RURAL PEN

Last Athens Farmers Market 2009

2010-03-12T14:45:00.001-05:00

I am not a lover of lawns. Rather would I see daisies in their thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the too-well-tended lawn.--William Henry Hudson

Thanks to all the members and patrons of the Athens Farmers Market in Athens, Georgia for a tremendous year. The 2010 season, no doubt, will be twice as good.

See you soon.

P.S. New content will be intermittent here, as Farmer South is now live.

Ode to Summer: We're Waiting

2010-03-04T17:37:00.005-05:00

When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Please. I'm ready for this to be done.

Oh baby, it's been a long, long time since that evening sun's come round....

You know the one I'm talking about, that later-day summer sun in the South, when the cicadas are out, yet the temperature is almost perfect. You hop in the truck to go for a ride, waving your hand out the window, riding it on the waves of air. The world smells like a stream. The sun goes down, and you walk through its afterglow, the shimmery gloaming celebrated in lightning bugs.

Lord, the warm weather can't some soon enough. I can see the table set with my mother's Pfaltzgraff tableware--cool blue Yorktowne pattern to be specific. There it is, regimented in sparkling flatware, in angles of forks and knifes burning with potential energy (more about silverware at Silverware Wikipedia, in case anyone doubted its incendiary capability).

Now the dinner plates crisscross around its length: cornbread and biscuits. Thick gray gravy, milk and sausage grease. Lima beans soaking in butter. Stewed greens. Sliced pink pounds of ham. Corn on the cob. One piece of dinnerware, for one fat tomato, cut in chunks and salted. Another for rings of a sweet yellow onion.

In the fridge a key lime pie, waiting.

And the sunlight reaching through the window.

Who's Your Farmer?

2009-11-03T16:07:00.001-05:00

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?--Douglas Adams

One of the vital purposes of this blog (when I'm not neglecting it) is the sharing of information. If that hardly sounds like a revolutionary mission statement, it's not. In fact, there may be nothing more obvious or downright pedestrian. Every published word, no matter where it appears, is an atom of information. And most blogs, in their essence, seek nothing more than to make communal the salient elements of private experience.

On the other hand, when the subject is agriculture and making food fit to eat, the importance of shared information rises to a critical level. Simply, we are growing generations without any intimacy with the soil and a cooking education that goes beyond frozen pizza in a conventional oven. As long as we continue to have, say, potatoes, I have faith we can overcome the latter: After all, even I know how to cook now, when only a few years ago I was sauteing canned salmon and mayonnaise in olive oil. But I wonder sometimes how long we'll have potatoes, especially ones not drenched in pesticides?

It's not an outrageous example. According to Progressive Farmer, from 2002 to 2007, the number of people "under twenty five years old who call farming their prime occupation fell by almost half," with fewer than 6,000 across the nation ("The Young Faces of Ag, October 2009). The average farmers in 2007 was over 57 years old. This upward trend in age certainly suggests that our agricultural knowledge is in peril. For a variety of reasons, we're missing the next farmers in line to learn when to plant the seed and how to use a tractor.

Perhaps the issue is even more urgent in organic production because its practice is more complicated and information-heavy than conventional agriculture. It's the difference between crop rotation and companion planting, or simply spraying a pesticide. In the past decade we have seen educational opportunities in the organic field spring up in academic certificate programs and mentoring support offered by non-profits. But the body of knowledge--and its institutionalization--is still being formed. As we grow the community, the best way to promulgate the why's and how-to's of organic farming is personal, firsthand experience and sharing it.

The enemy.

I will continue to share what I learned, e.g. don't ever, ever, ever let stink bugs in your tomato patch. I also encourage anyone really interested in farming organic to find immersion, to live and breathe the idea. The good news is there are an abundance of farm internships out there (and farmers in desperate need of labor). One way to get started might be to volunteer on organic farms by signing up with WWOOF, or World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, which connects organic farms in different countries with temporary volunteer help and enables those volunteers to see the world (Flights to Tel Aviv, anyone?). In a sensible and earthy way, it brings closer to home a global environmental consciousness.

Actually, I knew a couple in Arkansas who had been Wwoofers in Ireland. While they like anyone else traveling abroad or to the U.S. were responsible for taking care of their visas, they were matched to their work opportunities and lodging through the Wwoof organization. Unmistakably, they had a blast.

Great Tomato Sauce Recipes

2009-07-29T12:48:00.002-05:00

The man's desire is for the woman but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Who's got recipes? With all these damn scrumptious tomatoes, I need 'em. Here's the very serviceable one I've been using from allrecipes.com:

* 10 ripe tomatoes
* 2 tablespoons olive oil
* 2 tablespoons butter
* 1 onion, chopped
* 1 green bell pepper, chopped
* 2 carrots, chopped
* 4 cloves garlic, minced
* 1/4 cup chopped fresh basil
* 1/4 teaspoon Italian seasoning
* 1/4 cup Burgundy wine
* 1 bay leaf
* 2 stalks celery
* 2 tablespoons tomato paste

DIRECTIONS

1. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Have ready a large bowl of iced water. Plunge whole tomatoes in boiling water until skin starts to peel, 1 minute. Remove with slotted spoon and place in ice bath. Let rest until cool enough to handle, then remove peel and squeeze out seeds. Chop 8 tomatoes and puree in blender or food processor. Chop remaining two tomatoes and set aside.
2. In a large pot or Dutch oven over medium heat, cook onion, bell pepper, carrot and garlic in oil and butter until onion starts to soften, 5 minutes. Pour in pureed tomatoes. Stir in chopped tomato, basil, Italian seasoning and wine. Place bay leaf and whole celery stalks in pot. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low, cover and simmer 2 hours. Stir in tomato paste and simmer an additional 2 hours. Discard bay leaf and celery and serve.

I've yet to include either celery or tomato paste in my trials. You need salt, particularly if your butter is unsalted. I used a fruity South Georgia wine, nice to cook with and nice to sip (the Hahira Red from Horse Creek Winery)--although it's not absolutely essential. I've also doubled the carrot and increased the tomato requirements by half, based on the superabundance of tomatoes and carrots on hand. Mushrooms are a good throw-in as well.

I'm ready for variations and new culinary adventures. Any suggestions? Anything with zucchini (I've got some ugly ones probably unfit for market)? Bring it on.

There's This Dream I Keep Having...

2009-07-09T23:01:00.000-05:00

Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone -- Czeslaw Milosz

...I get up in the morning and head down to the field, and all the tomatoes are dead. Sometimes it's some lurid, overnight disease that's taken hold. Sometimes they've been decimated by deer or groundhogs or stupid, bastard kids who've tramped through the woods swinging baseball bats. When I stand there and see all the dead plants, I laugh. I can't do anything. Six months of hard thought and physical labor, every night of motherly worrying and hoping, are gone.

It's silly, but these tomatoes have consumed my life--and I have no idea exactly what I'm going to do with them. I'm sorry for being away, and I appreciate everyone who's stopped by, checking in during my absence. I'll do my best to honor your faith and repay your kindness.

Here's another picture for the ladies (thanks for the tip, Amber). I've got cuter ones coming.

Out with the Old

2009-05-22T16:15:00.001-05:00

And he said, "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord" -- Job 1:21

In with the new. I want to put up some pictures of something cute to counteract the grim portrait of Juanita in a previous post. There's also a point to make here. Was I sad about Juanita's death? Sure. Maybe the better word is "disappointed"--frustrated that all my hard work had been so quickly and summarily snuffed out. But nothing more.

There's no time for sentimentality and weeping on the farm. Quite simply. there's too much to do. And I know well the bloody awfulness of Nature. I borrow from it what I can, and I'm not so vain as to presume to have any control.

Lastly, if daily existence on a farm can often seem like a gruesome circus, it also has a warm, exhilirating antipode.

Juanita's gone. But now this orphan calf needs some looking after. Maybe there are no fair trades in life and death, but this one is acceptable.

Juanita Is Dead

2009-05-18T20:33:00.002-05:00

Long live Juanita!

More to come.

What Now: Part 2

2009-05-11T21:36:00.000-05:00

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule -- Michael Pollan

Here's what:

Yum. Thank you, Juanita!

Now What?

2009-05-07T10:27:00.002-05:00

Living the good life for us was practicing harmony with the earth and all that lives on it. It was frugal living, self-subsistent, self-sustaining. It was earning our way by the sweat of our brows, beholden to no employer or job. It was growing our own food, building our own buildings, cutting our own wood, and providing for our own livelihood. We needed and used little money. If we couldn't pay for a thing, we made it ourselves or did without. -- Helen Nearing, Loving and Leaving the Good Life

I did it. I freed the chickens. Now what?

As I've stated here before, my dad has been a heavy-breed chicken farmer his entire life. On average, he's looked after about 35,000 birds, both hens and roosters. The eggs he produces are hatched and raised by other farmers as broilers, which are the young, juicy chickens that everyone buys retail.

But my dad's been forcibly retired. His contract wasn't renewed, and the chickens were picked up in January. Three months later, in pursuit of some litter and shavings for my herb garden, I stumbled upon three hens, resting together on the egg collector, enjoying the last rays of evening sun shining through the window. Suffice it to say, this was a surprise, considering these chickens hadn't been administered feed or water since almost New Year's. Although they seemed perfectly content, I imagine they'd been surviving by picking through manure and sipping meager rainwater.

Of course, there was only one thing to do. I had to catch the girls and let them out to enjoy the good life. Maybe they'd be stupid, easy prey; yet, as long as they could, these chickens needed to experience life in the grass, under a blue sky. Perhaps they might even enjoy the taste of a plump caterpillar. So, over the course of a several days, one by one, I snatched them. After a brief sojourn in the herb garden, the hens were carried to my dad's house, placed in an old chain-link dog pen, and fixed up with an ad hoc coop.

So now what am I supposed to do? How are my chickens going to live happily ever after? How do I look after them so that they exist naturally and happily in return for a handful of eggs? In certain context, these questions seem completely ridiculous. My family has stewarded thousands of commercial chickens for generations, but we don't know how to care for three. Such, I guess, is the integration and efficiency of poultry agribusiness, a topic for another time.

My situation presents almost an ironic case; however, the huge information gap I'm staring down is no different from the one facing the enthusiastic novice. The mass production of food has kept our bellies full, and at the same time robbed us of a farming tradition, a cultural knowledge, and--by removing their practical necessity--the values of stewardship. If we intend to go out and experiment in self-sufficiency--to grow our own tomatoes and fry eggs that were laid behind the lilacs in the backyard--we need to reconnect to an agricultural tradition, and we need resources about farming. Both immediate and online, we need guides and forum and communities that discuss how to pinch a sucker, what the minerals need to be supplemented in feed, where to market your bursting figs.

I want to leave it at that, saving a personal story about former concert pianist and now suburbanite-turned-farmer in Fayetteville, Georgia for another time. Right now I encourage everyone to go out find that knowledge, rekindle the tradition, and share it.

Anyone who's ever tried it can to tell you, farming ain't easy. We need each other.

(More after the jump.)

A quick word about my chickens: I've got two eggs! Can you guess which two are mine? One of the chickens is either entirely sweet or entirely dumb. She'll follow you around, allow you to pick her up and stroke her feathers, and coo gently the whole time. Each day, I lead her to a separate pen. I throw a little corn scratch on the ground, and after a fit lunch, she settles down in the tall grass and lays a warm and singularly beautiful egg. If this keeps up, she's going to need a name. I'm thinking, "Juanita."

This Is Just To Say

I have rescued
the chickens
that were in the chicken house

and which
you were probably
going to eat
processed in canned soup

Forgive me
they are now happy
so clean
and free

"If you've got a chicken coming down the line, you've laid the egg, you've hatched the egg, you've delivered the chick to the chickenhouse you've fed it for seven weeks, you've eviscerated it, cut it up and packaged it all to make a penny a pound." -- Tom Hensley, president Fieldale Farms Corp

Don't Let This Happen to You!

2009-05-06T16:15:00.002-05:00

I looked the Bandit in the face, and he came away scared.

It's been a long hiatus. I sincerely apologize for depriving y'all of my singular brilliance and magnaminity. Ha, I kid--but I've got sound excuses. One, I've been running overtime preparing my soil to get the seeds in asap: turning, turning, then turning the ground again. The number of treatments that must be done to a plot of earth (and specifically a former chunk of pasture) is astounding. Having never run a plow or a harrow or a cultivator, I'm totally reliant on my dad's expertise and dependent on his pace. While I welcome the rain, the level of ground saturation has literally bogged things down.

Two, I've been on a trek of mythical proportions. I looked the Bandit in the face, and he came away scared. Texarkana to Atlanta, I scoff at you. By about 500 miles. Chasing and being chased by this spring monsoon, I have just finished traversing the fabled Mid-South: Dallas-Texarkana-Little Rock-Memphis-Nashville-Knoxville-Asheville-Raleigh. And I accomplished this with my mother. After about twenty hours in a car with a family member, you both begin to pose more of a physical threat to each other than the other cars on the interstate. I'm proud to say there were no injuries. In fact, there may have been some sincere maternal-filial bonding. The producers of Sideways are standing by, ready to option our story about coming to terms with the earnest failures of motherhood and surviving your twenties.

I plan on a small debriefing of my culinary and agricultural adventures, like the ultra-hip Weaver Street Market in Carrboro, North Carolina (think Whole Foods if Whole Foods were local). Until then, follow the jump so that we can talk my favorite subject, tomatoes....

This picture is of one of my seedlings from a few weeks ago. As a matter of interest, it's not just any ordinary seedling; it's actually one of those upside-down tomatoes that are being advertised all over the place (my spam folder, for instance). My neighbor, a small farmer extraordinaire and genuinely decent guy, gave me this particular plant, which was grown by his mother-in-law in Bentonville, Arkansas. I have no idea what kind it is, probably something run-of-the-mill. And I suspect it might come from a hybrid parent, which doesn't bode well for my yield.

But the provenance is not important here. This specimen is suffering from a common ailment of tomato seedlings. You can see it there in my rudimentary purplish, brown focus area, although you don't need my graphics to locate it. "Damping off" occurs where the stem emerges from the soil and is recognizable by the narrowing, diminished look of the stem. In most cases, if the issue isn't addressed, the plant will die as the stem shrivels into nothing.

What to do? I solved the problem by transplanting the seedling into my own proprietary soil medium and sinking it deep to allow new root systems to develop. But what do the experts say?

The following, written by Carolyn Male, comes from the Tomato Mania site:

There's no one way to start seeds but there are a few things that MUST be done or you tempt fate. Translate, you have lousy or dead seedlings. LOL

First, you MUST use artificial soilless mix. Regular potting soil has lots of fungi in it and you increase the chances of your seedlings developing damping off which is characterized by the young seedlings developing a narrowed stem at the soil level and falling down...as in DEAD. Rhizoctonia and other genera of fungi are responsible for this disease. Using a Benomyl drench or some folks say chamomile tea, may deter it. So start with a good artificial mix like Jiffy Mix (my favorite), or Pro-Mix or Peter's, etc.

Happy planting!

On the iPod

2009-04-13T22:08:00.008-05:00

O for a beaker full of the warm South -- John Keats

Honestly, I don't have one. But it doesn't mean I'm not listening to music, always. In the truck right now, I've got a burned copy of Texas Worried Blues by Henry Thomas, supposedly "the oldest African-American folk artist to produce a significant body of recordings." With its surprising panpipes, the music is positively buoyant.

When I'm on the computer, I've been enjoying thoroughly other tracks I discovered from the Anthology of American Folk Music (Edited By Harry Smith). You really haven't heard anything until you've heard Charley Patton groan. But, keeping with my current activities and the tenor of the season, I'm especially fond of two songs, jaunty farmers' laments, by the Bently Boys and the Carolina Tar Heels respectively.

DownOnPenny_sFarm.mp3

GotTheFarmLandBlues.mp3

So encouraged by the response to a previous post, I'm asking what are you listening to? Flamenco guitars? 1980's South African protest music? Korn? Sweet mercy, I hope not.

On the Bookshelf

2009-04-06T18:44:00.000-05:00

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me. -- Anatole France

Faulkner, Dillard, Rowling? What's on your nightstand? Your "To Read" list on goodreads? What's stored away, almost lovingly, waiting to be plucked with relish from your bookshelf?

At some point in my life, I must read Moby Dick. Right now, I've got more urgent, educational things on my mind, such as growing the perfect tomato and identifying a squash bug. Spring is a good time for taking on a challenge, for studying, and for kicking up the sediment of winter. To learn is to come alive; to philosophize, as Novalis says, is to cast off inertia.

The following books, I believe, will occupy a predominant part of my life in the next few months. They shouldn't expect a restful place, presiding over the living room from some prominent, decorative position. Rather, a reference guide understand it's no sinecure. And as with any truly great book, wear--dirt, rips, blood--is a testament to value.

Good Terms

2009-03-27T14:51:00.056-05:00

Admire the large farm; cultivate the small. -- Virgil

For such an earnest, out-of-the-way blog, in the past few months this has become a laborious and fretful avocation. After I created and posted an email address on the main page, days later I received an outrageous and mean-spirited email with threats of a defamation suit. Then I put up ads to monetize the site and make the content fuller and more various. Two months later, almost at my payment threshold, my account was suspended. I never received a precise description of what occurred, but allegations seemed to point toward improper "third-party clicking." Where, when, how, I don't know and won't, according to the ad provider's prerogative. My appeal has yet to be answered. I doubt it will. For the time being at least, it seems this blog will remain devoutly non-profit.

After such frustrations, I felt it was time for a wholesale change. I needed something fresh, and the old-two column format was clumsy, stale, and inefficient. It was due time for revision months ago. Spring and a plate full of new ambitions were my excuse to reach for the knife.

I half-worry that now, for some undefined cause, my blog account will be summarily suspended as well--such has been my recent luck. Until then, I'd like to thank Falcon Hive and the designers named at the bottom of the page for a beautifully ordered template. Any offense to sight or sense of harmony are solely my own, as I have made adjustments to fit my needs. For example, the designers put together a nifty Twitter feature located above the search box on the right, which having no Twitter account, I removed. This is my second experience with Falcon Hive, and I've been inordinately pleased both times. Hopefully, the minor alterations that remain--such as social bookmarking, font sizes, and certain background colors--will be entirely unobtrusive. If you're using Internet Explorer, God help you. I'll get the header straightened out in the next few days.*

As you can see, I've still to fill out my navigation bars. At the top of the page, eventually there will be links to other interests: a transitional organic farm, a site on book reviews, among additional things. The second navigation bar below the title currently holds a PDF link to the Pew Trust's report on antibiotic use in the nation's meat supply, a must-read for all those interested in public health. Soon I plan to make it a more accessible and permanent menu, with briefer informational links, including one to blogs of note. For my blogging friends, please don't feel slighted if you see yourself removed from the sidebar; you're still linked and publicized here, hopefully in a more optimal way.

To everyone who stops by, I want to say thanks, thanks for your patience and your care, thanks for being thoughtful, inquisitive, and so damn smart. Physically, we may be far away, but I continue to feel enriched by your fellowship.

Cheers.

*Thanks to Jake for lending his vast knowledge of code and style. He could fix and spruce this site up in five minutes. I also must put in a good word for photobucket, which has been a huge help in placing dynamic photos on this site. And how could I forget emily b. photographie, who took the picture in this post and the one in the header? I highly recommend her services.

Victory Garden

2009-03-18T18:02:00.003-05:00

It seems that the petitions and calls by agricultural groups and food activists, e.g. Eat the View, has paid off:

The White House will have a vegetable garden.

UPDATE: The New York Times has a fuller description of the garden, with a quote from Michelle Obama deserving an even huger font:

"A real delicious heirloom tomato is one of the sweetest things that you’ll ever eat,” she said. “And my children know the difference, and that’s how I’ve been able to get them to try different things."

Smorgasbord Supreme

2009-03-12T17:30:00.023-05:00

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. Ac cording 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.

