Down · the · Path · of · Life

I'm not really sure how much people know about their food. I'm pretty sure that most people don't even know someone that is a farmer, unless it is from a farmer's market or something similar. As far as I can tell people don't know squat about our food system and not just the normal things like most of the corn and soy that goes into foods any more is genetically modified. I know that isn't really normal, but I think of it as a normal thing to know.

What I find most disturbing is how oblivious everyone is content to be about their food, not know where it comes from and not knowing how to grow any. I'm sure I'm a little closer to the issue than most people just for the fact that my parents have always had a farm and I grew up there. I probably keep my eyes peeled a little differently than most people. But something really disturbing came up when I was talking to them today.

When we first moved to Missouri my parents got a couple of pigs, to raise and butcher, from a neighbor down the road that raised them. After a few years he sold out and we got a few pigs from another neighbor a little further away. This summer my parents decided again to get a few pigs. There were no local farmers that they could get any from so they called a sale barn about 30 miles away that was going to have a feeder pig sale. The sale barn wasn't sure if they were going to have any pigs show up for the auction, but promised that if they did they would buy them for us. Later my parents got a call that there had been four pigs brought in and bought for them.

Now the thing that I find scary is that only 4 pigs were going through the salebarn that day. The county used to have all sorts of pig farms and now only they are left with 4 pigs to be sold for the week. If you don't know all that much about farming you might think that this isn't really all that telling, but here is what I know that means we should be worried about our food supply. The reason that there weren't any pigs to go through the sale barn is because 99% of the pigs left in the county that aren't 4-H projects are owned by PSF. The would be better known as Premium Standard Farms. They contract farmers out to "grow" these pigs for them, but they always own them, unless of course they die and then that's the farmers problem.

My concern isn't that some pathogen will get into these hog houses and kill them all or have them pass something on to us, even though that is fairly likely. It is that even if you want to raise your own animals you won't be able to find any to raise. You would have to keep all of your own breeding stock and populations, but if you needed to start from scratch it would be exceptionally difficult. I'm sure that I'm being even more paranoid that usual, but I think this is something that the public should be aware of. It is something so basic to our food supply lines in this nation. I just re-iterates my belief that people need to know where there food is coming from.

Current Mood:

worried

Ok, so anyone who ever reads this knows that I may be a tad out-spoken about things. All this crap about recession, is something, I find, rather annoying. People are whining that their food costs are rising. Well I've got news for you people, food has been completely under and de-valued in america forever. I'm sorry that you can't have tomatoes completely out of season from thousands of miles away for practically nothing, get over it. If your eggs and bread have gone up .15 and you can't afford that, you've got bigger problems.

The truth, that most people don't admit, even to themselves is that they aren't mad that they have to pay a couple extra dollars every week or two on groceries. They are upset because between gas, which is costing a fortune and food which has gone up very little, they can't afford to buy that extra cheap piece of crap at Walmart. Some stupid little nothing that will make their meaningless existence a little more cluttered and meaningful, at least until they see something shiny on the side of the road.

If people were really concerned with how much food cost they would be discussing things they could do about it. I don't mean shopping at sam's and costco. I mean, maybe, planting a few seeds to get food from your own land or container. Or, god forbid, you go to a farmers market or get in touch with local producers and get food items directly from them. I mean, I guess, these people would only sell whole foods, so you know, the soda and potato chips still cost a lot at the store. It is heartbreaking to think about people having to go without their soda.

This could actually be the best thing to happen to america. If people were forced to buy locally and from farmers only whole foods, it might be the best diet program ever. Farmers would benefit from it as well and we could re-build the economy from the ground up. Well, I've about reached the end of my rant, but I have one more little thing to air out.

Big oil. I just love the little ads that have just been aired that tell you what fantastic people the oil companies are. They have just spent sooo much money on alternative fuels and energy technology while simultaneously supplying us with the petroleum products that this company is so addicted to. What saints, how did we not know this about them before? I would have gladly paid that extra at the pump if I had just realized all of this earlier. But wait, why are the oil companies advertising their greatness all of a sudden. Could it be that they want to waylay our upsettedness (I know that isn't a real word) at the pump by telling us what a big favor they are really doing us. Oh and if you're dumb enough to believe what the ads are telling you, then you probably won't stop and think about where the money to pay for all of those commercials is coming from. (psssstttt, I think that they are using all the excessive money from the gas, fyi.)

Too bad I didn't have much to say on these subjects, oh well, maybe next time

Current Mood:

annoyed

Today I started some peas and fava beans in containers with a trellis and did a second planting of lettuces and radishes. We ate our first salad of pea sprouts, baby lettuces, and chickweed today. It was good, but it was hard to cut enough lettuce to amount to anything without feeling like I was cutting all of it. I started seeds in paper towels a few nights ago. I used paper towels that had gotten wet when the basement leaked from all of the rain. I had to re-start the seeds b/c a few days earlier the flats that I had originally planted flipped in a high wind day. I felt quite proud of myself for taking two bad situations and turning them to my advantage. I think the paper towel method will be something I use from now on for starting seeds. They start faster and you can see exactly how far along each type is. You can see if a particular seed that you weren't sure about actually sprouted or if it really was a dud. I'm very pleased with myself for being so clever.

