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Alice Waters: she-devil in the garden

By timmukyPosted on Posted in environment, farming, gardening, healthTagged , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments on Alice Waters: she-devil in the garden
alice and the gardeners
Save these children from this woman!

If only Alice Waters and do-gooder school administrators would stop destroying our country!

Contrary is good. I’m all about the contrary. Received wisdom is often really, really wrong. But something happened to the concept of contrary in the oughts, to the point where being contrarian became pretty much synonymous with railing against the sacred cows of liberals or, as they are known on Fox News,  the “politically correct.”

Here is a catalog of some of the hits and near-misses of contrarian (or counter-intuitive) thinking, through the past decade, as compiled by Alex Pareene, then of New York magazine:

Boys are the biggest victims of sex discrimination.
Breast-feeding is not worth the trouble.
Bush’s second term will be good for liberals.
Car seats are unsafe.
Consumption isn’t just good for the economy, it’s good for the soul.
Conventional wisdom is right.
Corporate fraud should not be punished.
The Iraq War was a success.

Gosh. Do you see a pattern here? Writes Pareene: “In the aughts, the shocking hidden side of everything became the only side of anything worthy of magazine covers and book deals. Social scientists applied their techniques to the problem of climate change; liberals who wanted to be taken seriously had to come up with arguments for conservative policies and vice versa.”

I’m not too sure about the vice versa part. Please feel free to enlighten me about conservatives coming up with arguments for liberal policies in the oughts, or aughts, or whatever that decade was called. In fact, I would argue that nearly every contrarian take in major media was a snooty, arch, convoluted defense of … exactly the way things were. The stock market’s rocking [this is pre-2008]; we, the high-end journalists, are doing awfully well; and what WERE we thinking during Vietnam? The military is so cool! NAVY SEALS! Watch, we’ll win these wars yet, and you stupid hippies will be sorry! Global warming? NOT SO FAST. There are many unanswered questions about it, you know…..

Last fall, the Economist had an article titled “Contrarianism’s end?” which featured this spot-on definition of contrarianism: “a cheap way of allowing ideological hacks to think of themselves as fearless, independent thinkers, while never challenging (in fact reinforcing) the status quo.”

So now. Contrarianism’s moment has passed, but Caitlin Flanagan didn’t get the memo. In Cultivating Failure, Flanagan (“the rich lady who’s made a career of telling you what a bad wife and mother you are for needing to work”) launches a by-the-numbers hatchet job on Alice Waters (“dowager queen of the grown-locally movement”) and her diabolical introduction of gardens into the curriculum of California schools.

Flanagan plays the concern troll to perfection. She really only has the well-being of an imaginary child of Mexican immigrants in mind, whose family has risked everything to come north for a better life. A “cruel trick has been pulled on this benighted child [!] by an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt).”

These poor Mexican children come to America with aspirations to a nice job in a cubicle somehere. But, irony of ironies, these pobrecitos, they are forced to pick lettuce in school!  Just like the parents (although just MAYBE with slightly better work conditions).

“Wresting sustenance from dirt” is so NOT the American way! And that Alice Waters! She’s “the founder of Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, an eatery where the right-on, ‘yes we can,’ ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting man or woman of the people can tuck into a nice table d’hôte menu of scallops, guinea hen, and tarte tatin for a modest 95 clams—wine, tax, and oppressively sanctimonious and relentlessly conversation-busting service not included.”

“Yes we can”-baiting? “Public-option-supporting”-baiting? ACORN-baiting? (speaking of Fox News whipping boys!) ACORN?????? In the venerable pages of the Atlantic Monthly? (Well, it need hardly be said that this is not the same institution that published Mark Twain and King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”)

Flanagan proceeds to doggedly erect and knock down a number of straw men, including the statement made by “a pro-Waters friend” (maybe, I’m just guessing, soon to be ex-friend) that “There’s only 7-Eleven in the hood.”

Au contraire.  Brave Caitlin drives to Compton to discover a Superior Super Warehouse, a shining “example of capitalism doing what it does best: locating a market need (in this case, poor people living in an American inner city who desire a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and who are willing to devote their time and money to acquiring them) and filling it.”

Also, she finds time to visit with the “founder and CEO” of charter schools in Los Angeles, who reminds her, high-mindedly, that “[t]he only question in education reform that’s worth anything is this: What are you doing to prepare these kids for college? If I can get a kid to read Shakespeare and laugh at the right places, I can get him to college. That’s all that matters to me.”