Midweek Linkage

2009-02-19T12:24:00.006-05:00

Everybody (who counts) seems thrilled about Obama's nomination of Kathleen Merrigan for Deputy Agriculture Secretary. It looks as if the President is maintaining his trend of counterpoise, with Merrigan the yin to Tom Vilsack's yang.

This is a nice older article from the St. Pete Times about a northern Florida version of libertarian uber-farmer Joel Salatin. "Screw the conventional, big agricultural model, and screw the U.S.D.A. for prostitution to industrial interests and monolithic heavy-handedness":

After the state Department of Agriculture shut [Stoltzfoos] down for five months in 2005, he received a license to market his eggs, poultry and dairy products as pet food.

Selling raw milk for humans is illegal in Florida, and, according to many food scientists, dangerous and foolish. The fat-soluble vitamins in milk, A and D, stand up well to the heat of pasteurization and even ultra-pasteurization, when milk is heated briefly above the boiling point. Raw milk drinkers risk E. coli outbreaks, such as the one that swept through a natural foods co-op in Washington state in 2005.

Other scientists say there is no doubt milk from grass-fed cows is higher in vitamins and essential fatty acids and that pasteurization destroys some nutrients, including beneficial bacteria. Also, they say, raw milk from small farms is safer than milk from the filthy, urban dairies that created an outcry for pasteurization in the early 20th century.

New Yorkers are trying their hands (and turning their noses up) at vermiculture. I think city-dwellers need firsthand contact with organic processes--a world with more stink and less geometry. Whether in food or tennis shoes, we've all got to overcome the meretriciousness and obscurity of the market.

Got some time and a yen for edification? Read "Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America" from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. The PDF is available at Pew Charitable Trusts' Save Antibiotics site--well worth exploring.

Got more time and a modicum of curiosity? Then find out where your fresh fruits and vegetables come from with this calculator from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Newsflash, Georgia: You may be the domestic leader in greens, but the Peach State trails California, New Jersey, Washington, and South Carolina in producing its namesake crop.

Yes, New Jersey.

Did I Say "Vengeance"?

2009-02-18T13:38:00.018-05:00

How about with a limp? I'm putting together a big, eclectic, aggregated post today to make up for lost time and exaggerated proclamations.

Here's the first shot, courtesy of Josh: U.S. Food Policy blog. Read anything, read everything. I was turned on by the post on declining nutrient content in fruits and vegetables.

.........

6:00 p.m. Update:

The super-cell thunderstorms have passed my part of North Georgia, and now my blood pressure has lowered sufficiently to put a sentence together. I hope everyone else is lucky enough to escape the severe weather.

I've got to start by going back to U.S. Food Policy, which does an excellent job of linking policy papers on the economics and "healthiness" of the domestic food industry. I just finished reading a paper on "implicit subsidies to corn sweeteners and the U.S. obesity epidemic." And it's hard to come away from it doubting that the oil and corn commodity bubble will finally burst in the next decade, with traumatic effects. While I'm not going to give away the conclusion, since I'm fond of provenience stories, I can't refrain from quoting at length about the origins of high fructose corn syrup in the American diet.
With per-capita consumption weighing in at 43 pounds per year, it is worth retracing how HFCS came to be America’s sweetener of choice. In the 1970s and 1980s, HFCS burst into the sweetener industry as it replaced sugar, most prominently in carbonated beverages, but also in baked goods and other foods. As a liquid, HFCS is easier to work with than sugar, and six times sweeter. It also prolongs shelf life and resists freezer burn. From 1980, the year when Coca-Cola first used HFCS in its sodas, to 1999, per capita consumption of HFCS grew by a staggering 235%. Today, HFCS represents more than 40% of the caloric sweeteners added to foods and beverages, and is the only sweetener added to soft drinks in the United States. Each year, about 500 million bushels, or 5%, of the U.S. corn crop is used to produce HFCS.

In the 1970s, HFCS’s competitive advantage over sugar derived partly from R&D expenditures in the corn wet milling process. However, corn sweeteners have also benefited from the U.S. sugar program, which includes prohibitive trade restrictions and production allotments. With a high price floor for sugar and below-cost corn underwriting liquid HFCS, sugar cannot be price-competitive with HFCS. Data from 1963-2005 show real corn prices falling more than twice as fast as real sugar prices. As such, manufacturers have historically been able to purchase HFCS at prices 20% to 70% less than sugar prices. A 1983 Fortune magazine article estimated that Coca-Cola gained a cost advantage of $70 million annually over Pepsi when it switched from sugar to HFCS.
OK, where have I been? For one, I've been at the Farm Service Agency, checking into drought insurance payments (come on, big money), wetlands and riparian buffer conservation programs, and potential start-up loans. Word of advice, if you're in Georgia, don't go to the state office in Athens. They know nothing. It's not worth you time to go through the metal detector.
I've been cleaning up the old, forgotten cemetery in the woods on Ellison Farm Road because my great-great-great-great grandfather stays there, inside a rudimentary stone enclosure. His wife, Jane Bell, my great-great-great-great grandmother, is also my great-great-great aunt. But that's a story we don't want to get into. I've also been hanging out with the old folks in the cemetery up the road, which I'm happy to say the subdivision developers fenced off neatly.
I've been admiring beeches, and I think you should admire them, too.
I've been listening to a lot of Charley Patton: Shake It and Break It.
I downloaded The Greenhorns Guide to Beginning Farmers. No review yet.
I'm almost finished Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home by Janisse Ray, whom I can't wait to see at the Georgia Organics conference in March. I also started reading The Good Life, which I am thoroughly enjoying for its sense of political independence combined with practical know-how.
I now know the proper pH level for growing blueberries. I can rank the N-K-P content in the manure of rabbits, chickens, feeder cows, horses, and sheep, respectively. I've got a good idea how to compost a lot of chicken shit to take the heat off--and a good deal of cow shit to kill the seeds inside.
I've been examining plows and disc harrows and flipping through catalogs of heirloom tomato seeds. I discovered that household vinegar is a fine herbicide. But killing bermudagrass still defies me. The best advice I've heard so far is to split a couple atoms on your land and incinerate the stuff in a nuclear holocaust. Let's see what the county agent has to say first.
I've got plans for a dandelion salad and echinacea tea.
I turned down a remarkable offer to help a small farm outside of Raleigh in its transition to a fully organic operation that runs off-the-grid. Why?...
Because, as some of you might have guessed, I'm about to go halvers on a truck-farming operation in Georgia: 3 acres and a pile of tomatoes. Cherokee purple tomatoes (pictured at the top). This is going to be a hell of a thing, but it's time for risks and the courage and energy to pursue the kind of life I want. And this is family, which trumps almost everything else.

The Upper Farm fifty years ago.
Lastly, I saw a bobcat last Friday night/Saturday morning. That's not an obscure euphemism about Valentine's Day. I really saw one. I also saw a 260 lb. man fall and bust his head about 2:30 in the morning. Nothing that a bag of Krystal's couldn't fix up.
Miscellaneous links: Walter Reeves on Georgia gardening, University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences on Growing Vegetables Organically, Mother Earth News blog.

Selah

Coming Back with a Vengeance

2009-02-10T14:56:00.004-05:00

No new content on Rural Pen. Booor-ing.

Where have I been? Salmonella outbreak in Georgia--I know, I know: right up my alley. Well, I apologize for my indisposition and cross my heart, hoping to die, that it will never happen again.

Watching a superb and shocking episode of This American Life last night, I felt inspired to post something about factory farming today.

Here goes. Pity the piglets:

If You're in New Orleans This Weekend

2009-01-15T16:36:00.007-05:00

The SFA is advertising the Cochon Ball on its blog:

If we understand correctly, Chef Donald Link will be cooking a pig or three, with his grill set up behind one of the goals of a mock foosball game, laid out a green at the center of the Brickyard. While Link cooks, 26 foosball players will, taking their inspiration from the tabletop game, slide and summersault while kicking a green, inflatable ball – representing the apple commonly stuck in the mouth of a roasted suckling pig – around the field, trying to score points. After a couple hours of kicking, everyone will eat pig. Along the way, Meehan hopes to catalyze conversations about how food events engender community and about how local foods matter to local people. Wacky? Yes. Fun? Definitely. You should go.

Details:
January 17, 2009
Location: The Brickyard, Bywater, 3000 block of Chartres Street.
Foosball starts at noon or so
Feed starts at 3:00 or so
Admission is $5 or so
Questions: alisounm@gmail.com

Musing on pigs, I found a great how-to guide for cooking cochon de lait on this site from Texas A&M. Warning: It includes pictures likely to make sensitive vegetarians nauseous. But, as you can see, the flash-creations of pigs hanging on rotisseries in homemade cooking sheds are a delight. And the author's description of this joyous Louisiana ritual is spot on:

Cochon de Lait is basically a cajun pig roast of a whole young pig. The pig is slow roasted for 6 to 12 hours. That is what makes a Cochon de Lait an event rather than just cooking a meal. It's an extended "male bonding", "story telling", "bull shooting", "beverage of your choice drinking", "fire tending" event!

Like any good time in the South, it's probably not a success unless somebody gets hurt.

(That's a map of Acadiana above.)

Drill, Baby, Dri..

2009-01-13T11:34:00.012-05:00

Frustrated political activism eventually becomes civil disobedience--That's not always how it goes: I don't think Thoreau was active about too much outside of his writing and his bean plants. But he couldn't truck what he deemed an unjust war or slavery, so he stopped paying the taxes that financed it.*

But it is the story of Tim DeChristopher. Tired of watching the normal political actions bear little fruit (picketing, speaking with his representative), DeChristopher was determined to halt what he felt was the Bush administration's prostitution of public lands to oil and gas interests. At a Bureau of Land Management public auction on December 19, the twenty-seven-year-old student outbid commercial interests to purchase 22,000 acres in Utah, none of which he could afford.

Environmentalists and guerilla-types have been exuberant about DeChristopher's stunt; everybody else not so much. The Federal government is threatening to prosecute him for interfering with and perverting its business (whoops, I almost wrote the public good). And DeChristopher, who now owes $1.8 million to the BLM, has to figure out what to do with his new real estate. Recently, a group of supporters raised $45,000 for the down payment, which might help keep him out of jail, but the consequences of DeChristopher's political act are still up in the air.

You can read more about DeChristopher, as well as watch video of him at the auction, by clicking on the donation button, which leads to the Bidder70 site. Lord knows if I had any extra money, I'd throw it his way.

* Aware he was dying, Thoreau's last words were "Now comes good sailing", followed by two lone words, "moose" and "Indian."

Week in Review

2009-01-10T13:28:00.022-05:00

Or weeks in review...extended to account for the holiday attention lag:

Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson composed a sapient if not stirring op-ed in the New York Times about the need for a long-term, truly ecological Farm Bill:
For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billions of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.
The huge coal ash flood outside of Knoxville was determined to be larger than estimated at first, and the TVA left something to be desired in testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (HT: John, Ben).
President Bush granted monument status to 195,000 square miles of marine habitat in the South Pacific, which means he "has now protected more ocean habitat (333,000 square miles) than any of his predecessors." (I tried to make a joke about off-shore oil here, but then I decided there was no reason to be ironic about something praiseworthy.)
The Wall Street Journal snickered at Guvnah Pardo's Go Fish Georgia Initiative, which if you've ever played "Go Fish" is pretty funny in its own right (HT: Kim). The state is spending $18-19 million to make Georgia a premier boating and fishing tourism destination. That's a fine allocation when you're not facing "the worst economic slump since the Depression," not to mention a record drought:
The governor -- who fondly recalls a childhood in which his grandfather took him fishing with a cane pole along the banks of Big Indian Creek in Middle Georgia -- said critics must not be fishermen. "They haven't seen a kid's eyes light up when he catches his first fish."

Others aren't so nostalgic. Last month, the Georgia Department of Veterans Services was forced by budget problems to close a housing unit for 81 sick or disabled veterans in the town of Milledgeville. "It's a shame that our veterans are being displaced so we can catch some fish," said Fae Casper, a retired Army sergeant who heads the Georgia chapter of the American Legion. "Revenue is important, but taking care of the people that allow us to be free is, to me, more important."

In spite of the uproar from the Farm Bureau and the commercial farm industry, an EPA levied "cow tax" for gastrointestinal emissions is probably not going to happen. It probably was never going to happen and originated, as some have suggested, as an anti-regulatory scare tactic.
Companies at the North American International Auto Show rolled out their green models.
The Onion pointed out cogently that, at the end of the day, there is one thing we can all agree on.
And, when you really think about it, there's a lot to like about food. It tastes good and it's good to eat. That's all I can think of for now, but those two things alone make me like food. Furthermore, I just thought of something else: Food is probably the healthiest and best thing to put in your mouth. You can ask a doctor about that.

Have a safe weekend, everybody.

Shilling for the Man

2009-01-07T12:45:00.009-05:00

There's been a cavalcade of book recommendations here lately. It shows my native weakness for hardbacks and literary fare, but I've also got a higher motive. Everyone looking for a revolutionized food culture—Janisse Ray, Gene Baur, Sara Miller—have called for consumers to make their dollars political, proving the importance of local, organic, etc. by spending on them. I'm not going to dispute the point, although I think it may overreach by assuming a large, informed consumer base, not to mention the common availability of “new” food stuffs. Before anyone exercises political power by buying organic mutton off the shelf, work has to be done to inculcate that person of the inherent merits of the choice. That's where I come in humbly, attempting to solidify a vibrant food conscious by broadcasting the values of community, stewardship, singularity, and, of course, healthy eating.

Dabney, Rawlings, even Baker help achieve that goal. So might Sylvia Tomlinson, author of Plucked and Burned, a fictional expose of chicken farming in the United States. In the author's own words:

Chicken farmers are often maligned as "factory farmers" when in fact, they run small family farms. Families, who while desperately looking for a commodity that might earn a decent return and keep them on the farm, believed the false promises made by poultry integrators. When I began my research, I was shocked to learn that the situation about which I intended to write was not an isolated, maverick incident. It was widespread across the country and most especially in the South and parts of the East Coast where few rural employment opportunities exist and environmental monitoring is less strenuous, at best.

Color me intrigued and a little envious of Tomlinson for writing the book before I could. My dad's a contract chicken farmer, and I've seen the farmer-company relationship first hand. Tomlinson likens it to indentured servitude; I'd call it modern-day sharecropping—just a difference of origins and vantage points no doubt. My dad has escaped most of the standard company harassment in the last decade because he's been with Fieldale, which has acted more sympathetically to its growers than any company in his memory. But pop's got stories. The company can drop you at its whim, and keep you on the line and in debt with constant capital demands. It seemed that for a good part of my childhood, every year my dad was threatened with being cut off unless he installed $20,000 worth of feeder trough or cool cell upgrades before the next flock. He was fortunate because my grandfather had farmed chickens, too, and the houses had been up and paid for a long time. Today it's inconceivable that a family could build new houses and ever be comfortably profitable. The technology cost alone is now exorbitant. While the company would offer easy financing, it wouldn't necessarily be friendly, and as I mentioned, they'd be prone to making demands that could keep a grower forever behind the eight ball. This is a particularly heinous activity considering the economics of chicken farming:

In reality, Tomlinson states (and this is courtesy of a professor of economics at Auburn) that the growers put up more than 50 percent of the cost of poultry farming, only to collect 1-2 percent of the end profit. The company, however, receives between 25-30 percent. One of the farmers at this summer's meeting wondered how he could let the public know that while consumers are paying between $5 and $8 for one package of chicken breasts, he is "lucky to get 30 cents on a whole chicken."

I don't have space or patience to get into the psychology of intimidation. Although there is a market of companies and growing contracts, farmers are afraid to shop around with their livelihoods at stake. The contracts are so vital yet tenuous that the growers are almost forced to develop a kind of obedience. The servicemen and their bosses exploit and encourage it, composing niggling lists each week, “writing you up” after measuring the height of the grass outside the door.

My dad is now 61-years-old and out of the chicken business. It's not by choice. The economy has forced Fieldale to cut back, and my dad's farm is inconvenient to reach in the developing southern end of Hall County, Georgia. I'm glad he no longer has to fight the daily stress of a broken feeder or a serviceman in a bad temper. However, he's lost his primarily cash-flow. As with most farmers, there's not a lot to fall back on.

UPDATE--Merritt Melancon at the Athens Banner-Herald has a story up on the effect of the recession, as well as recent residential development, on North Georgia chicken farmers (HT: Ben):

"We're good right now," Crowe said. "But you worry what will happen in a few months if this thing doesn't turn around. ... If they cut an entire flock of birds, even though I'm this close (five years) from paying off my houses, I'd have to restructure my loans. Then if they miss one flock, what's to keep them from cutting down to two, three a year."

UPDATE UPDATE--The article has an exceptionally lively comment section, and I couldn't resist quoting one of the comments in its entirety. I suspect that KPOST's statements are ironic, but apparently that's wishful thinking:

OH MY GOD! Why are you people defending a business that employs illegal aliens? All these farms need to be plowed under! I moved to Barrow county so I could get away from the Mexicans in Gwinnett. I didn't move to the countryside to have my residential activities disturbed by farming activities. I shouldn't have to look at horses or smell chicken ***** when I drive down the road! I can't build my $150,000 house because of that barn next to me. Where I want to put my house, I'd have to look at that freak'n barn. It's bad enough that I have to smell the chicken house everytime I drive by, and I WILL DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO SHUT HIM DOWN. I managed to stop the horse farm from doing business!

And who are you people to judge me? You don't know me!

Another commenter, WTF, provides this well-measured response to KPOST: "Move to New York City and get run over by a bus. Thank you."

Joe Dabney's Ode to Appalachian Culture

2009-01-03T12:32:00.008-05:00

Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine is my favorite kind of a writing: Perhaps it's just an attention span that only slightly exceeds a chicken's, but I've always been partial to encyclopedias, chrestomathies, and motley books. The prime example in English might be Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, in a peripatetic group that includes everything from William Blake's epic poems to Ambrose Bierce's subversive dictionary to James Agee's queer account of Alabama sharecroppers. Like the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament, each seems to offer a continuously unique, surprising, and delightful encounter, and the reading as a whole is as various and inexhaustible as experience himself.

So it was with great satisfaction I opened, at random, Joseph Dabney's “cookbook” to find instructions for bear stew combined with an anecdote about a North Carolina woman breastfeeding a cub. Smokehouse Ham is hardly a manual for cooking but a living compilation of history, biography, opinion, and folklore, which animate each chapter's recipes. Personally, I can hear my own grandfather talking about hunting squirrels and rabbits in the North Georgia foothills to supply the family's table during the Depression, and in this way the volume invites a kind of mutual action, begging for me to pull out a pencil and write in the margins as the page inscribes me.

I should add a recommendation that will touch all similar bibliophiles. Characteristically, the book has a reassuring heft. My favorite books have all been physically substantial. They're like intimate companions. Often when I've fallen asleep reading late, I've woken the next morning to find the rectangular impression in the sheets beside me wholly comforting.

This is exactly what I had in mind as a mountain complement to Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's Cross Creek Cookery. I hope Rawlings doesn't disappoint. After reading the following quote from her Cross Creek, I doubt she will:

[T]he consciousness of land and water must lie deeper in the core of us than any knowledge of our fellow beings. We were bred of earth before we were born of our mothers. Once born, we can live without mother or father, or any other kin, or any friend or any human love. We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled [sic] in man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.

Help the Economy! Help Yourself!

2008-12-29T16:30:00.011-05:00

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas, got to be with his or her family, and left feeling overstuffed and a little guilty, as I did, for the abundance of blessings. It's been a good holiday for me, and I'm going to refrain from any of my usual jeremiads against the materialism and acquisitiveness corrupting American society. Why rant and rave when you're satisfied?

I've had a number of emotional needs fulfilled the past few weeks. That makes me grateful. Now I'm going to be greedy and expose two items from my personal wish list that, after Christmas, I'm still pursuing.