I feel like I'm finally starting to be able to put my diverse interests to rest with each other. It seemed like so long that I felt guilty for playing WoW and that I wasn't out gardening or cleaning. Today I got up, played on the internet for awhile, did my work for the day, did some laundry, did gardening, read a magazine and cooked dinner. While I was gardening I was thinking how it would be nice later on to play WoW. I'm letting everything be what it is, don't worry that it isn't the right thing to do. I enjoy doing all of these things and that is all that matters. I can finally feel at rest with that. It's a nice feeling to have!

So in the interest of being more environmentally friendly, as always, we got a re-usable lint roller. This is what it looks like. It has opposite sides with bristles facing one direction so that you pick up the lint/hair. It works super fantastic on our amazing shedding white cat's hair. I use it almost everyday on a lazy-boy recliner he likes to sit in. I tried vacuuming, but it didn't work as well or as fast as this thing does. I use it occasionally on close and it works reasonably well, but not super fantastic. But the sticky paper lint rollers only work for about 3 passes anyway.

So, I think that it has been about several millenia since I posted last and I am going to rectify that right now. Whilst the cat tries to get me to pet him and type. There was actually, what I considered, a useful piece of advice in the Mother Earth newsletter that I have an e-subscription to. They suggested taking bubble wrap spraying it with water and putting on your windows in the winter for insulation. Apparently it cuts heat transfer by 45%, which I think is fairly considerable. I have never heard of this before and it seems like a really easy, cheap, effective way to add insulation. Especially since tons of bubblewrap gets thrown away this seems to be an great solution, a real win-win. Here is the link to the article if you want a few photos of this idea in action or just the formulas they used to figured the heat loss, cost ratio etc.

I keep wanting to post, but never get my lazy butt to that point. Last night we had dinner with my boyfriends parents. It was really the first time in about 4 years that we had a decent conversation without too many lulls. Of course this comes with a few addendums. We only spent two hours with them the entire night and I was pretty much drunk when they arrived so I sobered up as the evening progressed, but wasn't completely sober until they left. I guess I've figured out how to have a decent time with them, but it is kind of pathetic. Oh well, need to survive however we can.

Well, things have been busy here. Work has been annoying so I don't get much time to do my gardening, but here are some pictures of what is growing so far. Hopefully today I will get to put in another bed and put corn, melons and beans in it!

Here is my spring garden.

Here are some tomatoes that I started myself. They are starting to grow very well in the Earth box.

These are some pretty purple flowers that the person who lived in our house before us planted.

I don't actually know what they are, but I like them.

This is a little squirrel that came to eat on our porch. The cat was very intrigued by the whole situation. I kind of looks like he's watching tv. The squirrel was not impressed.

So, a couple of weekends ago I spent my last weekend of freedom before I started working again and a second round Green Corps interview weekend. I don't have much more to say about the situation. If you have read not for profit watch they pretty much summed everything up. I actually felt bizarre afterwards it was like the words on the website had been lying flat and then they felt like they had just raised up 3-D like with no more meaning that before.

As an organization as a whole I'm not sure they are all that worth-while. At the dinner table there was a debate about whether or not a new building of theirs should be built green or as cheaply as possible to put more money into training more "leaders." If they really wanted to they could train 3-11 more classes a year and really get leaders out there instead of forcing people to pay their way to the interviews and then only choosing 1% of them.

I'm glad that I went so that I wouldn't always wonder what I'm missing because I know now that it is precisely nothing. So that is my rant on Green Corps, it is very possible that you have never heard of them and don't care, but I wanted to write it out so if anyone else was wondering about them they would know.

So it seems that this blog might get a tad political from here on out. Since I don't have a digital camera any more to take happy pictures with this is all that you are going to get. Here is my friend Carly , dressed as a cow, she doesn't look like this normally. She is doing an internship the Center for Food Safety in D.C.

I subscribe online to a newsletter sent out by the Organic Consumers Association. They don't send it out very frequently, maybe once a month, but I usually won't read it right away. Why you might ask? Well, they usually are full of super depressing issues and exploitation by the government and corporations. Here are a few that bothered me the most this time around.

One thing that I think that every consumer should now be aware about is posted as a video on a webpage by Jim Hightower. "Meat Video." Basically they are gassing meat to make it look fresh even though it may be going bad or already bad.

The next topic is disturbing and right in line with our upcoming love holiday. It involves major chocolate manufacturers in the US. FACT: One-third of Nestle's chocolate is from West Africa, where over 286,000 children are working in slave-like conditions on cocoa (chocolate) farms.

