Smorgasbord Supreme

Or gigantic, shameless linkage, of all variety and in no particular order. First, that's the tombstone of my great-great-great-great grandfather above--James Beverly Hudgins. I need to get back to cleaning up the stone wall that surrounds his gravesite and setting that piece of limestone upright. Now to other things:

• According to the Economist, Eleanor Roosevelt's "Victory Garden" is back. Tom Vilsack is looking to have community gardens outside of all of his department's buildings. It's worth noting that "many gardeners are focusing on 'heirloom' plants—rare varieties from earlier times that do not appeal to agribusiness." Let me also add that Heifer International is a really cool organization.
• Is there mercury in the high fructose corn syrup? Tom Philpott looks into the possibility. I grew up in a family that frequented Sam's and bought pallets of Mountain Lightning cola, so it's not difficult for me to believe that "the average American consumes 40 pounds of HFCS every year."
• Ladies, Frito-Lay is gunning for you.
• Warning girls, this Georgia farm specializes in cute!
• In Warner Robins on Sunday, I noticed there were new designations for vitamins and minerals in the ingredients list on a cereal box. But, the vitamins didn't sound like vitamins and the minerals didn't sound like minerals. According to Slate, it's all a marketing ploy to take advantage of health-conscious consumers. For example, Cocoa Pebbles can now boast a robust fiber content thanks to the addition of polydextrose, an industrial lab concoction with questionable nutritional benefits. None of this bothers the FDA, and the whole thing speaks to the spoiled-rotten nature of American consumers. If you want fiber, eat fruits and vegetables. We'd all live longer and better without shortcuts.
  
• Michael Pollan wants to know what your "food rules" are. The absence of such was the starting point for his magnum opus, The Omnivore's Dilemma. If a staple as ancient as bread suddenly can be removed from the dinner table by the assaults of a fad diet, then clearly there's a problem. Americans lack a food tradition to guide them through the supermarket, and they suffer too easily the stings of commercial marketing. And maybe our bread is crappy and killing us, too.
• Hope Harvest Farm.
  
• Food Inc. film. Worth your time to explore. If half the things people say about Monsanto are true, then--well--I don't know what to say. Damn sons of bitches.
  
• Maybe it's not having an opposable thumb. Maybe what separates homo sapiens from animals and advantaged us over our extinct cousins was the ability to cook.
• I'd hire those L.A. cuervos, but I doubt they'd make good employees, especially that woman. I couldn't realistically pay her to make shoddy fire pits all day. Also, it seems like you soul-seach in L.A. and then decide to get back to the earth. You don't leave L.A., soul-search closer to the earth, and then go start a bar in Seattle. And is she really going to be drinking milk directly from cows? I doubt it.
• Georgia representatives, including Hall County's own Nathan Deal, are all flustered over the specter of new energy regulations, which (unlike pollutants and noxious emissions) are grossly unfair to the state's citizens. Stan Wise from the Georgia Public Safety Commission testified before the U.S. House Energy and Environment subcommittee to address the challenges of meeting renewable goals in Georgia and the specific regional differences in meeting renewable energy goals. As someone very bright put it, basically, he told the committee that "legislation on climate change and renewable energy could negatively affect Georgia and why Georgia can't change its ways." I've got my opinion on Wise's testimony, which I thought, for one, was overly simple. He makes some good points but is certainly dragging his feet, probably with particular local commercial interests in mind, e.g. the timber companies: "The definition of biomass should be expanded to include all recoverable wood material. This would include whole trees which are currently excluded from credit towards compliance."
  
• Michael Lewis of Moneyball and The Blind Side fame shines the klieg lights on the Icelandic economy. When a tiny nation of fishermen decides to jump wholesale into investment banking, the results aren't pretty.
  

By the way, the best word I've come across lately has been "subintelligitur," meaning "something that is not stated but understood." I went canoeing on the Little River, and the water's up and cold. And that's Woody Harrelson playing soccer on the front lawn of Valdosta State below.