The first is an essential for anyone interested in the culture and history of that wild territory of swamp, quail farms, and cracker settlements that spans the Florida-Georgia border. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is best known for her classic novel The Yearling, which stands alongside Sounder, Where the Red Fern Grows, and perhaps A Day No Pigs Would Die in the tender coming-of-age-via-tragic-pet-death canon. But Rawlings was more than just a sentimentalist, and her observations of her poor, white neighbors are praiseworthy for their sensitivity and restraint. The latter is an especially honorable quality in a literary age in which the Southern grotesque was the rage (see Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White's nearly repulsive book of photographs, Have You Seen Their Faces?)

Chief among Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' treatments of her north Florida environment is Cross Creek, an autobiography of her time there. However, reading summaries of her work, at the moment I'm equally attracted to Cross Creek Cookery, a work I hope to pair with its North Georgia cousin shortly. For a treacly modern and fanciful account of Rawlings' north Florida environment, watch the Michael J. Fox's Doc Hollywood, filmed in nearby Micanopy, a brief and quaint moss-strewn place south of Gainesville. (If you're looking for the view from the Georgia side of the border, Harry Crews and Janisse Ray are recommended.)

The next author is a continuance, stretched fifty miles south, of the theme--and a man whom I've been thinking of since Christmas, for no particular reason. Proud son of Zellwood, Florida, Charles H. Baker Jr. should be every thinking man's friend and every dipso's darling. He's such an extraordinary and unique type that there's almost nothing to say; he defies approach. With that in mind, I leave Baker's introduction to the writer who introduced me, thanks to the Oxford American's 2008 Best of the South issue. St. John Frizell uncovers the definitive gallant and travel guide. Whoever coined the term "an absorbing read" was surely thinking of Baker's life (make sure you click to page two and Baker's "lusty" take on Florida crackers).

For another writer from Baker's neck of the woods, albeit one drastically different, try Zora Neale Hurston.

At Least He's Not Earl Butz

2008-12-21T18:39:00.007-05:00

“Bad choice Obama. Not progressive enough for a position that has regressed.” — Edwin S

“With this pick, I guess we can kiss goodbye any chance of a change in food policy in this country.” — jane

“Where’s your CHANGE now?” — mojo1988

I think it's fair to say that there's a general sense of disappointment among progressives over Barack Obama's Cabinet picks. The President-elect clearly favors pragmatism and experience over ideology and innovation. It's a pattern of decision-making that began publicly with Joe Biden and has been evident each week at the now customary nomination press conference. It's also one that has taken off some of Obama's revolutionary, "hope-mongering" sheen. A parade of hoary-headed technocrats from the Clinton administration does not immediately suggest a new start.

In Obama's defense competency should be an overriding qualification. I can hardly impugn a process that selects lieutenants based on their capability, and I'm comforted to know that in their hands the government will not jump its rails, an everyday confidence which at this moment shouldn't be taken for granted. It helps, too, to understand Obama's practiced and centrist Cabinet as a reaction to the mismanagement and extremism of the Bush Presidency. Hopefully, there is no Browny here, no Alberto Gonzales—and mercifully, no righteous political bloodlust, foreign policy built on abstraction, nor vulgar, corrosive displays of self-interest.

On the other hand, the opportunity for seismic change, promised ad nauseam during the campaign, is hardly apparent. Steven Chu, nominated for Secretary of Energy, at this point is a coruscating choice, but from where else among this team are visionary ideas or overdue revisions to policy going to come? Top-down. That's my answer and attenuated faith a month before the inauguration. I'm still sustained by the excitement of an incoming President who seems to be meditative, sincere about the issues that concern me, and emblematic of the modern world. He's got credit to use, and until he uses it, I'll look forward to the change we were all promised, mandated by Obama and carried out by his deputies.

That's how I'm going to approach Tom Vilsack, the tab for Secretary of Agriculture, with a healthy skepticism about my skepticism. Obama's still very much a Washington neophyte: He may have a breathtaking legislative agenda, but he needs people who can implement it, who know the room. And when it comes to the national food system, Vilsack certainly has standing relationships. As the two-term governor of the country's top corn-producing state, it's impossible not to have connections to the industrial corn industry and the huge federal subsidy program for that commodity. At the press conference Obama remarked, "Obviously, if you don't know agriculture, you're not going to become governor of Iowa." State-level agricultural authorities from around the nation are also praising his experience.

However, organic and sustainable proponents have been less than thrilled, particularly in light of Vilsack's most recent position analyzing the risks and benefits of genetically modified plant and animal products. The Organic Consumers Association fired, “[He] has a glowing reputation as being a schill for agribusiness biotech giants like Monsanto." For groups like OCA, Vilsack's ties to the corn industry conjure terrifying images of proprietary genetic manipulation, prodigal antibiotics use, a totally processed food supply, intensive monoculture farming with deleterious environmental effects, and purses swelled by large commercial lobbies.

None of that is a divergence from the status quo, and it's not hard to understand the collective sigh of frustration at Obama's announcement. Because the U.S.D.A. and its wild subsidization routines have been under attack by economists, ecologists, and nutritionists alike, it appeared to be the one place most ripe for radical alteration. Both practically and symbolically, Vilsack does nothing to encourage the belief it will happen. That's an unmitgated shame, as the position did not lack inspiring candidates.

On Tuesday, Reuters compiled an informed list of possible choices. Notably, Vilsack was absent:

Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin: South Dakota, "Blue Dog Democrat," supports renewable fuels.
Rep. Sanford Bishop: Georgia, conservative Democrat, African-American, would be Obama's first Southern appointee.
Dennis Wolff: Pennsylvania, agriculture secretary, dairy farmer.
Jill Long Thompson: Indiana, former representative and Undersecretary for Rural Development, lives on a farm.
Gus Schumacher: Former Undersecretary of Agriculture for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services, favors sustainable agriculture.
John Boyd Jr.: Founder and president of National Black Farmers Association, has led a class-action suit against the government for allegedly denying black farmers loans and other aid, farmer in Virginia.
Karen Ross: Head of the California Association of Winegrape Growers, see below.

Better yet, Food Democracy Now! put together its own impressive wishlist (HT: Vimala). After Vilsack was named, the organization changed its focus to Undersecretary positions and added six individuals, who have also "been champions on issues of sustainability and standing up for independent family farmers as indicated by their life's work":

Gus Schumacher: Former Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture, see above.
Chuck Hassebrook: Executive Director, Center for Rural Affairs, Lyons, NE.
Sarah Vogel: Former two-term Commissioner of Agriculture for North Dakota.
Fred Kirschenmann: Organic farmer, Distinguished Fellow, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Ames, IA; President, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Pocantico Hills, NY.
Mark Ritchie: Minnesota Secretary of State, former policy analyst in Minnesota's Department of Agriculture, co-founder of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Minneapolis, MN.
Neil Hamilton: Attorney, Dwight D. Opperman Chair of Law and Professor of Law and Director, Agricultural Law Center, Drake University, Des Moines, IA.
Doug O'Brien: Assistant Director at Ohio Department of Agriculture, former staff attorney and co-director for the National Agriculture Law Center in Arkansas; Reynoldsburg, OH.
James Riddle: Organic farmer, founding chair of the International Organic Inspectors Association (IOIA), has served on the Minnesota Department of Agriculture's Organic Advisory Task Force since 1991, appointed to the USDA's National Organic Standards Board, serving on the Executive Committee for 5 years and was chair in 2005, Winona, MN.
Kathleen Merrigan: Director, Agriculture, Food and Environment M.S./Ph.D. Program, Assistant Professor and Director of the Center on Agriculture; Food and the Environment, Tufts University; former Federal Agency Administrator U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Marketing Service; creator of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, mandating national organic standards and a program of federal accreditation, Boston, MA.
Denise O'Brien: Organic farmer, founder of Women, Food, and Agriculture Network (WFAN), represented the interests of women in agriculture at the World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, organized a rural women's workshop for the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, Italy; Atlantic, IA.
Ralph Paige: Executive Director, Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund; served as presidential appointment to the 21st Century Production Agriculture Commission; participates on the Agriculture Policy Advisory Committee for Trade, the Cooperative Development Foundation, and the National Agricultural Research, Extension, Education & Economics Advisory Board, East Point, GA.
Karen Barrett Ross: President of the California Winegrape Growers Association and Executive Director of the Winegrape Growers of America, Sacramento, CA.

So why Vilsack, why someone so far inside the machine when there are other bright, successful people with more impressive resumes? The experience justification looks flimsy unless Obama was after a specific type of experience, that is, with corn. I'm purely conjecturing:

Because he has backed ethanol and tax breaks for the industry, Vilsack might offer a bridge to eventual comprehensive energy reform. Ethanol is probably not a long-term alternative solution to the country's energy needs. (Even its status as a short-term fix is highly questionable due to the resources it pulls from the food system. Not only is corn necessary for ketchup, it's also an integral meal for the average cow before it becomes a hamburger. As we found out this Spring, when corn is diverted to ethanol, the price of basic food stuffs goes up. Yet, to play the devil's advocate from the foodie's perspective, maybe that's not entirely a bad thing. Michael Pollan will happily tell you America's food supply is artificially and absurdly cheap. Giving it proper value would level the playing field for organic products, as well as discourage overconsumption. Why not pay more for better goods--say, grass-fed beef--and eat less?) But corn and the infrastructure to process it are abundant. And besides satisfying his Midwestern constituency, Obama might consider ethanol strategically crucial to meeting his preliminary environmental and diplomatic goals.

Maybe Obama's just being a sly dog, and he plans on remodeling the nation's food system by gradually sucking the corn syrup out of it. If not, if the American people should only expect babysteps toward reduced subsidies and more incentives for ethanol, then Vilsack's appointment is a bitter pill. I explained my current attitude, in spite of my reservations, earlier in this post. There are many out there writing positive (and bromidic) reviews of the new Secretary of Agriculture. I suppose I'll add to them my own cliche: Like this "new rural economy" that Vilsack and Obama have touted, we'll just have to wait and see.

(Note: The initial version of this post suffered from serious grammatical and graphic flaws, attributable to my carelessness and deficient know-how. Apologies to all who stopped by and were offended by those homely information tables. I have deleted both. For Earl Butz's apologia for his subsidy program, watch the film King Corn and the filmmakers' interview with Butz in his nursing home.)

Your New Secretary of Agriculture Is...

2008-12-17T18:36:00.005-05:00

TOM VILSACK.

Not as exciting as you'd hoped? For purely personal reasons, I was itching for somebody else. I'll have more on the reaction to Vilsack's nomination tomorrow. Today I've been slammed with overly tedious and completely inescapable "work."

But, so you can't say I never gave you anything, I leave you this evening with this: The Southern Foodways Alliance has a new Web site. Check it out.

Fried chicken makes me wish for summertime.

Week in Review

2008-12-15T17:04:00.023-05:00

Yep, that was the sign we were looking for. The end of days is officially upon us. It snowed in New Orleans last Thursday (HT: Ed). God bless the unfortunate souls who were trying to catch a flight out of town. New Orleans being New Orleans, everyone was completely unprepared for the situation. My friend Chris had to wait at the airport for the snow to melt, "with about 4 millions other people trying to leave."

I spent a good part of the week working on HTML coding, among other things, and was unable to post. I hope all found Gene Baur illuminating. I've put together a quick primer on recent environmental and agricultural happenings to bring everybody up to date. Thanks to all for sending me info and apologies for any outdated links.

"Collapse" was the byword of the week, as in the impending collapse of the big three automakers. I just wanted to make sure everybody was aware of that, as it seemed all the news agencies got the memo. Was "collapse" the right word? I don't think so. It implies utter destruction, as though the American automobile industry would be forever expunged from the face of the earth. "Organizational restructuring" is probably closer to what will happen, with or without a bailout package. But calmness and sober thinking are so boring. By the way, out of this crucible, Tennessee Senator Bob Corker could become a Republican star.
Nicholas D. Kristof argued for a Secretary of Food with an insightful plea that hits all the major points of the "new food" issue. An excerpt:
A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat.
Renaming the department would signal that Mr. Obama seeks to move away from a bankrupt structure of factory farming that squanders energy, exacerbates climate change and makes Americans unhealthy — all while costing taxpayers billions of dollars.
The FDA has reversed its own ban on the extralabel use of cephalosporins before it goes into effect (HT: Dallas). According to Wattpoultry.com, extralabel use "occurs when a drug only approved for human use is used in animals, when a drug approved for one species of animal is used in another species or when a drug is used to treat a condition for which it was not approved." Cephalosporin is normally used in humans. Not suprisingly, the coalition Keep Antibiotics Working is not happy about this. From their press release:
The reversal simply ignores the evidence on which FDA’s initial decision was based as well as other studies submitted to the Agency. One study directly correlates the use of cephalosporins in poultry with the rise of resistance to the very same drugs in the foodborne pathogen Salmonella in both humans and farm animals. Cephalosporins are the antibiotic treatment of choice for serious Salmonella infections in humans, which cause 1,300,000 U.S. illnesses each year. Increasing resistance is a problem because it leads to more severe illnesses resulting in a greater number of hospitalizations and deaths.
Here's a little more on the topic from the Wall Street Journal:
The Food and Drug Administration said it would continue allowing the widespread use of a class of powerful antibiotics in food-producing animals, making a last-minute reversal after calling the practice a public-health risk in July.

The agency's bid this summer to ban many uses of cephalosporin drugs in cows, swine, chickens and other animals came under fire from the industry. Agriculture groups and animal-drug makers, including Pfizer Inc., said the antibiotics are needed to prevent many infectious diseases in animals.
Nope, no neurological problems here. Keep moving along.... The FDA is urging more consumption of fish, and the National Fisheries Institute has no problem with that. The EPA says it was not consulted, even though the two agencies are supposed to work together on any changes to the mercury advisory:
The Food and Drug Administration is urging the government to amend its advisory that women and children should limit how much fish they eat, saying that the benefits of seafood outweigh the health risks and that most people should eat more fish, even if it contains mercury.
If approved by the White House, the FDA's position would reverse the government's current policy that certain groups -- women of childbearing years, pregnant women, nursing mothers, infants and children -- can be harmed by the mercury in fish and should limit their consumption.
The FDA's recommendations have alarmed scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, who in internal memos criticized them as "scientifically flawed and inadequate" and said they fell short of the "scientific rigor routinely demonstrated by EPA."
The FDA sent its draft report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, to the White House Office of Management and Budget as part of the FDA's effort to update the existing health advisory. The report argued that nutrients in fish, including omega-3 fatty acids, selenium and other minerals could boost a child's IQ by three points.
The Environmental Working Group does not agree.
The EPA has exempted farms from reporting toxic fumes. Maybe it's just me, but I'm noticing a pro-big business, last-minute theme here:
The Bush administration late Friday completed a regulation exempting farms from reporting releases of hazardous air pollution to federal, state and local authorities. The rule applies specifically to the gases from manure that are often responsible for odor problems.
The Environmental Protection Agency said that the changes will allow responders to focus on spills and releases that require their attention. But environmentalists say the rule will make it difficult to track air pollution problems at farms.
Large farms with hundreds of dairy cows or thousands of pigs will still have to report to local and state authorities.
The E.U. adopted a climate change pact with expectations that the incoming President will be a more amenable confederate than George W. Bush against global warming. The transition will not be an easy one, especially considering the varying pollution rates of the member nations. It could be a hugely expensive project for Eastern Europe, as well as no small cost increase for the average citizen on the continent:
The European leaders, particularly President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who holds the union's rotating presidency, committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Europe by 20 percent before 2020 -- and by 30 percent if other countries make comparable pledges at a U.N. environment conference scheduled next year in Copenhagen.
To reach their goals, the leaders pledged that 20 percent of their energy will come from renewable sources by 2020, leading to predictions of windmill farms across the European countryside and carpets of solar panels such as those that were recently installed atop the Vatican in Rome.
In a measure of the expenses the pledge seemed likely to entail, only about 8.5 percent of Europe's energy now comes from renewable sources, much of it from hydroelectric or nuclear power stations. Experts predicted that steps needed to reach the targets could raise electricity bills in Europe by as much as 15 percent for industrial users and add nearly $200 to the average household's annual bill.
Lastly, I hope everyone enjoyed the Feast of Guadalupe last Thursday and Friday. I have one criticism: If you're going to hold a bilingual mass, please practice your Spanish pronunciation. Other than that, the events were highly enjoyable, especially the "pre-Hispanic dancing." The clip below gives you a sense of the rhythm and performance. However, the dancers I saw had cowboy hats. There were also demons, whips, and a sagging prosthetic bottom.

Interview with Gene Baur of Farm Sanctuary

2008-12-08T16:22:00.009-05:00

As an introduction, I'm going to borrow from my friends at Flagpole and the review of Gene Baur's book:

Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds about Animals and Food fires another salvo in the war against the established food system in America. Where Michael Pollan described the insidiousness of the corn industrial process, Gene Baur takes the reader to one of the ugliest destinations of all that Midwestern maize. If it’s not in your Coke or your fuel tank, it’s battening the nation’s meat supply at some massively dense feedlot.

Baur’s book is a striking indictment of stockyards, slaughterhouses and agribusiness in general, which has everything to do with the robotic efficiency of an assembly-line factory and nothing with the nurturing ideal of a family farm. Baur investigates the off-hand cruelty with which animals are treated and makes a personal plea for the compassionate treatment, in all phases of their lives, of our four-legged food.

Baur is the co-founder and president of Farm Sanctuary, one of the country’s leading farm animal protection organizations and food-advocacy groups. While documenting conditions at a stockyard, he was inspired to start the refuge after a sheep, cast aside and left in a pile of dead animals, raised her head and looked at him. “Hilda” became the first resident of Farm Sanctuary, and each year the organization rescues hundreds of sick and mistreated animals unfit for processing.

I've been sitting on this for too long; considering Mr. Baur's book tour occurred over the summer, I'm sure he would agree. Better late than never, right? In my defense the delay has helped me bridge whatever gulf remained in my mind between advocates for a humane food system and those for an organic one. The differences are only microscopic, but humane treatment doesn't necessitate organic standards and vice versa. However, each assumes the other, specifically by attempting to remove animals from feedlots, assembly-line abattoirs, and the industrial food machine. All parties support the fundamental principles of respect for life, ecology, and natural process. Conceivably, you could eat an organic cow that was flogged all its days, but that's not likely.

For the record, this was not a completely disinterested interview from either side since I gave Baur my background, namely: The cows have it pretty good. Lots of acres to roam around and chew the fescue. But the cows got me thinking as a kid. Where did they go after they went to the sale barn? Why did they become totally invisible after they left the farm? And was that Bessie wrapped in cellophane at the Publix down the road? And if it wasn't, who was it? So I asked some questions, got some unsatisfactory answers. And I realized [...] my mission was to go out and talk about farming and food and resuscitate a rich body of knowledge and culture that is being lost.

Gene Baur's answers are in bold below:

I've read the story about Hilda and the inspiration for founding Farm Sanctuary. Were you always concerned about animal welfare? I imagine growing up in Hollywood you didn't have much contact beyond the retail side of food.

I grew up in the hills and was intrigued and inspired by wild animals there (deer, coyotes, skunks, raccoons, snakes, frogs), and as a boy, I had a cat, Tiger, who I loved. But, I didn’t think much about the animals’ bodies on my plate. As time went, I came to feel more strongly about the need to confront animal cruelty, which I also see as part of a larger pattern of societal violence that needs to be confronted.

What do you see as Farm Sanctuary's ultimate goal? I think people might be confused at first, especially those with few questions about the food industry, and think you work solely on the micro-level giving refuge to sick animals. What's the macro goal?

The macro goal is to challenge assumptions about how we treat other animals, and to forge a better, more respectful relationship with other animals. Acting with kindness to other animals is good for them and us. Farm animals are among the most intensely exploited and abused, and in grave need of our attention.