FACT: Dole is the largest distributor of cut-flowers in the world, the majority of which are imported from Columbia and Ecuador, where farmers and flower workers (often adolescent girls) are exposed to 127 different chemicals, including neurotoxins and carcinogens.

FACT: The three private owners of M&M/Mars Inc. are each "worth" $10.4 billion, while the West African farmers growing the cocoa for M&Ms chocolate are paid an average of $108 annually.

FACT: Despite record profits in 2006, Hershey's has been accused of buying from contractors who utilize child labor and child slavery on cocoa farms on the Ivory Coast.

TAKE ACTION: Send a message to the chocolate and flower giants to stop child labor, illegal toxic chemical use, union busting, and to pay their farmers a living wage.

Those were the two most upsetting articles in the bunch. They actually did have some good news about genetically modified grass testing being halted. They usually only have bad news.

I just noticed that I'm getting stressed out about not emailing someone back that sent me a message 1/2 an hour ago. It used to take a letter a month to get somewhere. I still takes one almost a week sometimes. Where did we reach the point that the possibility of leaving someone hanging for an evening or a day makes our blood pressure rise? I feel stressed out enough about things that are stressful and important I definitely don't need to feel pressured about something this trivial. Technology, blech. Society. Stress. I think I'll go be a hermit.

You know the really sad thing is that I don't feel too terribly awful to leave a good friend's email hanging for a few weeks or months, but a perfect stranger emailing out of the blue for a valid reason and not emailing them back right after reading the message gives me a complex. Blech I say, BLECH! DAMN YOU EMAIL!

So, haven't posted since I told everyone that I had lost my digital camera. We have been super busy however. Clenton finally got a job. He will be working as a programmer for Edward Jones. But it also means that we will be moving to St Louis, which I was hoping to avoid as it was just named the most dangerous city in America. But that is mostly down town, so I'm not too worried about it. Most of St Louis is a suburb.

He starts on the 18th and we have already found a house to live in, didn't think we would be able to stand an apartment or duplex or condo. Pretty much all of our stuff is already moved in and we're trying to get out of our lease here. They have to find renters before they will release us, but they didn't mind taking our money up-front.

I'll be done with my job on the 27th of December and will look for something new in St Louis probably the beginning of February, I don't ever really get any time off since I have been leaving jobs before I qualify for vacation. One thing I'm excited about it that we live 2 miles from Whole Foods and Trader Joes and 10 minutes from Wild Oats. And they have Thai and Indian and Japanese and Taiwanese restaurants that aren't too far away from us! As you can tell, my life seems to revolve around food. It seems like an odd fixation for me to have.

So, haven't posted since I told everyone that I had lost my digital camera. We have been super busy however. Clenton finally got a job. He will be working as a programmer for Edward Jones. But it also means that we will be moving to St Louis, which I was hoping to avoid as it was just named the most dangerous city in America. But that is mostly down town, so I'm not too worried about it. Most of St Louis is a suburb.

He starts on the 18th and we have already found a house to live in, didn't think we would be able to stand an apartment or duplex or condo. Pretty much all of our stuff is already moved in and we're trying to get out of our lease here. They have to find renters before they will release us, but they didn't mind taking our money up-front.

I'll be done with my job on the 27th of December and will look for something new in St Louis probably the beginning of February, I don't ever really get any time off since I have been leaving jobs before I qualify for vacation. One thing I'm excited about it that we live 2 miles from Whole Foods and Trader Joes and 10 minutes from Wild Oats. And they have Thai and Indian and Japanese and Taiwanese restaurants that aren't too far away from us! As you can tell, my life seems to revolve around food. It seems like an odd fixation for me to have.

So, I lost my damn digital camera. Yeah, I didn't even have it a year. It is pathetic. Well, I assume that I lost it, unless someone stole it, which I guess is a possibility, but a small one. So now I don't ever have new pictures to post. I'm looking into getting a new one, but they are expensive and I don't got no monies. So until I do get a new one I probably won't post very much, not that I have been recently, but probably only very rarely if anything super exciting happens.

I just got back from the weekend performance of Wicked! in Chicago. I thought that all in all it was very good. Stacie Morgain Lewis who played Glinda was just perfect. But they had some understudy, Jennifer DiNoia playing Ellphaba. Lets just say her performance was less than stellar. I was so disappointed with her. I hate it when they put people who can almost sing the parts in them. Anyway, all in all I thought it was great and the Oriental theater is really an incredible structure. The moldings etc are just fantastic.

I have started the drying of herbs, peppers, seeds. Hopefully I'll actually have some of the seeds grow for next year. So far I've collected beans, mustard, and peas. This is some stevia that I'm going to dry as it is getting out of control in the container. I'll probably be drying quite a few herbs for this winter they seem to be thriving in their pots.

Current Mood:	blah
Current Music:	Project Runway on TV