For Flanagan, school gardens represent nothing less than a potential “act of theft that will not only contribute to the creation of a permanent, uneducated underclass but will rob that group of the very force necessary to change its fate.”  Does she mention any other factors that figure in the creation of this underclass? Nope. Any delving into the upside of the school garden program, or mention of the only slightly problematic industrial food system in America? No, not really. Basically, Get back into the classroom, kids. No need to grow your own food! Let capitalism do what it does best, and by the way, maybe it’d be best to leave education to privatizing charter school CEOs.

What’s become of the Atlantic Monthly? This is just kind of sad.

Cryopreservation: Swine of the times

By timmukyPosted on Posted in environment, farming, industrial agriculture, sustainableTagged , , , , , No Comments on Cryopreservation: Swine of the times
surgery on a sheep
Sheep surgery at the SVF Foundation. photo: New York Times

Is it quibbling to question  the New York Times’ decision to run Rare Breeds, Frozen in Time in the Dining and Wine section, instead of the Science Times?

The story is about the SVF Foundation, a livestock preservation farm/lab that freezes and stores the sperm and embryos of heritage breeds. The writer, Barry Estabrook, does a good job in sketching out the potential catastrophe underlying current industrial livestock techniques, which (in)breeds so aggressively for value-adding uniform characteristics that it weakens the genetic makeup of popular lines. Holsteins, for example, “make up 93 percent of America’s dairy herd. Fewer than 20 champion bulls are responsible for half the genes,” according to the Holstein Association USA.

“Think of this as a safety valve program,” said Dr. George Saperstein, the [SVF] foundation’s chief scientific adviser, who is chairman of the Department of Environmental and Population Health at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. “If there was a disaster, if something like the potato famine of livestock ever hit, these frozen embryos [of selected heritage breeds] would be made available, and in one generation we would be back in business.”

Peter Borden, SVF’s executive director, explains the obvious advantages heritage breeds present. They “have not been continuously ‘improved’ by humans…. They have been shaped by natural survival-of-the-fittest forces and can get along without human intervention.”

What a concept. An animal unimproved by man! This is in marked contrast to the modern “standardized”  factory hog as portrayed in Nathaneal Johnson’s terrific 2006 Harper’s article Swine of the times: The making of the modern pig. (Such a good title. Couldn’t resist stealing it.)

The goal of modern factory livestock farming is the same for pork, beef, chicken, whatever. The business model, based as it is on efficiency and massive scale, finds it desirable to have “standardized” animals that grow at predictable rates and produce predictably uniform meat. The uniformity is necessary for, among other things, the slaughterhouse assembly line, one of the highest expressions of the deranged genius of industrial agriculture.  Writes Johnson, “As swine carcasses move down the conveyor belt, at Hormel’s Austin, Minnesota, packing plant, they hit a curved knife, which slices the cylindrical loin from the inside of the body cavity. If the animals aren’t just the right proportions, the knife will hit the wrong spot, wasting meat or cutting into bone.”

That dystopian assembly line was the single image that stayed with me, and creeped me out, since I first read Johnson’s article.  Of course there are no tradeoffs for this uniformity, right? Wellllllll….. Writes Johnson:

The modern pig is so susceptible to disease that producers must take extreme measures to transform their barns into pathogen-free bubbles. The pigs are vulnerable because they live in close quarters; and because they are genetically uniform, a bug that breaches the defenses of one pig’s immune system can hop to the next. A bacterium stowing away between a traveling boar’s toes could wipe out half a herd.

Johnson paints the most vivid and frightening picture of modern industrial agriculture I’ve come across. It would give PETA-sympathetic folks conniptions.

In just a little more than a decade, the modern hog industry has produced a tower of efficiency-maximizing products, one stacked atop the next, each innovation fixing the problem the last fix created. It is a monumental if somewhat haphazard structure, composed of slatted floors and aluminum crates, automatic sorting scales and mechanized wet-dry feeders. It is constructed of Genepacker sows, Tylan antibiotic feed, Agro-Clean liquid detergent, Argus salmonella vaccine, Goldenpig foam-tipped disposable AI catheters, CL Sow Re-placer milk substitute, and Matrix estrus synchronizer.

Brilliant system, right? What could go wrong?

Sorry, I digressed a bit as I revisited “Swine of the times.” (Really a must-read, and it’s not behind the famous Harper’s firewall, for all you cheapskates who don’t subscribe to the world’s best magazine). Back to the Times article. It’s well worth a look, and the companion slide show is good too.  I just found it a little odd that the emphasis at the top of the article went on about “cutting-edge restaurants”* and “the next food trend” when much bigger issues, like the precariousness of the  food supply, are really what’s at stake here.