I think most people would say that Georgia is behind most other states as far as raising the consumer consciousness about food. Our total number of farmers markets is woeful, despite Georgia Organics best efforts. You could probably ascribe a good portion of that blame to the poultry lobby, as chickens are big business here in the Peach State. Without humane local options, what do you think is the best method for Georgians to achieve compassionate treatment of their food supply?

I think consumer consciousness is lacking in most states, but I agree that in states with powerful animal industries (like the poultry industry in Georgia), there are additional pressures and mechanisms that serve to keep consumers in the dark, and maintain the status quo.

To rephrase, Georgians overall like to elect steak-eating, free market-loving Republicans to the highest offices. They've got agribusiness interests in their back pocket. Local alternatives to big-box retailers are not numerous. What should we do to implement change legislatively? On the national level, should the solutions be top-down or bottom-up?

I think solutions need to come from both directions, from the top down and bottom up, and through changing consumer patterns. It’s very important to recognize that our purchasing choices can have a major impact, as we essentially vote every time we spend a dollar. I’d encourage Georgians to buy vegan foods at farmer’s markets or other retail outlets that provide healthful plant foods, and to become engaged in the political process by expressing you opinions about pending legislative items. (People can learn of these by contacting Farm Sanctuary.)

How would you respond to those people who object that a compassionate food system simply wouldn't feed America? That the nation needs factory farms and "efficient" assembly stockyards because family farms simply can't meet demand?

The production of foods derived from animals is inherently inefficient, and there are many unrecognized external costs. We can produce more food and healthier food by eating plants directly rather than by feeding them to farm animals.

I think this one is a related question to the previous one. Does the system have to be revolutionized? Can you count on big retailers and food operators to buy humane? Or do we need to change the entire way of doing things? Of course, that's a huge idea because it's not just about food, it's about agriculture and land-use policies and about increased pricing.

I think change will occur on various tracks. I believe there can be small adjustments on the part of large companies to eliminate some of the most egregious cruelties, which are positive steps, but I believe we need a completely reformed food system. Rather than relying on consolidation, globalization and industrialization, I think we need to get back to more of a community based system, with smaller farms producing food for local markets.

I'd like to thank Mr. Baur and encourage everyone to read his book. It would be educational to interview a farmer next, someone who doesn't meet all of the organic criteria but still considers him- or herself a "good," conscientious farmer. I'll see what I can do.

Do You Like Totally Cool Stuff?

2008-12-05T14:58:00.006-05:00

To be entertained, engaged, challenged? Are you interested in art or the fundamental condition of humankind? Ever curious about the caged bird and why it insists on singing? Do you want to explore that recessed territory where the intellect meets the viscera?

If so, I'd recommend heading out to your nearest Borders, Barnes & Noble, or other purveyor of fine literary vittles. For this is happening today, and Peter Guralnick is sort of awesome....

P.S. I've got a pretty nifty interview coming on Monday.

A Quick Note on Broccoli and the Blog

2008-12-05T14:03:00.005-05:00

If you haven't noticed already, I'm retooling the layout of the blog and adding new features and widgets. Please forgive any untidiness during this time. Because of its size issues, the calendar has been suffering from all sorts of permutations. For the time being, I've decided to move it from the sidebar to the bottom of the page beneath the posts. It should make the events more readable. (I'd also like to stop a moment and give wholehearted thanks for Wikipedia. I think we all take its information resources for granted, but as a blogger wary of copyright infringement, I am inexpressibly grateful for Wikimedia Commons and its archive of photographs, i.e. broccoli.)

The giant picture is a rather loud transition to my next topic. There's been some discussion as to why the broccoli leaves are yellowing. I had thought, based on some past discussion with Celia Barss over at Woodland Gardens, there actually might be too much nitrogen in the soil. However, after some cursory googling, the answer is indubitably more simple and obvious: cold. August and September are average harvest times in the Northern Hemisphere. It's been unseasonably chilly in North Georgia this year. If you're florets are limping along and the leaves are getting puny, your plants probably need some nighttime cover.

Here's what the The Guardian says on the matter:

Calabrese needs to grow steadily and so will need a fair bit of attention. Keep weeds back and make sure you water your crop in dry weather and protect under cloches if cool weather sets in (while the leaves of calabrese are hardy, the flowering shoots are susceptible to frost). As your sprouting broccoli begins to flourish, you may find you need to stake it and/or build soil up around the stem to support it. Remove any yellowing or fallen leaves and burn them to prevent fungal diseases setting in.

"The Price of Sugar" at Cine

2008-12-04T16:16:00.006-05:00

I just added to the calendar an event happening tonight in Athens at Cine. Since the calendar still needs to be resized, I'm going to repeat the description here:

Film: The Price of Sugar, sponsored by 1000Faces Coffee

Brownie Competition and Coffee Tasting at 6pm
Movie starts at 7pm
Admission is $15
All proceeds go to Bottles for Babies

"We will also be pouring our Finca El Injerto for the first time. It's good! I've been drinking it all morning. Taste notes from this morning suggested hints of Spanish Red Wine and Meyer Lemon."--Benjamin Meyers, 1000Faces owner/roaster/hustler.

Here's Cine's description of the film:

1,000 FACES COFFEE hosts a special evening of coffee, brownies, and a screening of the documentary film THE PRICE OF SUGAR. In the Dominican Republic, a tropical island-nation, tourists flock to pristine beaches unaware that a few miles away thousands of dispossessed Haitians have toiled under armed-guard on plantations harvesting sugarcane, much of which ends up in U.S. kitchens. They work grueling hours and frequently lack decent housing, clean water, electricity, education or healthcare. Narrated by Paul Newman, the documentary follows Father Christopher Hartley, a charismatic Spanish priest, as he organizes some of this hemisphere's poorest people to fight for their basic human rights. This film raises key questions about where the products we consume originate and at what human cost they are produced.

Fowl Exhaust

2008-12-03T16:57:00.006-05:00

If you ever find yourself in the Gainesville, Georgia area and you're struck with a sudden irresistible curiosity to learn about local environmental and agricultural issues, then Debbie Gilbert at the Times is your go-to gal. Today she reminds us the city's not called "the poultry capital of the world " for nothing, answering that age-old question that everyone who's ever waited at a stoplight behind one of those eighteen-wheel chicken trucks has asked herself: Is it OK for me to breathe this?

[R]esearchers at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health recently analyzed the types of bacteria that end up on (and inside of) cars that drive behind chicken trucks. Johns Hopkins is located near the Delmarva Peninsula, a region that comprises portions of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia and has a high concentration of poultry farms. Researchers drove for 17 miles behind chicken trucks with their cars’ air conditioning turned off and the windows rolled down.
Afterward, they found elevated levels of bacteria on surfaces both inside and outside the cars. They also tested the air in the cars and found increased concentrations of airborne bacteria.
Some of these bacterial strains were resistant to three common types of antibiotics used to treat infections in humans. Those drugs also are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use as feed additives for broiler poultry.
However, the study provided no evidence that anyone has ever gotten sick from driving behind a chicken truck.

I was raised with much stronger concentrations of the nasty stuff, and the exposure hasn't made me chronically ill yet. In fact, my daddy said they used to put chicken manure on the top of my head, and that's the reason I'm as tall as I am now. When I do get sick, my family usually blames my "worminess." They're right; I'm pretty wormy, but maybe I had too much nitrogen growing up. (By the way, that's not me in the picture.)

If the thought of motes of chicken bacteria flying in your face didn't make you a little nauseous, then read this: Coal Mining Debris Rule Is Approved. Why not dump mountaintop rock and dirt in nearby streams and rivers? I mean, they're just sitting there doing nothing, indolently purling away.

Lean, Mean Organic Machine

2008-12-03T15:31:00.007-05:00

The New York Times has this story of a California pediatrician who ate nothing but organic food for three years to see if it would improve his health. The verdict? He's still eating organic. He says he gets sick less, and his urine is now a brilliant golden color, which is supposed to be a very good thing.

It's not surprising that he found eating organic while traveling a difficult task. His solution, in bold below, should have practical value for everyone.

At home, he said, the organic routine was relatively easy. Organic food is widely available, not just at stores like Whole Foods but at traditional supermarkets. He also shopped at farmer’s markets and joined a local community-supported agriculture group, or C.S.A. Because he bought less meat, the costs tended to balance out. And his family (two of his four children still live at home) largely went along with the experiment.

On the road, though, life was more challenging. In corporate cafeterias and convenience stores, he looked for stickers that began with the number 9 to signify organic; stickers on conventionally grown produce begin with 4.

Pictured: organic collards from Woodland Gardens in Winterville, Georgia.

Michael Pollan, Michael Pollan, Michael Pollan

2008-12-02T18:43:00.007-05:00

Guess who's the keynote speaker at the Georgia Organics 12th Annual Conference? You got it: paladin of the dinner plate, Michael Pollan. His bestselling book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, is almost by itself responsible for the current crusade of fervid localists and foodies against the inner aisles of the grocery store, stacked as they are with the polysyllabic preservatives and refined sugars of the corn industrial complex. Count me among the converted, although my own personal agricultural history brought me to his book in the first place. We all hope this is a lasting revolution, that Pollan can be our Harriet Beecher Stowe for a prismatic and vexed issue in a like-minded world.

Simply put, this is a huge coup for Georgia Organics. The celebrity that Pollan brings to the conference should make it the most successful yet. Beside, it's in Atlanta. Attendance will be through the roof. I'm having goosebumps with the hope that this could be a watershed event for the state.

Michael Pollan would be enough, but Georgia Organics has absolutely outdone itself. Have a gander at this preliminary schedule of workshops:

Whole Farm Planning: Alex Hitt (confirmed)

Mushrooms: Tradd Cotter (confirmed)

Intensive Urban Agriculture: Will Allen (confirmed)

Urban Homesteading: The Dervaes Family (requested)

Personally, I'm excited about each one, but Will Allen, a recent recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, is another unbelievable guest. Here's a video of him talking about his work.

Pre-Thanksgiving Thoughts

2008-11-26T16:55:00.004-05:00

OK...Terrence Malick, swimming, Austin, developers vs. environmentalists, William Greider and Sigur Ros.... That's a film I want to see. Here's the stupendous trailer for The Unforseen (thanks Ben).

I hope everyone's thinking a little harder about their food this Thanksgiving. Here are some Facebook groups with a local, organic, or sustainable repast in mind: Thanksgiving Local and Organic Food Challenge, Eat Local for Thanksgiving and Local Thanksgiving Challenge...and BEYOND!

Whatever the case, enjoy it!

On Blogging Peril: A Final Comment

2008-11-21T13:31:00.006-05:00

I pray you all enjoyed my overwrought statements on the le statement, aka [REDACTED]. I wish I could have offered some more practical directions on how to avoid a sneaky legal row. But I've never really been good at grimy specifics. Motivating the spirit is more my thing, and I've got a book of Tennyson quotes ready for any occasion. For instance, "he makes no friends, who never made a foe." How apropos!

In the interest of concluding the issue, I sought out a lawyer, who's also something of an academic virtuoso, for a disinterested opinion on the charge of defamation. This is what he had to say:

The funny thing about [...] both libel and slander is that we commit both all the time, but it's so hard to prove, assess damages, and litigate that you rarely see suits despite the regularity of the tort.

He also says we shouldn't forget that the law is a sophistical whore. Reasonable belief passes for truth. And in a defamation case, it's very possible that a statement can be found libelous with no damages being awarded.

So, I hope that ends it. Let's get back to thinking about, and eating good food.

Fearing the Self-Googler: A Note on Blogging, Excess, Reprisal and Legal Entanglement

2008-11-19T17:40:00.007-05:00

This is a modest blog. Through my own narrow lens, I've endeavored to build a public account of the modern environmental and agricultural situation in the United States and specifically, when it's available, in the South. I'll be the first to admit that the results have been fitful. I'm inclined to look at my work here as something like the little the blog that could, as it has refused to stop pumping and churning despite my deeply inconstant attention and purpose. Its persistence, which has somehow defied indolence, whim, and this author's peculiar stupidity, is inexpressibly heartening. However tiny its effects, I can only conclude that this blog continues to exist because it offers, at least for myself, a kind of spiritual fortification against an inhuman and rapacious progress of modernity.

Therefore, you can understand my shock when I recently received an email accusing me of slander and threatening legal action—for one, that my blog would be expunged if I did not remove the offense immediately. I'm not going to repeat the statement in question, as I feel the dispute has been resolved, and I do not have the time to see it perpetuated or the energy to match my accuser's incivility. In the spirit of fairness and common sense, the statement has been deleted in its entirety.

It was never my intention to impugn the integrity of the entity that I was accused of defaming. My errors, whatever they may have been, were the result of a possible overstep in articulating a matter of public interest and, if it is in fact the case, an honest mistake. Of course, I have no wish to comment about said entity now, other than to say I have no reason to believe at the moment that it is not perfectly viable and successful. I do wish, however, to make a few analytical points about the statement in question in an effort to reach some useful abstract conclusion for other bloggers.

First of all, the burden of proof is on the accuser. Was I inadvertent? Potentially. Guilty of slander? Maybe not. Like every legal issue, it's hardly simple, and my counsel is just as good at semantics as yours is. While I may have opined about the aesthetic value of an entity's name, I did not presume to present any fact about that entity. The charge of defamation might stand on firmer ground with my declaration that the Web site of such entity was no longer in operation. In this case I may have been unintentionally inaccurate, even though on the occasion of the relevant blog entry, I had found no contradictory evidence after a thorough investigation. Perhaps there were server problems at the time; nevertheless, it would be up to the accuser to produce proof of Web site functionality and seamless domain registration. That would seem to require an inordinate effort for what might be considered a paltry faux pas. Immeasurably more strenuous would be the accuser's attempt to prove the damage inflicted by a homely, little-read blog keeping to itself in the corner of the Internet: There were zero comments on that post. I would posit that the majority of my profile views are the gross tally of stumbling, accidental Web surfers. How and to what degree has the supposedly defamed entity been adversely affected by a statement that was made over a year ago and is only just now being brought up?

If this is First Amendment debate, I'm not equipped to pursue it there. I am curious, though, about the extension of my individual rights to blogging. I have no desire to fabricate lies or disseminate false information, but I wonder where my right to expression ends, i.e. whom can I call an ass? Is it that I can say I'm fearful of Dick Cheney or that I distust Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil's CEO, but have to bite my tongue with reference to ordinary figures? Is there a legal scale of damage that applies, or merely a practical one? Is it that if I claim both Rex Tillerson and Mr. Smith, owner of Smith's Flower Shop, are incompetent organizational leaders, each has a legitimate grievance for whatever injury to consumer confidence in his respective business I have created? Are these, in fact, the differences: that, relatively, the damage to Mr. Smith is greater, as his corporate entity lies outside of some standing public trust, and its welfare is consequently more susceptible to singular opinions—and that Mr. Smith, at the end of the day, has enough time and concern to prosecute me?

The academic issue whether to interpret defamation in a blog as slander or libel is also pertinent here. Whatever my scrawling pretensions, at this point I have never considered Rural Pen to be journalistic documentation. I have made general inquiries and attempted to record current events in the midst of their unfolding and uncertainty. Like most bloggers, my tone has always tended toward the personal and confessional, and I have composed under the notion that I was having an informal (and sporadic) conversation with a few like-minded readers, real and imagined. Because of my use of the first person, my tone, and the temporal nature of a blog, I would think that I could be guilty of slander—unfortunate cries in the moment—but not libel.

However, this incident has forced me to rethink my idea of Internet publication. On the one hand, blogging is an ephemeral user experience. When I read the email notifying me of impending legal action, I did not remember the statement in question because, as I said, over a year had passed since its composition. It had been written as most bloggers write, like diarists, and was part of the normal blogging process of quasi-linked utterances. If I considered my statement in some way “past,” my accuser did not. And the discrepancy in understanding probably owes to the remarkable exactitude of search engines. I haven't googled anything in the last year that would have returned that particular blog post in the results. But I would suspect, that perhaps after some vain googling, my accuser found the offending statement readily presented to him or her as it would be to anyone who makes the same search—that is, as an almost permanent document. And, obviously, such permanence can entail liability and requires particular editorial conscientiousness.

I find it hard to walk away from this legal threat without an increased sense of self-importance, which should be shared with other bloggers. No sane person would bring suit against a commenter on an online article or a poster in a forum. But it's clear that a blogger commands substantially more respect. I'll spare you a cliché about power and responsibility because the moral here is not to check. Instead, watch your words, not with jeopardy in mind, but influence.

One effect of this experience is that in the future I'll be loath to poke fun of any domain name. Also, in order to prepare other bloggers for a similar experience, I am pasting my accuser's letter below with names and the statement in question all redacted. I think it speaks for itself. But I suppose it's nice just to be on someone's mind.

Donn,

I've just come across your entry for [REDACTED] where you state, [REDACTED].

I am the designer, owner and proprietor of [REDACTED], and am demanding you remove this statement, as [REDACTED] is not, and has never been, [REDACTED]. Not only is this slander and defamation of character, it's false and inaccurate information posted in response to your obvious dislike for [REDACTED].

The remainder of your blog entries suggest the type of intellect you possess, which obviously isn't much more than the "chicken shit" occupation you boast on your profile. One thing I'm sure you will understand, however, is that I've contacted my attorney regarding this matter and will not hesitate to pursue your slanderous behavior through legal channels, which I've been advised is well within my rights. I've already contact Blogger and Google in response to this, and unless you remove the above referenced statements, you will leave me no choice than to make removing your entire Rural Pen site my next project.

Regards,
[REDACTED]

Georgia Sheep

2008-10-30T18:45:00.006-05:00

It's all well and good for a blog to be a kind of repository for major MEDIA stories touching on important environmental and agricultural matters. It's important even, when the nonstop cycle of news threatens to crush your attention span like a juggernaut. Doting is necessary. Forming a narrative and a sense of concentrated consciousness is indispensable.

But it's also easy. I don't like the idea of this blog as nothing more than a link parade to the Washington Post. My Protestant blood accuses me of laziness, while my political bones grind with impatience. What profit is another window to the calamitous world? I'm tired of pointing and drooling and sometimes shaking my fist at the thunderheads.

If there's no comfort in worry and outrage, there must be in alternative. I can echo complaints of the situation at hand, or I can work to achieve preferable agricultural, environmental, and economic systems within my small sphere of influence.

Think globally, act locally. I despise bumper commandments, but few of us can live in Eden. The rest must grow it around ourselves. My Eden begins today with sheep:

I learned about Shady Brook Sheep Farm after reading about farmer Jennif Chandler's possible deal with Athens-Clarke County for her sheep to eat the kudzu, privet and honeysuckle invading local parks. Then some friends from Flagpole shoveled home a truckload of manure for their winter gardens. I hope to have an interview with Jennif soon. Until then, check out her Web site and buy some lamb.

(And don't forget about the Georgia Sheep and Wool Growers' Association.)

Election Fever, Sorry Y'all

2008-10-30T16:40:00.001-05:00

(Thanks, Vim)

Catfish Wars Update

2008-10-15T17:00:00.004-05:00

It's not just about high feed and fuel prices. The New York Times Magazine has an article about American catfish farmers' secret weapon against Asian impostors and the international free market: Branding. Good bye catfish! Hello Delacata!

By the way, that's a picture of a Northwest Arkansas catfish. He's a big boy--so big that he and his cronies ate some of the ducklings on the pond. The long, thick fillets were delicious, but they tasted nothing like duckling.

Check out more from New York Times Magazine, including Michael Pollan's letter to the next President.

Look Out, Wild Horses, Rare Sea Turtles

2008-10-15T15:54:00.005-05:00

Here comes the internal combustion engine. Cumberland Island, "a federally protected wilderness off the Georgia coast that’s larger than Manhattan," will soon be hosting bus tours:

For more than 25 years, government rules have required most of the 43,500 visitors who come each year to explore the island on foot. But under a mandate from Congress, the Park Service plans to change that early next year by offering daily motorized tours in spite of the tough terrain and cries of protest from environmentalists.

