint masterpieces on ceilings and walls. We write operas with music so sweetly beautiful that it makes us weep with joy.

I saw an interesting story on the CBS evening news about rice art in Japan. Artists create images that are transferred onto computer generated grids and enlarged on a massive scale. Then the entire town comes together to plant the images in rice. How wonderfully awesome that hundreds of people work to create these transistory works of art. The rice is eventually harvested, but before the harvest tens of thousands of visitors come to town, boosting the local economy, as they view the rice fields in all their glory.

Inakadate Village, where this creative endeavor began has a population of 8,400. Last year there were 170,000 visitors to the village's rice field. Other rural areas of Japan have also created their own rice art.


I felt uplifted by this story. It seems that I may be wrong about humankind. Perhaps there is hope for a better us, a hope born out of the innocence of childhood and rice fields.

Happy now?

Is the Gulf of Mexico becoming the cesspool of the Oil business; the repository of all the spills resulting from accidents, neglect, irresponsible drilling and all the other inevitable situations we refuse to listen to while sneering at "enviros" and calling for more oil whatever the cost?

Sure it is, but we may just be beginning to give a damn, now that it's appearing that many of us won't live to see that section of the great mother of life, the World Ocean, and it's shorelines restored to any kind of health.

We have another gusher, apparently. Just off the coast near New Orleans where a barge has reportedly crashed into a well spilling more oil just where we need it least and just where we have our equipment otherwise occupied. It hasn't been the first time, and it won't be the last, but maybe now we're starting to realize that you can't get all the world's oil out of the ground without the nasty consequences we've been ignoring. You can't transport it by ship or by pipeline and you can't pump it without leaks and spills and fires and of course, loss of life.

Yes, that's right, you're paying three bucks a gallon -- much, much less than other countries do and all our efforts to ruin what's left of what's worth keeping in our country aren't going to reduce that price. It's all going to get worse until you start listening to those hippie, treehugging, sandal wearing weirdos and stop listening to the bought and paid for politicians who refuse to do a damned thing that might stop the campaign contributions and free propaganda that keep them in office. The rich TV blowhards, your friends, your neighbors and all their stupid stories about vast reserves of oil ready to pour into your tanks if only the government and those environmental freaks would let our friends at Exxon sell it to China and Japan at a higher price than we want to pay.

I'd like to blame it all on Republicans, like the ones in Florida who refuse to take any steps whatever to keep the oil off our shores ( or the industrial and agricultural waste that poison our inland waters) but even the President we elected in our naivete, thinking that he could be immune, has been tainted.

Oil corrupts. Big oil corrupts big time, whether it's in Nigeria, Venezuela or Iraq. It's corrupted us and has corrupted presidents since the Harding administration. But before you think I'm going into another partisan rant, think again. It's us - it's you who elect these people. It's the American people, the snickering snarky states of America looking for scapegoats while we support the Palins and the McCains and the Cheneys and the Bush's who tell us we need more oil and that we need only to disregard all prudence to get and use more of it and faster. Yes, they either bought or bamboozled Obama into thinking it was all so safe despite the shaky safety record and now they want you to forget that we all cooperated in eliminating all traces of safety standards -- you know, the things we've been dumb enough to see as "Communism." It's us, the soccer moms, the commuters, the SUV fashionistas who don't think past our daily concerns and laugh at the concept of giving a damn about the future. You wanted oil and you've got oil. Are you happy now?