___________

* and speaking of “cutting-edge restaurants”: when did it become conventional to prepend the chef/proprietor’s name to every mention? “David Schuttenberg’s Cabrito in the West Village, Rick Bayless’s Frontera Grill in Chicago and Tom Douglas’s Lola.” Annoying! I take off my hat to the restaurant PR flacks who made this a matter of journalistic policy at the Times.

dystopian

Detroit as the canary in the coal mine

By timmukyPosted on Posted in environment, farming, gardening, industrial agriculture, sustainableTagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments on Detroit as the canary in the coal mine
Diego Rivera mural
"deities waiting to reclaim the world"

Marcy Wheeler has an interesting post on “the increasingly urgent efforts to turn Detroit back into an agricultural bread basket.”

Apparently, companies are buying up large abandoned chunks of the Motor City with the idea of turning the lots into “a large-scale commercial farm enterprise.”  Another, better established (and just plain better)  model involves the rapidly growing network of community gardens, some of which feed students in over forty city schools.

Marcy’s conclusion echoes some of my thinking recently: that, like it or not, we might well return to being a nation of farmers. The question is what kind of farmers will we be?

Detroit has long been a symbol of America’s industrial might. And yet, quickly, it has become a symbol not only of decay, but of the earth reclaiming the land. Frankly, I’m in favor of using Detroit’s vacant space for farming (though I prefer it to be organic, small scale farming). But if Detroit is the canary in the coal mine of industrial society, we need to start preparing to return to an agricultural way of life.

For more, there’s this wonderful Harper’s essay by the great Rebecca Solnit, Detroit arcadia: Exploring the post-American landscape. “Surrounded, but inside that stockade of racial divide and urban decay are visionaries, and their visions are tender, hopeful, and green.”

Everyone talks about green cities now, but the concrete results in affluent cities mostly involve curbside composting and tacking solar panels onto rooftops while residents continue to drive, to shop, to eat organic pears flown in from Argentina, to be part of the big machine of consumption and climate change. The free-range chickens and Priuses are great, but they alone aren’t adequate tools for creating a truly different society and ecology. The future, at least the sustainable one, the one in which we will survive, isn’t going to be invented by people who are happily surrendering selective bits and pieces of environmentally unsound privilege. It’s going to be made by those who had all that taken away from them or never had it in the first place.

Solnit concludes with this bit, about an “odd masterpiece,” the massive Diego Rivera mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts (“painted by a Communist for the son of one of the richest capitalists in the world [Edsel Ford, who commissioned the piece]”):

That Rivera mural, for instance. In 1932 the soil, the country, the wilderness, and agriculture represented the past; they should have appeared, if at all, below or behind the symbols of industry and urbanism, a prehistory from which the gleaming machine future emerged. But the big panels of workers inside the gray chasms of the River Rouge plant have above them huge nude figures—black, white, red, yellow, lounging on the bare earth. Rivera meant these figures to be emblematic of the North American races and meant their fistfuls of coal, sand, iron ore, and limestone to be the raw stuff of industrialism. To my eye, though, they look like deities waiting to reclaim the world, insistent on sensual contact with the land and confident of their triumph over and after the factory that lies below them like an inferno.

New Decade: Fallin’/flyin’

By timmukyPosted on Posted in environment, farming, sustainableTagged , , , No Comments on New Decade: Fallin’/flyin’

At the dawn of the Millennium, my Monday mornings as a New York City cubicle warrior involved a leisurely routine of coffee drinking, subway riding (I went in a little late so I could have a seat), and  paper reading. Then I got to the office, and commenced to Web surfing and chatting with work buddies.  And eventually working, some days more than others. When I was sick or on vacation, I got the direct deposited check just the same. At the time, I felt underpaid, but from my perspective today, my salary in the year 2000 now seems like a fortune. It was a simple trade-off, my time and brainpower to further the goals of a major media organization whose overall effect on the world can at best be described as neutral.

I wanted something more. Emboldened by another small fortune, the meteoric appreciation in value of an old house in Brooklyn we bought at just the right time, my wife and I agreed it might be a good idea to revisit her ancestral abode and try living on a farm in central Kentucky. We had a bunch of money from the sale of the house, and the stock market would generate more than enough income to live on, even if our ventures didn’t pay the bills.

Needless to say, it didn’t work out quite that way. A decade passed, the larger world has become incredibly precarious, and I am the father of three with not a hell of a lot of earning power.

It’s still true that the rewards of this life are pretty exhilarating. Coming outside on a spring morning to see a new calf, born overnight, standing and suckling; eating meals entirely from our garden and livestock; watching a cloud of starlings at dusk a hundred yards long.