....

Park Service ranger Pauline Wentworth says she often hears visitors, particularly seniors, say they wish they could take a bus or van tour.

Most, she says, have a particular destination in mind: “They want to see the church where JFK Jr. got married.”

....

Congress intervened in 2004 with a law removing the Main Road and two others from the wilderness designation that protects the surrounding forest. The same law ordered the Park Service to provide daily tours. Rep. Jack Kingston, a Savannah Republican, got the measure passed as part of a larger spending bill.

“The way it was, only an 18-year-old backpacker could walk the 13 miles up the trail to see some of these historical sites,” Kingston said. “This island is not paid for by some of the taxpayers for some of the people. I don’t think John Q. Taxpayer should have to walk 13 miles to see Plum Orchard.”

Ugh. I realize that the island isn't free of human influence: A few homes and a B&B speckle the landscape. But there's no reason to disrupt or change the current state of affairs. It seems the future of Cumberland Island, like most wilderness areas, depends upon its inaccessibility. The more people come, the more people find interest in the island (damn you, JFK Jr., and execrable pop insignificance), the more the essence of the island will be jeopardized. I guess that means I shouldn't add to its publicity.

Let's all recite together our Gerard Manley Hopkins:

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Urban Garden Deluxe

2008-10-15T14:58:00.003-05:00

Will Allen, urban farmer and recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Fellow Award:

I found the video on TheWhoFarm's Web site (HT: Ben). "TheWhoFarm (aka The White House Organic Farm Project) is a non-partisan, petition-based initiative to respectfully request that our 44th President oversee the planting of an organic farm on the grounds of The White House, our nation’s First Home, at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, DC." I've pasted their plan below. Visit their site and sign the petition.

The White House Organic Farm Recipe

Article I: The Farmers
Public school children and Americans with disabilities will work The White House Organic Farm, to set an example for the world of hands-on learning and will foster an independent, do-it-yourself work ethic.

Article II: The Eaters
The White House Organic Farm's harvest will provide fresh food for the President, the President's family, and the President's distinguished guests. Just as importantly, it will also supply healthy food to public school lunch programs and food pantries in Washington, DC.

Article III: The Delivery
Food from The White House Organic Farm will be delivered to local public schools and food pantries by volunteers on foot and by bicycle, at a net-zero cost to U.S. taxpayers.

Article IV: The Seeds
The White House organic farmers will plant a diverse mix of heirloom seeds passed down from Thomas Jefferson's farm at Monticello and seeds donated by American farmers and gardeners, to celebrate both the rich agricultural traditions of the Office of the President and the passions of everyday Americans for working her fertile and bountiful land.

Article V: The Soil
The White House Organic Farm will use healthy topsoil, nourished by compost supplements from yard and food waste from all three branches of the federal government; from The White House, from The United States Capitol, and from The United States Supreme Court.

R.I.P. David Foster Wallace

2008-09-17T13:22:00.002-05:00

Is it not possible that future generations will regard our own present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Aztec sacrifices? My own immediate reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme—and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I have not succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

and/or

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

From Consider the Lobster

Fieldale's Woes

2008-08-19T23:08:00.004-05:00

I'm copying and pasting Harris Blackwood's article from the Gainesville Times because it hits close to home:

Fieldale Farms Corp., the Baldwin-based poultry processor, has announced the layoff of 20 administrative employees and plans to leave 10 other positions vacant.

Tom Hensley, executive vice president of the company said the layoffs were due to rising prices for feed and fuel.

“Our feed cost have increased $2 million a week,” Hensley said. “Our diesel fuel costs have increased $16,000 a day for a six-day week.”

Hensley, who has been in the business for 33 years, said the current situation “is as tough as I’ve seen it.”

The company has cut back production; however, Hensley said no jobs related to production were lost in the cutback. He said the company offered the employees a generous severance and is doing everything it can to help them find new employment.

He said the company has not cut back on the number of chickens being placed with contract farmers, however, the company has delayed placement of chicks by a day to extend the production cycle.

Hensley said other poultry companies are suffering from the two-pronged problem of feed and fuel costs.

Corn prices have skyrocketed in the past year due largely to the demand for corn for ethanol production.

The Fieldale executive said retail chicken prices cannot keep pace with the internal costs of production.

“People are just willing to pay so much for chicken, then, they’ll start eating beans,” Hensley said.

Industrial Vs. Grass-Fed in Three Minutes

2008-08-10T13:10:00.003-05:00

Cows eat M&M's?

Thanks Philpott!

Global Food, Global Crisis

2008-08-10T12:47:00.003-05:00

Grist reviews Paul Roberts' new book, The End of Food. The passage below, by Tom Philpott, speaks to the historical white elephant sitting among the foodies, locavores and even animal-rights advocates (although, as someone with intimate knowledge of a factory farm, I can hardly argue that there isn't room for a more humane food system):

But Robert's historical frame drives home a key point that his predecessors didn't quite nail down: In many ways, modern food production is an attractive response to centuries of chronic food insecurity. Who wants to spend nearly all of one's income on food, and rely on sugared tea as a key source of calories, as did the 19th-century British working class? Who wants to spend hours a day preparing food as peasant women did, not by choice but for survival? By the dawn of the 20th century, people quite understandably longed for food security and freedom from drudgery. The modern food system -- for all of the new problems it created -- largely met those desires, at least in the United States and Europe. The locavore movement will eventually have to confront them head on.

Philpott also writes that Monsanto is selling its rights to make Posilac, or rGBH...

Posilac had become increasingly marginal to Monsanto's profit growth, which derives mainly from its dominance of the genetically modified corn, soy, and cotton seed markets.

Vanity Fair's terrifying investigation of Monsanto: Harvest of Fear.

Catifsh & Co.

2008-08-09T15:39:00.003-05:00

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published a fine article on the embattled catfish industry in its August 6 edition (subscription required but follow the link for the picture; and while you're at it, do a google image search for giant catfish). I don't have any comments, except that the best catfish I've ever had was at Taylor Grocery in Taylor, Mississippi. It is interesting that catfish are very much a regional product, farmed primarily in Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama.

Increased feed prices, driven by record-high soybean and corn prices, have stressed the budgets of all U.S livestock farmers--beef, poultry, swine and catfish. But the catfish industry has suffered the most for two reasons, said, Terry Hanson, an agricultural economist at Mississippi State University.

One, feed is a larger share of the variable cost of catfish production, 52 percent in 2007, compared with 35 percent for hogs and 21 percent for cattle, he said.

Second, the U.S. catfish industry must contend with more imports. In 2007, imported catfish accounted for 36 percent of industry sales, compared with just 9 percent for beef, 4 percent for pork and less than 0.00001 percent for poultry products, Hanson said.

"These other industries, while they can't pass on all the higher feed costs, they can pass on some because they have no import that's going to fill the void if people decide not to purchase the higher-priced meat product," Hanson said.

Wow, look at the market dominance of domestic poultry! Here's a good trivia question: Why is it that trout are aggressively advertised as being wild-caught, but catfish as being farm-raised?

Ecocrit

2008-08-06T11:10:00.004-05:00

"Of course, readers have always been willing to pull on their mental boots and journey to places in books they would never think of visiting in the flesh. Millions have read Walden and Life on the Mississippi, yet how many have built a hut in the woods or rafted down the river? What is new about contemporary readers is not their preference for indoor life, but how far indoors they are able to retreat and how long they are able to stay there. The boxes that shut us off from nature have become more perfect, more powerful, from all-electric mansions in the suburbs to glass towers in the city, from space shuttles to shopping malls. Today, the typical adult reader leaves a humming house in the morning, drives an air-conditioned car to a sealed office, works eight hours under fluorescent lights, stops on the way home at night to buy dyed vegetables and frozen meat wrapped in plastic, enters the house through a garage and locks the door. Except for lawns, which are fertilized and purified to an eerie shade of green, and a smoky sky, and a potted plant or two, everything this reader sees all day had been made by human beings. Only the body itself stubbornly upholds the claims of biology, and even this biological datum our reader treats with chemicals designed to improve or delay the workings of nature."

From "Speaking a Word for Nature," Scott Russell Sanders. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. UGA Press, 1996.

Also, upcoming from UGA Press: What Is a City? Rethinking the Urban After Hurricane Katrina edited by Phil Steinberg and Rob Shields ($19.95), a collection of essays by 12 planners, architects, policy-makers, and geographers.

Snapshots

2008-08-05T14:47:00.005-05:00

Jennifer Campbell, from Tiger, Georgia:

“My husband thinks we're going to have another Depression. But the people these days don't know how to get along. What are they going to do without their TVs and cell phones? It's going to be ugly.”

Interviewed at Zack's Too gas station in Hoschton, Georgia.

Feed & Seed

2008-08-04T11:20:00.003-05:00

In May I went to Maddox Feed & Seed in Jefferson, Georgia to interview the proprietors about how rising fuel costs, the price of corn, and the ongoing drought were affecting business. I spent two hours inside, gathered my quotes, and wrote an article for the newspaper. However, I could have grabbed a chair and stayed there all week. A feed-and-seed and farm supply store is a goldmine of decent people and good talk. Everybody who walks in has a story that'll make your hackles stand up and is ready to tell it. Unfortunately, I wonder how much longer places like Maddox will survive in North Georgia. Maddox itself is in a precarious position on the south end of Jefferson, as that part of the county is rapidly suburbanizing and pushing out its farmers.

The following is an assortment of quotations from the owner and her son, Caleb. Each is speaking to the worst case scenario of rising fuel and feed prices and an intensifying drought:

“There's people been giving away horses.”
“Drought, [no] hay, fuel, corn—what's going to happen next year?”
“Despite what people think, we're not making a dollar a bag on a bag of corn.”
“You can't find any hogs right now.”
“Fertilizer is up 30-40 percent.”
“The fertilizer companies have decided they're going to make money because the farmers [with corn] are going to make money.”
“There's a lot of fields that were planted last year that are idle this year.”
“The only end that's really making any money is the fuel end of stuff.”

Know Your Milk

2008-08-04T11:11:00.002-05:00

What is rBGH?

I'm swiping this definition entirely from Ben & Jerry's, which produced a small pamphlet explaining its thoughts on a “synthetic, chemically-intensive, factory-produced food supply.” I love that they call out Monsanto and can't wait for the oncoming transnat war, as imagined by Kim Stanley Robinson, that will end capitalism, democracy, and civilization as we know it. Right now I'm hoping it's a no-holds-barred bout between Exxon-Mobil in one corner and an alliance of ConAgra and Archer Daniels Midland in the other.

Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone is a genetically engineered copy of a naturally occurring hormone produced by cows. The naturally occurring hormone regulates the amount of milk a cow can produce; the genetically engineered copy of the hormone is used specifically to boost those amounts.

rBGH is manufactured by Monsanto Company, which sells the drug to dairy farmers under the name POSILAC (though it's more commonly referred to as BGH, rBGH, BST or rBST); farmers inject rBGH/POSILAC into cows for the purpose of increasing the cows' milk production.

If you read the label information on POSILAC, you'll see th manufacturer indicates that injections of the drug may cause a wide variety of serious healthy problems in cows. Some studies report a 79% increase in mastitis (infection of the udder) resulting in greater need for antibiotics, reduced pregnancy rates, cystic ovaries and uterine disorders, digestive disorders and lacerations, enlargements and calluses of the knee. As to milk's nutritional content, some studies have shown that the use of rBGH increases the time during which cows give milk with decreased protein.

The use of rBGH to treat dairy cows is prohibited in Canada and the European Union.

For Ben & Jerry's, rBGH solves “a problem that never existed.” Besides the health of the cows, their biggest concern is that the FDA “does not require that food products be labeled when they contain milk from treated cows” because that agency sees no qualitative difference, at least for the health of consumers, between normal milk and synthetic rBGH milk. And since there are also no “uniform state labeling standards,” shoppers often purchase and drink milk from rBGH-treated cows without knowing it.

Ben & Jerry's duly notes that the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (www.vpirg.org) helped compile this information. I owe Claire thanks for passing it along.

Stepping Away from Food: The Nature of the Beast

2008-08-03T13:45:00.003-05:00

Continuing from the previous post, perhaps I'm being overly sensitive to the often cadaverous finger-pointing of the newspaper trade in general. To each his own, and it's probably unacceptable to expect conscience and creativity from something that never promised either in the very first place. But, on the other side, “baby accidentally suffers burns in hot bath”—come on? We all open and close our eyes to the overly mundane and inane of our meager circumferences; giving ready voice to it only adds to a chattering chaotic world that's already threatening to slip through our collective grip.

There's too much data. The world is too cold and objective. I don't need computer read-outs of social entropy. I'm looking for a human voice.

The Times-Picayune has concluded an eight-part feature on one local homicide. Is it a harbinger of a different kind of reporting? I'm not sure. The behind-the-scenes account seems to borrow something from cable television. But it's damn interesting, and the reader is actually allowed to see and feel for the players: the detectives, the family, and the victim.

You're Never Going To Believe This: Gardens

2008-08-03T13:33:00.003-05:00

The Washington Post published an article in the August 3 edition about the rise in the number of vegetable gardens nationwide. Honestly, there's nothing really new here, and I think I've seen the same article, at some point in the past several months, on the Web sites of every major news publication in the U.S. The angle has usually been the same: Rising fuel and food costs are leading to more locally-grown and home-grown tomatoes. I'm not necessarily complaining—Lord knows, it's heartening to see stories about community food efforts pop up on the Times-Picayune and Journal-Constitution. But at this point, as a pure news item, it seems like a fall-back and another space filler.

You know as someone who advocates a sacramental vision, like that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, I'm just nutty about the dreadful modern worship of numbers. However, I did find one passage in the article, and its horrible statistics, particularly interesting:

In New York City, more than 3 million residents, 38 percent of the population, had difficulty affording food last year, according to a recent report by the Food Bank for New York City -- up 13 percentage points from 2003. Food costs rose 15 percent during that period. The number of people using soup kitchens and food pantries hit 1.3 million last year, up 24 percent from 2004. LINK

Did I read that right? People are starving. Hopefully, there's something here that envisages organic, locally-grown food as a public right, and not simply a boutique, status-sensitive icon, like an iPhone. You could even ditch the organic part and just increase the number of urban gardens. Beyond the philosophical and theological arguments about the experience of being close to food, there's simply no drawback in a ubiquity of food. Inundate the world with vegetables from California, Florida, Chile, and around the block. I find no sin in a rotted cucumber if everyone's belly is full.

It's such a fine line, haranguing against the wrong kind of food while people go hungry. Social justice and the long-term health of inner-city residents consuming food products high in artificial hormones, antibiotics, trans fats, etc. has to be secondary to immediate needs. Yet there's no revolution without shocking the system.

Which leads me to another article. Los Angeles is trying to zone out fast-food restaurants in the same way as liquor stores in order to protect the health of its citizens. William Saletan of Slate gives his opinion here.

New Digs 2.0

2008-07-30T21:59:00.005-05:00

The side field: It's cow Christmas here now after we patched all the fences and let them in. But the deer like to graze around sunset. I've never seen so many in my life. Thirty-five at one time is my highest count so far.

The view from the back toward Fayetteville: You can almost see that the Boston Mountains are more of a big washed-out plateau than actual mountains. The National Forest is in the other direction.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Sane Energy Strategies

2008-07-29T13:42:00.004-05:00

Although this July was wetter than last year's, Georgia is still in the midst of an extreme drought. That's why it came as an extreme surprise when, two months ago, Jackson County modified its watering ban and encouraged citizens to go out and wet the grass on weekends. The move wasn't just surprising; it was insensible. What?! But we haven't had any appreciable rain.

"That's right," said the water authority, "but water conservation is working too well. We're not making any money because we're hardly selling anything. We need people to start using more water."

Sounds bassackwards doesn't it? I never considered that it worked this way, but utilities are basically organized like any other commercial industry. They manufacture a product--clean water, electricity, etc.--and sell their supply. Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center of American Progress and former acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy 1997 (a title so long it's probably meaningless), explained the situation and offered, alternatively, smart government-backed conservation initiatives, in the line of what California has done, in a recent Salon article:

Well, that's pretty much how we have run the U.S. electric grid for nearly a century. The more electricity a utility sells, the more money it makes. If it's able to boost electricity demand enough, the utility is allowed to build a new power plant with a guaranteed profit. The only way a typical utility can lose money is if demand drops. So the last thing most utilities want to do is seriously push strategies that save energy, strategies that do not pollute in the first place.
America is the Saudi Arabia of energy waste. A 2007 report from the international consulting firm McKinsey and Co. found that improving energy efficiency in buildings, appliances and factories could offset almost all of the projected demand for electricity in 2030 and largely negate the need for new coal-fired power plants. McKinsey estimates that one-third of the U.S. greenhouse gas reductions by 2030 could come from electricity efficiency and be achieved at negative marginal costs. In short, the cost of the efficient equipment would quickly pay for itself in energy savings.

New Digs

2008-07-13T20:57:00.006-05:00

I may have eulogized the garden and lamented leaving it. I got exceedingly comfortable inside the ecosystem of my urban yard in Athens. The mockingbirds were used to my rumbling around their nest. And I liked the contrast of robins against a fence or a jalopy. But...

I'd be a fool not to admit that I've stumbled upon a pretty sweet gig...

Stay away from Rogers, sober golf, and the soul-patched shitheads with too much cologne, and northwest Arkansas is breathtaking. The view of the Boston Mountain fluctuating into Fayetteville will knock your socks off. I'd say at this point it's worth the odd seed tick, brown recluse, rattlesnake, or black bear.

Better lit photos to come as soon as I've finished a kind of waking ecstasy.

The Question Is the Answer

2008-07-07T09:28:00.004-05:00

The AP is looking for a retail reporter in Northwest Arkansas to cover Wal-Mart and, apparently, the postmodern condition, which may or may not be located in Bentonville.

This reporter anchors AP's coverage of Wal-Mart's global operations, including its relationships with key suppliers. As part of a team dedicated to covering the retailing and consumer product sectors, this newsperson contributes spot news and authoritative, compelling and useful enterprise stories and packages on Wal-Mart as well as other key retailing topics. This person handles stories on a wide scope of business events, including strategic initiatives, quarterly earnings, acquisitions and regulatory actions. The successful candidate will at times be asked to take charge of the biggest story of the day – a potentially game-changing strategic decision by Wal-Mart or another retailer, an earnings or a blockbuster M&A deal – and fashion it to illuminate for online and print readers how remote-seeming and complex forces affect their lives. He or she will occasionally be asked to cover companies outside of the beat, and may be asked to help cover major general spot news in the surrounding area.

It's an important one, so good luck to whoever gets the job. Dealing with Sam Walton's company is like trying to wheedle a 500-pound gorilla. I've known a couple of folks who've tried, and I imagine it's easier to get a straight, candid answer out of the White House.

Also on the topic of media jobs in NWA: The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is seeking an experienced reporter to cover Tyson Foods, the world’s largest meat company, and other poultry and meat processors. We’re looking for a journalist who can develop sources with local ranchers and niche farmers while covering breaking and enterprise news concerning a major Fortune 500 company with holdings worldwide.

Leaving the Garden

2008-07-06T23:01:00.013-05:00

Traversing the South seems to me my one true profession: I'm good at it. Chestnut Mountain, Georgia to Fayetteville, Arkansas in only nine hours. But I'm an amateur, in the light-headed literal sense, of almost all else. The least is hardly my garden, which I abandoned on the Fourth of July to fortuity and unkind weather patterns. I'm off to follow urgent pursuits, and I hope, as an anxious father might, I've implanted and trained my vegetables as best I could. I suppose the squash, tomatoes, roses were always for other people, anyway. May they give as much pleasure at the table as they gave me in the dirt.

Here are some pictures to mark the end of my invigilation:

Caterpillar and Meal: This was the second I found on my big, healthy tomatoes growing from seed. Neither is currenlty living. No pictures of my one potted plant languishing with rust.

Corn. Everything in the soil was busted, carved, and removed by hand. As I bent over working the dirt and getting secretly sunburnt on my lower back, I'd chant a half-lame nursey rhyme to myself, holding up alternate arms, saying, "This is my harrow, and this is my plow, and everything that happens, happens right now."

Okra: Here the sun has yet to rise high enough for the flower to open up. See a previous post.

Cucumber: This plant growing against the fence is not prospering as well as the ones in the mounds by the rosemary bush. Notice the bee in the flower. This is not a honey bee, but they do swarm over the squash and lavender thyme blooms in the mornings. I usually go out with my cup of coffee to watch.

Squash. Old rough and ready. No matter the heat, I can always count on squash. This plant, which doesn't receive full sun, is especially thriving. There's a lesson here--and a bee in there.

Pepper: The only thing I didn't plant from seed. These little numbers are hot and plentiful and are as equally appealing for their smooth, almost laminate texture.

Scuppernong. Damn shame. Along with figs, I enjoyed adding the native Southern grape to morning fruit shakes last summer. You always knew at my dad's house when the muscadines were in bloom because their fragrance would overpower the air. It was the second wild treat of the season, after blackberries.

No pictures of arugula, basil, or watermelon. Said thyme and honey bee (bird bath in background):

Vayas con Dios.

Alliance of Religion and Conservation

2008-06-23T07:13:00.006-05:00

I've been squatting on this for a while, meaning to post something. Recently, the Pope's been calling attention to the need for RELIGION and the globe's wisdom traditions to reinvest significance in a world that's devolved into little less than a furnace for number-crunching. Specifically regarding Christianity and the environment, there's too often an eschatological argument for inaction and a worrisome angelus of "what's the use?" This tone, of course, has less to do with the faith than the culture it's subsumed by, operating as an excuse for arrogant resignation, reactionary politics, and material greed:

First a link to the ALC's website:

Christians increasingly recognise the need to repent for what harm has been done to reation. In the words of the Orthodox Patriarchate, ‘This may well mean that just as a shepherd will in times of greatest hazard lay down his life for his flock, so human beings may need to forego part of their wants and needs in order that the survival of the natural world can be assured.
The challenge to all Christians is to discover anew the truth that God’s love and liberation is for all creation, not just humanity, and to seek new ways of living that restore balance and hope of life to the endangered planet.

An NPR interview with Martin Palmer, ALC founder:

For one thing, these religions are in for the long haul. So they can tackle long-lasting problems like climate change. They also know how to talk to people — and not with scientific data.

"There are tens of thousands of scientists who do that perfectly well," Palmer says. "What we want to bring is the passion, the commitment ... and the interpretation of meaning that religion brings to that data."
...

"My understanding of my God — and I work with many, many different religious traditions — is that my God is not there to solve the problems," Palmer says. "My God is there to say, 'You are co-creators with me, now... work out what that means.'"

"It is not about, if we pray hard enough to God, he will end climate change. Yes, we should pray to God. We should also get off our backsides, get out there, and do something about it," he says.

Ecology, Russian

2008-06-22T23:18:00.007-05:00

This all comes back to the verities lost in the lust for science and chemical shortcuts. Joel Salatin says he's first and foremost a grass farmer, and in this passage from Anna Karenina, Tolstoy talks about rotational grazing, returning the nutrients to the soil, and the sensitive, meditating stewardship of the land. Listen, as well, to the mesmerizing cadences of Tolstoy's prose. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation is duly lauded.

The further he rode, the happier he felt, and plans for the estate, one better than another, arose in his mind: to plant willows along the meridional lines of all the fields, so that the snow would not stay too long under them; to divide them into six fertilized fields and three set aside for grass; to build a cattle-yard at the far end fo the field and dig a pond; to set up movable pens for the cattle so as to manure the fields. And then he would have eight hundred acres of wheat, two hundred and fifty of potatoes, and four hundred of clover, and not a single acre exhausted.

And now because it's late, I have something for you hearty young men. May you dream tonight of strong white calves, fresh in the spring:

Having admired the cows, familiar to him down to the smallest details, Levin ordered them driven to pasture and the calves let out into the pen. The cowherd ran merrily to get ready for the pasture. The dairymaids, hitching up their skirts, their bare, white, as yet untanned legs splashing in the mud, ran with switches after the calves and drove them, lowing and crazed with spring joy, into the yard.

Reveries on a Raven's Wing

2008-06-20T17:14:00.008-05:00

By June 20, exhortations on vegetable gardening arrive too late for a Southerner to flex his or her green thumb. As any seedling will tell you, it's too damn hot--not the proper situation for tender roots. Still, Slate makes a wise exhortation, reaffirming my own favorite truth that stewardship of one's yard is a matter of both economy and miracle.

One rule I had this year when I began to map out my garden was that an eggplant could be just as lovely as a coneflower, if not more so. Last summer I watched the delicate soft-yellow flowers of okra open in the morning and shyly retire as the sun rose (picture source: BanyanTree). How could I ever choose a plant again that didn't offer caloric sustenance as well as the aesthetic kind? From Constance Casey's article:

But the less obvious and often overlooked pleasure in edible gardening is that the stuff is beautiful. You don't need to add flowers. A young peapod is translucent. Look closely, and you'll see that what seems to be a plain green plant can have an intriguing dark-red stem. Before its gorgeous, shiny-skinned, edible product appears, an eggplant has leaves with purple veins and a lavender flower with a tasteful yellow center.

Despite poor timing, I also like this piece because it does cut through the mysticism of growing plants to get to the reality of hard work and expertise:

But, to be realistic, the people who can feed themselves and their families from their own vegetable plot and save money doing it are rare. These people are extraordinarily diligent and patient, and, what's more, they're possessed of gigantic freezers and a willingness to explore the mysteries of canning.

What do you do with overabundance of squash? That's not the only problem. It's very likely that your vegetables will neither look as good nor, with the exception of tomatoes, taste as good as the ones in the grocery store. I know that's sacrilege for the Foodies, Locavores, and their ilk. But I'll bet you that the people growing squash for the grocery store know a hell of lot more about growing squash than you do. They've allo got some first-rate soil, first-rate fertilizer, and first-rate methods of keeping caterpillars from grinding their crop into a pulpy mess. What do you have, well-meaning organic greenhorn, Michael Pollan and a couple articles from the New York Times?

This is not an admonishment against gardening. Rather, it's a small personal exhortation for the very earthly glory of it, the fruit of labor, accident, and compromise. Kids are nothing if not difficult. Go have some.

High Global Food Prices Will Continue

2008-05-30T12:55:00.002-05:00

From the Washington Post:

About 33 percent of the expected rise in food prices over the next decade can be tied to biofuels, OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development] agriculture official Loek Boonekamp said, but the economic, environmental and energy-security benefits of diverting agriculture products to fuel "are probably smaller than commonly expected."

.....

Food prices in the past year have risen more than 20 percent in China, Kenya and Sri Lanka; more than 18 percent in Botswana and Pakistan; and 11 to 14 percent in Indonesia, South Africa, Egypt, Haiti and Bangladesh, according to the report.

No country has been immune. In the past year, the report says, the price of butter was up 50 percent in Poland, 40 percent in France and 36 percent in Jordan. Eggs rose 34 percent in the United States and 30 percent in Britain. The price of vegetable oil -- a key commodity in diets in developing countries -- rose 47 percent in Botswana and 18 percent in India. Meat prices jumped 45 percent in China.

High Pocket

2008-05-30T09:05:00.003-05:00

All dogs go to heaven. Only some go to Alabama.

Returning to the scene:

Enjoying Summer

2008-05-25T19:46:00.004-05:00

Revamping going on here. I shall return soon and with a vengeance.

P.S. Who's been watching the Farm Bill?

Bug Sex

2008-04-28T17:22:00.005-05:00

I'm not sure this is the best return after a work-imposed layoff, but here goes nothing. As my friend Sara says, Isabella Rossellini has still got it. I'll bet Gary Oldman could tell you that.

It's no more insane than Blue's Clues. (HT: Sara).

Where Do Farm Subsidies Go?

2008-03-26T14:10:00.002-05:00

From Mulch and the president of the Environmental Working Group:

How much pesticide does your peach have?

Wednesday! Chipotle!

2008-03-26T13:19:00.005-05:00

First, a Washington Post article about Chipotle Mexican Grill's endeavor to buy local pork from uber-farmer Joel Salatin and supply its Charlottesville store:

"For so many people, it's still about price," says Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold. "If a fast-food vendor can get meat for seven cents a pound less, then they'll drop their supplier. For us, it's about building relationships and knowing we'll have a better product over the long run."

Also, another intereting link: Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.

White People Like It

2008-03-21T13:44:00.000-05:00

Farmers Markets.

(HT: Dan)

More Collards: It's on, New York

2008-03-20T14:57:00.009-05:00

Here comes the gauntlet, New York. You want to champion hip viands and flaunt a semi-patronizing embrace of Southern cuisine? Well, this is the litmus for cool kids: authenticity, also called the chitlins test. Anybody can add smoked turkey legs from a gourmet market in Greenwich, but who's going to use turkey necks? Why would anyone use turkey necks? For the same reason he eats collards grown in the yard--he's poor.

So I improvised on the recipe from last week. Out were the cheap chicken legs (no turkey in the first place), in were cheaper turkey necks from Kroger (sacrilege, I know, but the only reliable supplier of meat in town). I think I paid less than three bucks for two and half pounds. It was a flight, honestly. The smooth muscles posed under the gloss of taut packaging like creamy Olympian gods. Suddenly, I found myself saying, "Neck? Neck. Yeah, neck. That sounds delicious." I like a good neck on a woman, and I like necking; naturally, I was going to like turkey necks too.

And I do. Nonetheless, I learned in media res why you don't see a whole lot of recipes that call for turkey necks. Try to pull the meat from the bone. Yes, there is some kind of bone. And as far as I can tell, it's shaped like a double helix. That is to say, it refuses clean cuts and wants to break into spiky fragments that jab under your fingernails like some kind of low-rent Vietnamese instrument of torture. Or, it's like trying to wrestle a rat snake sopped in vaseline. You'd better have fingers like Hercules.

All in all, it was worth it. The Lord blesses the bold, and experimentation is the spice of life.

How To Eat Dandelions

2008-03-13T09:42:00.001-05:00

Beats the hell out of me, but it can be done. It seems like it would take a week to collect a sufficient mess.

Let's watch chef and pythoness Alice Waters instead:

Gormandizer

2008-03-13T09:32:00.005-05:00

I'm not a good cook...yet. I'm trying, but I tend to be impatient, letting good ideas devolve into goulash. Too many ingredients, too little understanding of taste. So it pleases me immensely to announce I finally prepared a dish that other people have found halfway palatable. There's a lesson here about recipes versus inspiration.

I found this recipe for collard greens in the January 14 issue of New York magazine. It belongs to Charles Gabriel of Charles' Southern Style Kitchen. I never would have considered it had I not already possessed chicken drumsticks in the freezer (substituted here for smoked turkey) and some vibrant collards spinning their folate-filled leaves in the garden.

Ingredients:
 1 pound of smoked turkey wings or drumsticks (chickens works just fine too).
 8 cups of water.
 3 bunches (about 4 pounds) of collards.
 4 ounces of butter (this is a lot more butter than I realized).
 1 medium onion, chopped.
 1 tablespoon salt.
 1 tablespoon black pepper.
 2 tablespoons sugar.

Directions:

Put the meat in the pot with 8 cups of water. Bring to a boil over high heat. Turn heat down and cook for 90 minutes. Meanwhile, clean the collards. 1. Stem the leaves. 2. Roll up a few leaves at a time and cut them crosswise into ½-inch strips. Remove the meat from the pot, pull the meat away from the bones, and carefully strain the stock of any errant bones. Discard the bones and tear the meat into small pieces and stir it back into the pot. Add butter, chopped onion, and all the seasoning into the pot. 3. Add the collards a few handfuls at a time, stirring them until all the greens are in the pot. Simmer over low heat for 1 hour. Remove collards from pot with slotted spoon. Serves 4 to 6, depending on their size.

www.wholefoodsmarket.com

I also diced four red potatoes and added them to the pot with the meat. Don't forget to put the stems in your compost pile. And, if you're collards are fresh, don't worry about imperfections or bugs. Finally, I feel I should mention one particular collard plant that has been growing in my backyard for going on seven or eight months now. It's been with me so long, I'm thinking about it naming it.

As a whole, the meal was easy, odorous, and delicious. My only complaint is that you weren't there to share it.

Parade Magazine & Antibiotics in the Meat

2008-03-13T08:22:00.005-05:00

Singer Sheryl Crow: “You Have To Be Fearless.” OMG, illiterate kitties of the world are captivated. What's Oprah up to in Primetime? Hack, retch, retch—hairball. Parade is the worst kind of pap. Duh. Normally, I (gloating mandarin, artistic type) would never refer to it, but I'm hoping this particular “article” is evidence of saturation. From the Parade Intelligence Report, March 2:

Studies have linked animal use to increased antibiotic resistance in humans. In response to these concerns, McDonald's has told its direct poultry suppliers to refrain from using antibiotics for growth that also are used in people. Tyson Foods, the nation's largest meat processor, now is marketing chicken that has a label saying it was raised without human antibiotics. In addition, all meat bearing the green “USDA organic” seal has been verified by federally certified inspectors to come from animals that were never fed antibiotics.

Now how much of that do you have confidence in? The USDA? Totally, absolutely credible. What about parsing this semi-clause: has told direct poultry suppliers to refrain from using antibiotics for growth that also are used in people? Told; direct; for growth? Meow, meow, meow.

From Next Nature.

Folks To Know:
Animal Health Institute—pro liberal antibiotic use in livestock.
Keep Antibiotics Working Coalition—not so much.

Ash

2008-03-06T21:44:00.003-05:00

I'm indulging in one of my favorite avocations today: the intellectual crush. Currently, it's Timothy Garton Ash, the Oxford history don upon whom I stumbled on Charlie Rose the other night. When Rose wasn't interrupting in the interest of showing off a knack for repetition, Ash spoke with the kind of cogent, invigorating genius that makes all of England sparkle.

By luck, Ash is something of a Deutsch-phile, and he reviewed Nobel Prize-winner Gunter Grass's impressive memoir, Peeling the Onion, in an August 2007 edition of The New York Review of Books. What follows is a mishmash of liberal quotation, hopefully the most captivating and self-contained stuff:

The account of his tank unit's desperate action in April 1945, almost surrounded by advancing Russian troops, is one of the most vivid descriptions of the experience of war that I have read: Tolstoy crossed with Vonnegut. He hides under a tank from the rockets of one of the Red Army's so-called "Stalin organs" and wets his pants from fear. In the silence after the rockets stop, he distinctly hears beside him a loud, sustained chattering of teeth. The chattering teeth, he discovers when he crawls out from under the tank, belong to a senior officer of the Waffen-SS. The young enthusiast's image of the Teutonic hero begins to crumble. On the ground around them, "body parts were to be found."

He gets lost behind Russian lines. Wandering in the woods, exhausted, hungry, and afraid, he hears someone nearby. Friend or foe? Nervously he intones the beginning of a German folk song about little Hans wandering out "into the wide world" alone, "Hänschen klein ging allein...." To his immeasurable relief the hidden stranger responds with the rest of the line, "...in die weite Welt hinein." Had the other man been a Russian, we would probably have no Tin Drum. Instead, he's an avuncular German corporal, who advises the now seventeen-year-old Grass to take off his Waffen-SS jacket. If he is captured, the Russians won't take kindly to those double runes.

The Shelley reference here follows a selection from Auden's eulogy for Yeats:

Yet even here, let me attempt a rescue which goes beyond the realm of conscious intentions. What will be the effect of Grass's belated revelation? As he approaches the end of his life, as the memories of Nazism fade, as the activities of his SS-Frundsberg division become the object of weekend leisure war games in the United States, Grass suddenly demolishes his own statue—not as a writer of fiction, but as a moral authority on frank and timely facing up to the Nazi past—and leaves its ruins lying, like Shelley's Ozymandias, as a warning beside the roadside. Nothing he could say or write on this subject would be half so effective as the personal example that he has now left us. For sixty years even Günter Grass could not come clean about being a member of the Waffen-SS! Look, stranger, and tremble.

My goodness, the notes alone are worth the review:

2. Grass has a powerful imagination, but in his best fiction he draws from life. Take, for example, the fantastical performing dwarfs that appear in The Tin Drum. You might think they must have been invented. But in Peeling the Onion, Grass recalls how, on his way to join the Waffen-SS, he saw a group of dwarfs performing in the bomb shelter of a Berlin railway station.

8. Mailer, who indicated that this might be one of his last public appearances, also told the audience that the Grass story had prompted him to start "searching my own life," asking, "what have I held on to for a long, long time and never written about, and indeed...may never write about? And it seems to me that stabbing my wife, Adele, is probably what I will never write about."

(An audio recording of the event is available here.)

For some hint of Mailer's maniacal heyday, I refer you to an earlier post.

Meh

2008-03-06T21:35:00.002-05:00

Before the unsettling revelation that the Democratic primary season will go on and on and on....the Washington Post ran this critique of American narcissism. A selection:

Consider this paradox: Things are becoming more instantaneous in an era when delays are rampant and increasing. There are faster flights and cars but more people in airplanes and on the roads.

What has happened, even though companies are improving service, is that "customer expectations are continuing to rise," says Roger Nunley, managing director of the Customer Care Institute in Atlanta. This can be attributed to "consumers doing business online, where they get instant gratification and quick turnarounds. That's quickly becoming the standard expectation."

Change in expectations is a generational thing, experts say. People who grew up during the Depression were happy to have a job and stuck with one for a lifetime. Many members of generations X and Y were raised in a different light. They expect a buffet of opportunities and are peeved when they don't materialize.

Narcissism and entitlement among college students have increased steadily since 1979, according to a study to be published this year in the Journal of Personality. Between that year and 2006, 16,000 college students were asked to pick between such paired statements as "I expect a great deal from other people" and "I like to do things for other people," and "I will never be satisfied until I get all that I deserve" and "I will take my satisfactions as they come."

The data are clear: The ascent of narcissism and entitlement is dramatic.
"What we really have is a culture that has increasingly emphasized feeling good about yourself and favoring the individual over the group," says the study's co-author, Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University. "And that has happened across the board, culturally, and it's showing no signs of slowing down."
To complement her research, Twenge offers evidence from the field: "I have a 14-month-old daughter, and the clothing available to her has 'little princess,' or 'I'm the boss,' or 'spoiled rotten' written on it. This is what we're dressing our babies in."

.....

All of this is tied to the feeling of not being satisfied, of thinking that some force is blocking the way to a goal we think we deserve.

(By the way, my two cents on Texas and Ohio: It's not a good time to be the Democratic frontrunner, unless you can withstand simultaneous broadsides from both your immediate opponent and your presumptive one.)

BBC & Food

2008-03-02T22:14:00.003-05:00

Here's a miniature older essay on the future of global agriculture by Professor Les Firbank, head of the North Wyke Research Station at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research.

The themes of environmental/food advocates are echoed so frequently inside the community they can fail to make an impact. Professor Firbank doesn't say anything here different (or better) than what's been said elsewhere by the rest of the sustainable movement. But he does say it, and this is about proselytizing.

Agricultural land should be valued more highly by society, as should land that is needed to supply our rivers and reservoirs with the water we need and the land that will be required to deliver renewable energy.

It will become harder to balance the needs of everyone; perhaps we need a new land planning system that takes a more holistic view of our future needs than we have now.
These changes will not just happen by themselves; we need investment in industry, people and technologies.

Perhaps the biggest change is that we all need to see agriculture as one of our most important industries for the future.

There's an intriguing call for genetic modification in the comments thread.

Drought Crop

2008-02-27T20:21:00.001-05:00

Per the BBC:

Researchers in Finland and the United States say they have discovered a gene that controls the amount of carbon dioxide a plant absorbs.