But on a morning like this a song from Crazy Heart comes at me pretty hard: Fallin’ feels like flyin’ for a while (or words to that effect).  All the intangible benefits of this life are wonderful, but what we’ve given up  in comfort and security sometimes seems like a lot. This morning, for example, waking to a house that is never warm enough in winter, in a week where the temperatures will top out in the low 20s every day, getting the kids off to school, then wriggling into my Carhartt jumpsuit, trudging outside on the crusty ground, moving a ramshackle hay ring, held together with wire, to a  new hay bale so my cattle can eat.  Today, it’s hard to see this as flyin.’

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.4343198&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

more about “Crazy Heart Movie Trailer http://movi…“, posted with vodpod

Here’s the beef

By timmukyPosted on Posted in environment, farming, industrial agriculture, sustainableTagged , , No Comments on Here’s the beef

Very proud of myself.  This Thursday marked the culmination of a two-year dream to raise and process my own beef.  Dicky, an affable, professional butcher from Moore’s Meats, made a house call to our  farm, and killed, skinned and quartered a young steer, one of the fourteen thirteen cows in the herd I’ve been raising since last spring.

Naturally, for this city boy there was a degree of emotional discomfort to see a large, complex animal felled with a shot to the head, and transformed into meat before my eyes.  We are not so sentimental that we name our cattle, but the steer in question, #18, had a personality. He was fearless and curious and docile, if that makes any sense.

But  perhaps the best thing about the emotional aspect of this affair was that my stress level on the day was higher than the steer’s ever got. His heartbeat might have quickened a fraction when he smelled the strange man walking towards him, pointing a long stick … but that was it. #18 never had to experience the disorientation and panic of being loaded, transported, crowded and harassed in his last hours.

So that was a good thing. Also, the fact that he got to this nicely rotund body condition while eating an exclusive grass/hay diet.  He wasn’t stuffed with grain, and never saw an antibiotic. He had nothing to do with the massive, and massively ugly, industrial cattle production system. Since he came to our farm at about three months of age, he never left it. He spent no time standing up to his ass in mud and shit in a feedlot. No trucks, no gasoline, no corn or beans or fertilizer or herbicide were involved in his raising (OK. Maybe minimal amounts of gasoline).

Yay, me.

I ain’t gonna lie. This wasn’t easy. There was a good deal of labor involved, nearly all of it supplied by yours truly. When the grass is growing, I moved my herd to a new paddock every day by moving electric wire with portable step-in posts. And when the grass is not growing, the procurement and placement of hay, combined with doing constant battle with Kentucky mud (mixed with cow piles), is an unrelenting (and pretty unpleasant) challenge. As is doing all of this without the purchase of tractors, trailers, handling equipment, ATVs and four-wheel-drive trucks. That’s the trade-off. More labor in exchange for keeping expenses, debt, and  inputs to an absolute minimum.

My one big insight into agricultural endeavors, especially those involving “alternative” techniques, is that it takes years to see the true benefit of your efforts. Or detrimental effects. Going by the inspiration of books by Wendell Berry, Gene Logsdon, Joel Salatin, and others, and regular reading of crackpot (in the best sense) publications like Stockman Grass Farmer and Eatwild.com, I’m trying to do my humble part in a reinvention (0r rediscovery) of American agriculture. I  like to think I’m stumbling forward. It would be nice if my farming skills were not so rudimentary, but they are, and they will have to do ….

A “mash-like product derived from scraps”

By timmukyPosted on Posted in industrial agricultureTagged , No Comments on A “mash-like product derived from scraps”

Woman paralyzed by E. coli-tainted hamburger is the headline in Boing Boing. The Times understates things a tad with: E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Beef Inspection. “Shows that the entire process is diabolically unsafe” would be more to the point.

The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.
Using a combination of sources — a practice followed by most large producers of fresh and packaged hamburger — allowed Cargill to spend about 25 percent less than it would have for cuts of whole meat.

Those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli, industry research shows. Yet Cargill, like most meat companies, relies on its suppliers to check for the bacteria and does its own testing only after the ingredients are ground together.

This looking the other way when it comes to Cargill and the other big boys is especially amusing, in a disgusting way, in light of the fact that the USDA is trying to ram a mandatory national animal identification system down the throats of all American livestock farmers, large and small. What is the point of tracking every move of a live cow when you allow the Cargills of the world to make hamburger out of a foul casserole of meat, sundry parts, and crap (in the loose sense, as well as the specific) from Texas, South Dakota, and Uruguay!???

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