It also controls the amount of water vapour it releases into the atmosphere.

This information could be important for food production and in regulating climate change.

Back, Food

2008-02-18T17:55:00.006-05:00

Big news today: USDA ordered largest recall of meat in history after employees blew the whistle on Hallmark Meat Packing:

The tape, made secretly by a slaughterhouse worker and provided to the Humane Society of the United States, showed electric shocks and high-intensity water sprays administered to cows too sick or weak to stand on their own, and the use of forklifts to roll such animals. Government regulations prohibit slaughtering for food cattle that cannot stand or walk on their own.

There are plenty of folks who'll grab the soapbox on this one. They'll no doubt mention that most of the meat went to school cafeterias and institutional food programs. I'll leave the scolding to them.

Also, bananas is out! Fungus, the CIA, Victorian antipathy for penis-shaped fruits. Another illustration of how our diet is motivated principally by commerce and politics.

I don't want to give anyone the short shrift: there is another banana book on the market.

Manning Will Outperform Brady

2008-02-03T17:10:00.001-05:00

Who else is excited about the Super Bowl?

The Love You Save Today May Be Your Own

2008-02-01T16:22:00.000-05:00

Janisse Ray packs a walloping punch. She's smart, passionate, and clearly a practiced speaker. She needs to be rhetorically gifted because, after all, it's her job to make the auditorium feel guilty about all the things it's not doing to save the environment. Styrofoam cup anyone?

I can get behind her immediate moratorium on heated patios and garden lights. And I like her idea, which I think she borrowed from Eugene Odum, that the exodus of smart people from our rural counties has created a critical brain drain and political crunch in those places. We must go back to reinvigorate them.

"Not to live my value is to live a lie, to live in a kind of schizophrenia."

Bugz

2008-01-30T17:21:00.000-05:00

This is really what the Mason-Dixon looks like, at least emotionally:

One non-PC bit in there. (HT: Trey)

And this is why we do not live in Idaho:

Focus the Nation

2008-01-30T16:27:00.001-05:00

"I think the term Green Democracy describes the citizen awareness and engagement needed to push environmental policy through government. To me the term also brings to mind the ethos that lies (for better or worse) at the heart of capitalism, which is to 'vote with one's dollar.' Similarly, the daily actions of citizens--from the food and vehicles they purchase to the way they consume energy in their homes--can have a significant impact on how our society evolves in response to the climate change crisis."--Athens Focus the Nation organizing committee member Bart King.

Flagpole has a list of events happening at the Center for Continuing Education tomorrow. I'm looking forward to Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, and National Geographic Executive Editor Dennis Dimick. A couple quotes from King that didn't make the article:

In addition, I think Focus the Nation is especially important here in Georgia, where the state legislature decided earlier in the year, based on the testimony of a few hand-picked scientists, that climate change was not a serious issue.

That's outrageous, even President Bush, who has done nothing but hamper environmental causes throughout his presidency, admits that global warming is for real and needs to be dealt with.

In addition to the fact that climate change itself will have disastrous effects on the way of life here in Georgia (all those displaced Floridians will have to go somewhere), we are missing the economic motor boat, so to speak. Green technology and what are being called "green-collar jobs" are on the rise. Economist predict their influence to be greater than that of the dot-com era. Those jobs and technologies will be developed where they are welcome--whether that is Florida, California, Michigan, Germany or China.

King is also the news editor of sustainablebusiness.com.

Farmers Should Wear Lab Coats

2008-01-30T15:54:00.000-05:00

Tell me if this looks like a good idea. I'm not fond of the implications. By 2030, 87% of North Americans will live in cities. This doesn't mean necessarily that the countryside will be blissfully depopulated, more that our future cities will be slobbering megapolises.

Vertical farm enthusiast Dickson Despommier is really enthusiastic about the farm of the future: "We shouldn't be at the whims of nature when it comes to providing calories and water." Maybe. The other idea, of course, is that if you don't learn how to cooperate with nature, you destroy it. And ultimately you destroy yourself. But, hey man, whatever.

At least Despommier is addressing a surefire problem.

(U.S. News & World Report, May 28, 2007)

Global Warming & Food Production

2008-01-29T20:19:00.000-05:00

On Sunday afternoon Athica hosted Global Warming & Food Production, a local pre-event for Focus the Nation's large-scale global warming function happening later this week. As might be expected, the discussion covered ways in which the current food system needs to be revolutionized in order to curb it extensive carbon emissions, particularly the need to get away from oil-based processes of long-distance transportation and packaging. One answer is to jettison our Platonic ideals of food. Consumers must stop demanding the perfect produce in favor of the local produce. Discard that cylindrical, burnished, and plastic-wrapped ear of corn raised under a herbicidal bath in California—for a more homely local one, perhaps even with a harmless bug in it.

It was disappointing that there weren't any farmers in the building or people who work with food, although there were a lot of academic types who like to think about food. Anyway, John English and Bart King should be commended for their organization. Participants included

Dr. Carl Jordan,UGA Ecologist & founder of Spring Valley EcoFarms.
Craig Page, executive director of P.L.A.C.E. (Promoting Local Agriculture and Culture Experiences).
Julia Gaskin, of the UGA Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department.
Dr. Elizabeth Andress, director of the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Gaskin, who works directly with farmers through the county extension program and is a leading authority on sustainability at UGA, gave the most spirited answers by far. Who knew that most of Georgia's milk comes from New Mexico? Picture what that must look like. Tits on a bull. There's a big move to re-energize Georgia dairy production, with cattle living on pasturage like they're supposed to. Dr. Andress despaired of all the young Food Science majors who don't know how to peel a carrot. Simply, a whole generation's been raised on pizzas and ready-to-eat meals. And although he didn't, Dr. Jordan would have like to have said something about humanity and hubris—and fertilizers. You can't rewrite Nature or take shortcuts with the land and not royally screw things up.

The Slow-Ass Country Breakfast

2008-01-28T13:33:00.000-05:00

Go, eat, learn, enjoy donkey milk. Ass milk. The Slow-Ass Country Breakfast (get it?) is in conjunction with Athica's Ingest exhibition, which is worth seeing and truly weird. Weird like cakes with teeth and hair in them and chicks hatching from oranges.

Get up bright and early February 23rd. I don't know how to put it eloquently, but you need to explore other pages on The Slow-Ass Country Breakfast website. Here's the index. Weird, again, and a lot of fun.

First of the Volley

2008-01-28T13:01:00.000-05:00

Lots of posting today as I try to catch up. Expect something on Focus the Nation a little later.

I'd been meaning for some time to post this picture from Athica's Animal Instincts: Allegory & Anthropomorphism exhibit:

White Oak Pastures

2008-01-28T12:44:00.001-05:00

Sunday a week ago, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a good profile of Will Harris, an Early County cattle rancher building a processing facility on his 1000 acre farm. Harris's cows are all grass-fed and grass-finished, which means he's bypassed the traditional route of sending them to feedlots to batten on corn and antibiotics. And it also means that he's got to find his own processors and distributors: thus his very own processing facility and his in-store appearances at Harry's Farmers Market. Someone really intelligent—I'm going to attribute it to Joel Salatin—said that it's not enough today for farmers to be just farmers; they've got to be entrepreneurs in every way.

Some financial info for investigation:

Harris got a low-interest loan from the OneGeorgia Authority, which disburses some tobacco settlement funds to promote the rural Georgia economy. He expects another loan from a Whole Foods program set up to bring more locally grown food into its stores, and he's kicking in another half-million.

Here is the website for Harris's White Oak Pastures.

Lunch Youtubery

2008-01-24T13:00:00.000-05:00

From Ray McKinnon's superb short film, The Accountant:

Last Fall, I saw Ray McKinnon and Ralph Reed on the same day. McKinnon was hanging out after screening his film Randy and the Mob. Reed was walking downtown with the shittiest of shit-eating grins on his face.

(HT: Derek)

Niche Marketing Has Its Day

2008-01-23T14:49:00.000-05:00

Perhaps this is the last time you'll see something here like this:

Staining the water clear.

I haven't held true to the original intention of this blog, which was to cover topics of food, the agriculture-nouveau, and writing where it appears distinct and irresistible. Pasting multiple videos of University of Georgia players dancing to Soulja Boy was never supposed to be part of the project. Since posting here seems to have been motivated by nothing more than caprice and traffic isn't exactly proliferating, I'm returning to the plan, especially the ag/food part. So for the handful of you who have tuned in regularly for snarky updates on SEC football, travelogues across the Deep South, confessions of lust for that damned temptress Cat Power, and the odd report on New Orleans, I apologize in advance.

Now I could offer an apologia for the blog as a whole—why farming and food, Donn? But I'm not, except for the picture below. At the expense of sounding fulsomely high-minded, I feel that fighting for the health of the family farm and farming in general in the South amounts to fighting for its soul. The city needs the country as much as the country needs the wilderness. Phrased for those of you familiar with Atlanta: would you like everything below the Mason-Dixon to look like Gwinnett County, subdivisions stacked on strip malls stacked on more malls? If so, well, I guess the good news for you is that your side's winning. We're wiring ourselves to a nice antiseptic world where everybody can live in DVD-filled cocoons all of the time. Hopefully, you can watch a couple sunsets and get back to me.

I'll continue to add music and idiosyncratic content, like the coon dog cemetery, but less whimsically from now on.

Take care, everyone,
Donn

The Presidents of the United States of America from their eponymous album (you might have to scroll down; I'm not fond of Divshare's new embedded media player):

Essaying into the Afterlife

2007-12-20T20:11:00.000-05:00

Jack Burton: What does that say?
Wang Chi: Hell of Boiling Oil.
Jack Burton: You're kidding.
Wang Chi: Yeah, I am. It says, Keep Out.
from Big Trouble in Little China

I have ventured to the frorest depths of hell, where split gravity tears you at the gut. I have seen the dread circle Dante never grasped. It is in downtown Memphis. And it is called traffic court.

I'm not going to delve into the details or relate the frightful sociological conclusions from a day in the bowels of the Memphis courthouse. (Let's just repeat there's a definite inequality between the races in American society.) As I waited in an interminable line, a tiny black woman with a single giant tooth and a big bouffant—she looked like Dionne Warwick—pushed a pamphlet cart and entreated us to get with jobs and school in a street-corner sing-song worthy of the finest evangelists. I silently wended through and watched the accused (syllabic stress on -ed) hordes mass in a darkened bowels of a municipal building unrivaled in concrete monolithic ugliness. One man had half of his face literally falling of his head. Some kind of nerve damage I assume. Others swayed, still strung-out, as they waited for their particular unkind door to open and the judge to deliver them. I listened to two attorneys discuss a case that involved a crackhead mother, an abused daughter, and a child molester boyfriend—and then in the next breath, lunch, drinks, and Ole Miss football.

My spirit might have been irreparably wilted had I not been, to a degree, relieved to be there. I had driven the previously day from Atlanta to make this very court appearance. I had gotten detoured and "lost" on my morning drive from Olive Branch, Mississippi. I had already been panhandled on separate sides of the city. I had already been kicked out of Memphis' handsome federal courthouse. Late and confused, it seems I had run into the wrong building only to be detained and sent out on account of a weapon on my person.

Said weapon. About five cheez-its long.

I had simply hopped in the car and driven to Memphis. No accoutrements. No change of clothes except underwear and socks. All miscellany still in my pockets, even a miniature pocket knife. Realizing we were on the verge of discord, I played up my bumpkin in the city-ignorance act until the security guards suffered my departure. Sure, I can run a trotline. In retrospect, thank goodness it occurred in the wrong building.

As for my legal troubles, the case was summarily dismissed in light of the insane pedestrian on I-40. After waiting three hours to speak with someone, a pleasant sub-adjudicator dealt with me in seconds. Perhaps the law really comes down to patience and money, or the money to be patient.

"the spiritual post-sepulchral life even on earth of the individual, through the thoughts he transmits to his fellows"--Giuseppe Mazzini, "Byron and Goethe"

And off I went, gouging through the enchanted vacancy of northern Mississippi. Serendipity always arrives on a trip. John Steinbeck said a trip takes you. After trawling for quaintness and Southern home-cooking in Corinth, I found my way to the coon dog cemetery before you come to Tuscumbia, Alabama. I simply followed a sign until I was a ways off the main road and then the secondary one and then into the primeval (assuming, of course, the primeval includes off-roading and deer hunters). The windy country road took me into a vast wood, sparkling serenely on a crisp and cold day, and somehow as soft and inviting as clouds. And then to a miraculous little spot, with granite monuments, outhouses, a picnic pavilion, a fresh water spring, and a couple hundred graves devoted to beloved coon dogs.

Besides the care and effort spent upon the gravestones, some carved in wood by hand, my favorite thing was their ornamentation. They could be like Catholic shrines to the Virgin Mary. But protestant sobriety kept all inclinations toward the rococo in check. The one indulgence was commemorating the foe. Coon hunters are exceptional because of their respect for the intelligence of their quarry. It takes a damn good dog to be a coon dog. The raccoons engraved on this stone or sitting atop that one were a kind of obeisance and also signified that Old Blue and Dr. Doom and Loud would always be doing what they loved, treeing that great raccoon in the sky.

This raccoon seems a little too happy with himself.

Mental Floss actually covers the cemetery in their current Spinning the Globe section (topic: Appalachia). But it's rather cursory, has no pictures of the actual site, and is casually irreverent.

Ramen a Clef or Something

2007-12-20T00:06:00.000-05:00

It's celebrate-your-cousin week here in Chestnut Mountain, and I'm making up for lost pronouncements during Thanksgiving.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that one word of truth shall outweigh the whole word. Well, I've got a word of irrepressible, incontrovertible, ineffable truth: My cousin Erica makes the best damn desserts in the whole world.

This is not overstated. Red devil cakes, Dutch chocolate cakes, lemon cakes—all so delicious your teeth feel like icy cotton. She should be doing this full time.

Pecan pie the way you were meant to eat it: on an aluminum plate in a cardboard box upon firewood and an axe over a red concrete floor. This tree farm is getting to me.

Hooray for Erica. My pop says she ain't bad to look at neither. Cough. An academic bonus, I think.

Levon Helm as promised, and in honor of New Orleans, the Sugar Bowl, the SEC, and Atlantic tropical storms versus sissy-pants, gimmicky Pacific ones:

Levon Helm

2007-12-19T00:07:00.000-05:00

The best member of The Band is getting some good pub surrounding his new album. Viz.

From Midnight Rambler by Clark Hollis.

"The commonly held perception of The Band is that they were muso types uninterested in rock & roll debauchery. This is a quarter-truth, at best. Says Ronnie Hawkins: 'Levon's got an extra chromosone or something. Samson couldn't have screwed that many girls in one day.' Helm slyly grins: 'We were always ready to make love and not war.'"

"The movie, Helm believes, is a showcase for the guitarist, not The Band. 'It's not what The Band is or was,' Helm spits. 'We had a lead singer named Richard Manuel. And, if you believe The Last Waltz, he's the drunk that shows up about halfway through for about two minutes.'"

Listen to tracks from Dirt Farmer and Helm's interview on Fresh Air here.

I read somewhere that his daughter's favorite member of The Band was Rick Danko. As a little girl, she thought it was Danko's band, and he was the lead singer. I'll admit then that Danko is almost as equally stupendous. Elvis Costello claimed that his vocal style was a big influence.

Levon Helm's website. I might link some Helm songs tomorrow.

The Cow Is My Cousin

2007-12-18T23:32:00.001-05:00

And we are all very, very proud. From the M.I.A. show in Atlanta on Halloween.

(I don't care how cool he thinks he is. We're still going to kick his tail in the intra-family, no-holds-barred Christmas football match. The trophy stays with us, mophead!)

Scorched Earth

2007-12-12T23:31:00.000-05:00

Days after the flood, as someone with allegiance to the University of Arkansas, I find myelf between a rock and a hard place. I can't sit here sober and tell you that Houston Nutt was the answer or that Arkansas isn't truly better off without him. At the same time, I can't endorse his replacement either.

Insert salty caption here.

In so many words, Arthur Blank called Bobby Petrino a quitter and a liar. What did the Falcon players have to say?

Well, it was much more caustic, believe or not. Safety Lawyer Milloy went so far as to cross out Petrino's signature on his impersonal farewell letter to the players and replace it with COWARD.

Falcons rookie defensive end Jamaal Anderson, the team's first-round draft pick from the University of Arkansas, has gotten non-stop calls from players, friends and associates with the Razorbacks football program. They all want to know what type of guy their new coach, Bobby Petrino, is.

"Disloyal," said Anderson, Petrino's first pick as an NFL coach. "If he can leave players here, what makes you think he won't leave the players he's going to coach? I'm just afraid to see what happens if he does bad at Arkansas. Is he going to leave those kids?"

...

Veteran safety Lawyer Milloy taped the "insensitive" farewell letter Petrino sent to players to his locker. Petrino's copied signature was crossed out in red ink.

"Coward!" was put in its place.

"Everything he preached over the past eight months was a lie," Milloy said. "Everything he said he stood for was a lie. He came in and messed with a lot of people's lives — he wasted a year of my life. It was a cowardly act. A selfish act.

"One thing I'm really [mad] at was while he was having a half-hearted approach to games, he was putting us all at risk. His mind wasn't in it. That explains why he threw a challenge flag a play after he was allowed to. Why we went for it on fourth-and-9 and punted on fourth-and-1. Maybe he was on the phone at Arkansas to the AD at that point.

"The cancer was diagnosed. Never would you want it to be your head coach, your general, to be that cancer, but in our case, it was."

...

From Warwick Dunn, whom no one can accuse of being classless: "He sold us a dream. He put this organization last in his life. He's selfish. He's definitely a liar. One of the things we have hanging in our meeting room is [a sign] 'Finish.' If he wanted to leave, you can at least finish three more games. It's 18 days. You can finish it and say, 'You know what, this wasn't for me.' You can respect that. But to let it go yesterday the way that he did and the disrespectful way that he did it, to me he has no heart."

There's a tendency discard players' complaints as the rambling of spoiled primadonnas, whose exorbitant salaries prohibit them from being unhappy about anything. However, if I'm a football player, committed to a violent game in which every snap puts at risk my health and my career, I'm entitled to expect my coaches to be as focused as I am.

Whatever Arthur Blank said at his press conference, this is what he meant: Ben Folds Five's "Song for the Dumped" from Whatever and Ever Amen.

A Fable of Expectations

2007-12-12T20:34:00.001-05:00

This is what it looks like to have no soul. Harsh.

Alas, my dream of Arkansas and Clemson swapping coaches, or a version thereof, evaporated when Tommy Bowden decided to remain in the South Carolina upcountry. Now Arkansas has hired Bobby Petrino, and I'd prefer to sum up the Arkansas/Atlanta Falcons/Bobby Petrino imbroglio as swiftly and cleanly as possible. I'm afraid that's not going to happen. For all the swiftness of the event, there was nothing clean about it. Petrino's yellow opportunist reek is overpowering everything else. I'm hardly going to touch Houston Nutt's foibles, Arthur Blank's naive mollycoddling, or the ineptitude among the higher-ups in Fayetteville (the word on the street is that new Arkansas athletic director Jeff Long never asked permission to talk to any of his candidates save for Jim Grobe). Plainly, I don't trust any situation in which Jerry Jones is the intermediary, and I don't trust any academic institution that has a Pravda man like Rick Schaeffer on retainer to disseminate the official story.

For Arkansas, there are two simple ways to break this down:

Petrino is a good hire because...Arkansas needed to save face after a coaching search that up to this point had seemed both far-fetched and disastrous. Lane Kiffin from the Oakland Raiders to the Razorbacks? Come on. He wasn't going to run to Fayetteville just because his father, Monte, the current Tampa Bay defensive coordinator, was an assistant there in the mid-'70s. Three of the four major candidates linked to the job--Butch Davis, Tommy Bowden, and Tommy Tuberville--had leveraged Arkansas' interest to engineer better deals at home. Wake Forest head coach Jim Grobe eventually turned down the Razorbacks after concluding the insanity and personal intrusions that had surrounded previous UA head coach Houston Nutt were not worth a more lucrative contract. It's rumored that Butch Davis cautioned fellow Arkansas alum Jimmy Johnson that the rewards of the jobs did not offset its headaches. In fine, there was a growing sense that, with their ruthless invigilation of Houston Nutt, untethered Razorback fans had made their bed and now were destined to lie in it. The Arkansas football program would be condemned to a level just above competitive mediocrity.

Mediocrity is the crucial word here. Despite two SEC Championship appearances in the past six years, Arkansas fans felt mired in perpetually also-ran status. They perceived that Houston Nutt had not the intelligence, activity, or moral fiber to lead them to the Promised Land. They prosecuted a witch hunt for Nutt's professional distractions and indiscretions and eclipsed the normal apathy and absenteeism of a disenchanted fanbase by becoming wild and fractious tormentors (see the acquisition of Nutt's cell phone records, sartorial protests to the direction of the program, sarcastic airplane banners flying over the stadium).

A picture of Lenny Kravitz would also have sufficed.

Arkansas has looked these past few years like a nation of incurable lunatics. Sure, Nutt played politics with the Springdale crew, but he had to under pressure from a mob of wealthy and meddlesome local boosters. That one nearby high school could create so much turmoil inside a college--much less SEC--athletic department was patently ridiculous. Frank Broyles should never have admitted the Springdale parents into his office or brooked a single complaint from the no-nothing, juvenile cadre. As for the charge that Nutt never gave Gus Malzahn a fair chance to run his "HurryUpNoHuddle" offense, it might be true: Nutt is at his core a jealous huckster, and his instinct for self-preservation is second only to Phil Fulmer's. Nonetheless, there was no reason to reinvent the wheel with the best tailback tandem in the country. Or with Darren McFadden alone--recent victim of the ESPN Heisman farce. From the outsider's viewpoint, Arkansas overachieved last year thanks to a sympathetic schedule (USC notwithstanding) and the best college football player perhaps in two decades. To expect more was and is foolish. The overall talent pool inside the Natural State is vastly inferior to the likes of Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and certainly Florida. In their more traditional recruiting grounds in Texas, the Razorbacks are competing for whatever scraps fall from Texas, Oklahoma, LSU, and A&M. Simply put, Arkansas will never have the athletes, unless they become a national recruiting dynamo of Tennessee's caliber. Thus, four years ago the Hogs welcomed cornerback/safety Michael Grant when UGA denied him admission for improper sexual conduct with another minor (obviously, there are more unseemly, if not illegal, specifics here). And, thus, they yearly scour the JUCO ranks for impact players, always a dicey proposition since those student-athletes end up at junior college for good reason. From the outsider's viewpoint, Arkansas will never outclass the ability of its SEC rivals in quantity and quality. It's only hope of championships depends upon an immaculate brew of luck, good health, strategy, and execution. Consequently, the folks in Arkansas should have been happy with Nutt's winning record and appreciated his knack for cobbling together a dominating offensive line from second-tier oafs. If he had one glaring deficiency as a coach, it was his failure to recruit or develop an outstanding quarterback. (Matt Jones was a fleet giant. Mitch Mustain was a year or two away. I watched him practice his bounce pass against Wisconsin in the bowl game last year. Surprisingly, he found the SEC a little stiffer that his high school league).

So the rest of the SEC has long considered Arkansas fans provincial demoniacs, terminally fixated on the only communal property of the state. In the Deep South and inside Cavalier social sets in places like Atlanta and Nashville, there has been a tendency to attribute the Razorbacks' very literal fanaticism to the lack of culture's tempering influence. Northwest Arkansas is a place of parvenus and the nouveau riche, without the taste to mitigate excessiveness in entertainment, capitalism, and evangelical Christianity. There, it is only progress, no skepticism or sense of the absurd.

Did someone say absurd? Click on it.

If the Razorbacks feel like the red-headed stepchildren since joining the SEC, it's not without justification. A poster on an Arkansas website claimed the other day that he could no longer stomach disrespect from the media in the Southeast, that they never demean Georgia, Florida, or Alabama in the same way. That's not necessarily true, but it's undeniable that the ancien regime of the SEC has no memory of the halcyon days Arkansas fans desperately wish to return to. They were a million years and a million miles away, when Arkansas' face pointed towards Dallas and its butt towards Atlanta. In the SEC there is no precedent and historical imperative for Arkansas to be excellent.

The hiring of Bobby Petrino from the Atlanta Falcons, especially after weeks of administrative folly by the school, gives the Razorbacks the kind of certification they have been starving for. Yes, an NFL coach has left precious Atlanta to become the new head coach at the University of Arkansas. At once it signalizes to the fans that Arkansas is back: a major player, one of the big boys, top flight, etc., etc. (exactly what South Carolina and Alabama had felt). Despite the embarrassing hiccups, look at how sweet a job this was after all. Look at the power the Razorbacks command, pulling an NFL coach before the season ends. The sizzle factor of Petrino is undeniable. No doubt a wave of exhilaration rippled through the Natural State when his name was announced, bated by the fear of another reversal. Petrino is also a good coach who knows offense and, unlike Houston Nutt, thoroughly believes in a vertical passing attack. He will make the Razorbacks multiple and balanced. He took Louisville from relative obscurity to national relevance. Major kudos go to Chancellor White and AD Jeff Long for not pulling a stub (Skip Holtz) out of the bottom of the bag.

Survival this way. Giggity.

Petrino is a bad hire because...I promise I'll keep this shorter. Frankly, it's less complicated.

This is not an improvement over Nutt in character. Petrino is mercenary, mendacious, and impatient. He's looked for a new job every year in the past five. He conspired in a covert plot to dethrone his former boss Tuberville at Auburn (see Bobby Lowder and Plane-gate). He lied about his commitment to the Falcons and then ran out the next day. He lied that he had never had contact with Arkansas before signing a contract with them. Strictly factual perhaps, but his agent has been a busy man. You can't trust him. It's worse than Sabanic; it's Petrinoesque. Oh yeah, and he is a LIAR. L-I-A-R. He never once mentioned Arkansas to any of the top brass at the Falcons when questioned directly about his future. Despite last night's televised Hog Call, he does not really care about the Razorbacks.
He won't tolerate the shenanigans that have plagued Arkansas the past few years. This is a good thing, but it also means he will not suffer the particular Hog brand of crazy. For a man with a wandering professional eye, a breath of wind may cause him to jump ship again. What about a bacon-flavored acid bath?
When the going gets tough, the tough bail. How many people had made commitments to the Falcons and Atlanta based on Petrino's being there? I cannot repeat enough that he didn't even finish a full season in his contract. Look, Vick was an out and out fiasco. But as Falcons owner Arthur Blank said today, you don't leave the golf course just because the first two holes didn't go well.
Arkansas does not have the personnel for a multiple offense. If McFadden and Felix Jones both leave, the talent will be immeasurably degraded. With this team and Texas, Florida, and the usual foes on next year's slate, instant success is not at hand. Arkansas fans did not just get an "offense genius" from the pros so they could wait a few more years.
As an Arkansas fan in Atlanta said on the radio, Petrino shouldn't have any trouble transitioning back to college since he's been running a college offense with the Falcons all year.
Louisville was solid before he arrived. The school accepts student-athletes liberally. Is Petrino that good? How will he fare with tighter academic restrictions (ahem) and against more robust opposition? How will he deal with all those fat, wealthy hands (Jim Lindsey, the Walton clique and claque, et al.)?
The consensus among Falcon fans and football gurus is that Petrino is pouty, petulant, and inflexible and did a piss-poor job of coaching his first NFL season (see Steve Spurrier).
Joey Harrington discovered he would not start the next game, after leading the team to two consecutive victories, from reporters at a press conference.
He might have even stuck around had he not let his relationship with his players erode. Team members thought him a smug, condescending jerk. Among players and fans, the word "cancer" was thrown around.
Petrino is an abysmal communicator with players and the media. Joey Harrington discovered he would not start the next game, after leading the team to two consecutive victories, from reporters at a press conference.
Petrino can't utilize his NFL cache in recruiting because he washed out before completing a year.
Petrino is not a long-term solution. His professional philandering prevents that.

And the conclusion is...this is a good, albeit precipitous, hire in terms of PR and restoring faith in the university's administration. However, the negatives outweigh the benefits in image. Petrino right now is a mirage. His NFL resume is specious. His merits as a coach are questionable in light of Louisville's featherweight schedule and utter defensive collapse this year. There is growing suspicion that the latter owes more to Petrino's inadvertence to the defensive side of things than the absence of his coaching majesty. And he may leave as soon as another program comes calling. Then what?

I would have preferred to see Auburn's defensive coordinator Will Muschamp get the job. He is young but he too has NFL experience. He's also served as DC for LSU's 2003 National Championship team.

I like Muschamp because of his youth, his energy, and his enthusiasm. He seems to be a straight arrow. He would devote himself to Arkansas and do it the right way, sustaining a program for years to come. The next two seasons could be lean, but Muschamp would still be lighting up living rooms across the Heartland and Deep South (he's from Georgia, Petrino from Montana) with his infectiousness and promise to young men that they would grow and win together.

At least we no longer have to witness Petrino's forlorn visage on the Atlanta sideline. The Falcons "now have one less quitter to worry about." Muschamp will get his shot somewhere. Everyone can be happy for the time being. Selah.

In the Days of Running Water and Easy Transportation

2007-11-23T22:37:00.000-05:00

Today's quote again comes from Marshall Frady's Wallace. It entails a necessary question: Can this be considered something other than caricature, parody, or satire today? Among other things, are these verities still true in the Sun Belt South? More literary-speaking, can these periodic sentences stand on their own merit?

"More than anything else, he is a consummate political and curtural articulation of the South, where life is simply more glandular than it is in the rest of the nation. Southerners temd to belong and believe through blood and weather and common earth and common enemy and common travail, rather than belonging, believing, cerebrally [....] Any politician like Eugene McCarthy, with his diaphonous abstractions, would be impossible in the South. The region is ruled by humid passion, and a fine old-fashioned sense of sin. There is a lingering romance of violence, a congenital love of quick and final physical showdowns. Not just the filling-station attendants, the cabdrivers and deputy sheriffs and beauticians and tabernacle evangelists, but also Rotarians, bankers, teachers, the urbanites of Atlanta and Charlotte, stockbrokers and reporters who have moved away to the cities of the North—virtually all those born in the South have about them, to a certain degree, that air of an immediate and casual familiarity with violence, a quality of loosely leashed readiness for mayhem. Even those Southerners who come from large cities—although, say, having martinis in some expensive New York restaurant, surrounded by Continental waiters and chandeliers—seem to have emerged from another dimension where the days are fevered and dreaming with honeysuckle and wisteria, from a different and more passionate play of life, a slow, sensuous, easy, lyrical, savage marriage of man and earth. They carry with them the sense of another landscape—primeval mountains, scruffy pine hills populated with mules and moonshiners, cottonland as level and limitless as the sea, fierce skies—a land where winters are only a dull and sullen hiatus with a pale ghost of a sun passing through vague chill rains."

In addition to this picture being totally irrelevant to the matter of this post, I--frankly--don't have any idea what it is. But Vimala sent it to me, so it's clearly important. Maybe an allegory? Code? A social aphrodisiac? Special prize for the first one to identify the super-smooth and solitary subject.

Eschatological Glee

2007-11-21T23:25:00.000-05:00

I had good weekend of watching football on the television, and I have to tell you I'm feeling better than ever before about the major questions facing the world in the fifty years. We can all rest easy. Based on viewing countless Toyota and Ford commercials, I'm confident that the automobile industry will not only save the environment but also execute a revolution in social conscious that leads to lasting peace and comfort. Problems solved.

Before I get to the article, I want to say that, yes, I believe that Global Warming is real, that even if the globe isn't warming, we're doing things to it that are detrimental. Human beings have flunked ecology, miserably. However, there's also a fulsome tone of self-righteous in the fusillade accounts of environmental crisis. It's as if the Liberals are finally revenging themselves for all those years of Conservative vituperation and emasculation by doing a little fear-mongering of their own. You can see the I-told-you-so vindication and smugness every time Al Gore's wide owlish countenance appears on screen.

The following is from a Washington Post article about the effect of climate change on global agriculture. The earth has undergone climatological permutations before; the difference is this time we're teeming over its surface.

To the extent that plants cannot adapt to change, farmers will have to. In Uganda, where coffee is an important cash crop but where temperature increases are expected to devastate the plants, researchers are hoping that by planting shade trees, growers can preserve the industry while perhaps even increasing biodiversity.

In other parts of Africa, farmers are being taught to add fruit trees to their subsistence farms. The trees can survive droughts and waterlogging better than crops planted annually, and so can serve as an economic
bridge across hard times.

Farmers in developed countries must also prepare, experts say.

A recent study by researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico concluded that wheat growers in North America will have to give up some of their southernmost fields in the next few decades. But they will be able to farm a full 10 degrees north of their current limit, which extends from Ketchikan, Alaska to Cape Harrison, Labrador.

That means amber waves of grain will be growing less than 2 degrees south of the Arctic Circle, and Siberia will become a major notch in the wheat belt.

By changing their practices, and not just their crops, farmers can also temper the buildup of greenhouse gases. New technologies that measure soil nutrient levels are allowing farmers to add only as much fertilizer as is really needed -- important because the excess nitrogen in those chemicals gets converted in the soil into nitrous oxide, which has 300 times the greenhouse activity of carbon dioxide.

If I'm not mistaken, the Farm Bill here in the U.S. is still in the Senate; in other words, there's still time to contact your Congressman.

The Dead Horse

2007-11-15T16:30:00.000-05:00

This officially is overkill, but I swear I'm moving on from the past (resplendent) weekend after today. Enjoy more UGA videos than you can stomach.

I've decided that technology can't accurately capture the amplified mood and unprecedented emotional spikes of the game. Notice the "camera" becomes extremely unsteady at the end. That's when everybody "lost their shit."

You can actually hear the decibel level rise here; still, I swear, it doesn't do the experience justice. At that point in time, we were all keeping each other from falling out of the stands.

Evidence that Soulja Boy has infiltrated the Bulldog psyche: This one's titled "Soulja Boy-GA White Girls." You start circulating videos of Georgia co-eds, and you're bound to attract some views. I don't believe any of these girls was the one at the game whose sign read, "Knowshon is on my to-do list!" I also am not sure the ordinary Georgia fan has listened to the words of "Crank Dat."

The Georgia running backs are really close. Also, the Georgia sideline is all madcap antics. Coaches have decided it's an "all-charade" zone: "Son, if you don't start shaking those hips, you're doing up-downs all week."

And finally, the best highlight package on the game. Breathe it in one last time.

I said a couple weeks ago that success hinged on beating Florida. Check. Now the past month has made this a special season no matter what. Let's get ready for Kentucky.

Graceful Gallimaufry

2007-11-08T20:50:00.000-05:00

Sigur Ros and George Wallace in the same week? That's why you love me. And I'm reinforcing my door to keep the hungry, slavering crowds at bay. Look at 'em all--lining up around the block. I'm going need a couple more continents of bandwidth at this rate.

There's more about Wallace from American Experience. Coincidentally, his would-be assassin, Arthur Bremer, was released from prison three days ago, paroled for good behavior. Bremer intended "to do SOMETHING BOLD AND DRAMATIC, FORCEFULL & DYNAMIC, A STATEMENT of my manhood for the world to see." He was CRAZY. He still is, just a sweeter, gentler kind.

This Berserk Season of Assassination

2007-11-08T11:50:00.000-05:00

I'm bringing back the weeklies feature that I had negligently discarded during the course of the past six months. If nothing else, my favorite element is resurfacing: the quote of the week, which could easily evolve into the quote of the day or, if my typing and memory improve substantially, quote of the nanosecond.

Today's selection comes from Marshall Frady's Wallace, billed as the "Classic Portrait of Alabama Governor George Wallace." It's a purchase from my high journalism/rabble-rouser phase, including A.J. Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana, Bob Short's Everything Is Pickrick: The Life of Lester Maddox (my father guarded him in the governor's mansion), Tyler Bridges' Bad Bet on the Bayou: The Rise of Gambling in Louisiana and The Fall of Governor Edwin Edwards, and Hendrik Hertzberg's Politics. I can't recommend Liebling and Bridges enough; I have yet to plow through the others.

Forthwith the quote:

"It was true that, as he proceeded on in 1968 as a third-party political outrider, his candidacy began to be regarded as a rough approximation of the potential for American fascism—a strictly indigenous and generic American variety, ferociously respectable and righteous and patriotic, totally blank of the operatic Visigoth glares and blusters of the German precedent, having far more to do here with the Up With People Chorus and Jaycee luncheons on Wednesday afternoons at the local Holiday Inn, and so unrecognizable to the vast majority of citizens right on until its final consolidation."

Elizabeth Hardwick's blurb about Wallace is that it has a "palpable Faulknerian mood to the reporting." I'm not sure she's being entirely complimentary, as Frady seems implacably fustian, steadily suppurating a kind of transparent reduction of Absalom! Absalom! But he's good at it, and Hardwick's a Northeastern snob, and the Southern writers who matured after WWII, like William Styron, had ceased being Christ-haunted because they had become Compson-haunted. Flannery O'Connor got her ass of the tracks thanks to her sex and a host of personal complications.

As far as the portrayal of Wallace the man goes, he comes off as a catfish-lipped diminution of Edward G. Robinson, without a lick of the urbanity, or chameleon ability to transcend himself. He is the boyish imp, a folk tale, the savvy bumpkin playing up his twangy callowness among the sophisticates to his quick advantage. He is the Populist upstart who went dazzingly awry: smart, playful, terrifically wrong-headed, and irresistible.

Summa Khan's Vices and The Farrago of Crush

2007-11-06T17:31:00.001-05:00

According to Orson Swindle at EDSBS, Josh McNeil's been discovered with three girls in his bed, possibly propelling himself to the front of the Thighsman contest. Folks, it's all about attitude; looks are academic. And being the starting center for a major SEC football school makes attitude.

Smile, you prodigious plier of women.

(I love Orson. Despite his sinister Gator allegiances, he's smart and he's an English major. And whether he realizes it or not, he's making a concerted effort to redefine crapulous onomatopoetically. Which is the way it should be.)

In other news, MaconDawg has just articulated the abstract for the entire UGA season:

After the game, Coach Richt was asked if Knowshon has continued to "get better and better". Coach Richt replied "yeah, and we're blocking better and better." That pretty much sums this team up. Like most of us thought back in July, they started as a mediocre team, progressed to maddeningly inconsistent, and are now teetering on the verge of "pretty good". How fast they get there will make the difference between 10-2 and 7-5.

Finally, David Ching has evidence that UGA defensive tackle Jeff Owens is no fool. Brandon Cox, like Chris Leak, is a pouty, average-armed quarterback who doesn't "respond well" to three-hundred pound men flying at his kneecaps. S-I-S-S-Y.

On Ray Gant's sack on Auburn's first play, that appeared to hurt Cox's knee:
"That set the tone. That was a big momentum shift for the whole game. Right there we thought we put fear in their hearts. We knew that we could just keep jabbing, keep jabbing till they fall. That’s what happened last year. That locker room celebration was big."

On whether he thought Cox got rattled (he finished 4-for-12 for 35 yards, 4 Ints):
"I think he got rattled the first play. We were confident because we went downfield and scored and he knew it was on his shoulders to try and make a comeback and he gets sacked on the first play – nearly blew his knee out. So I think he was timid the whole game."

For further proof, see Cox's crapulous—er, craptastic—first game against Georgia Tech. Of course, give him enough time and he'll sink a fourth-and-forever impossible dagger into your exposed, quivering heart.

Nice pinpoint throw, melancholic archer-boy. Yeah, you heard me.