Be Less Boring

Yeah, that low-fat, high-carb diet you've been following for oh, thirty years or so... Well, it's killing you.

This two-part video presentation explains in fairly simple terms how the modern food pyramid is horribly wrong, how there's absolutely no correlation between high-cholesterol and heart disease, and how more traditional diets full of fat are better for you than the high-carb nonsense that's been foisted on us for the past few decades.

I have high cholesterol and I don't care (Part I)
I have high cholesterol and I don't care (Part II)

Go find your grandmother or great grendmother's recipe box and learn to cook what she did. It'll be much better for you than the modern concoctions your mother fed you. It wasn't her fault, she was doing what the government recommended, she just didn't realize the government has been corrupted by big business and bad science.

While we're on the topic of local food and local farmers, you can help support local food and your right to choose between big agribusiness and small neighborhood farms by signing this petition.

What if everything you wanted to do was illegal?  I'm not talking about lighting cats on fire, selling heroin to six year olds, or bankrupting the country by leveraging your too-big-to-fail company with bad credit default swaps.  No, I'm talking about simple things like hiring your neighbor's teenager to mow your lawn or buying some sausage from the friendly farmer down the street that you've known for 20 years.   That's not illegal, right?  Well, you might be surprised.

If you've seen the documentary Food, Inc. or read Michael Pollan's excellent books, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, then you've no doubt heard of Virginia resident and self proclaimed "lunatic farmer," Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm.  He wrote his own book (one of many he's written) describing many of the run-ins he's had with state and federal beaurocrats who want to shut him down for selling healthy, grass-fed beef and pastured poultry to people who are willing to drive hundreds of miles to his farm to buy it.

The book is Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front and I personally think everyone should read it.

If Joel Salatin is a lunatic, then so am I.  I found myself agreeing with at least 95% of his ideas and I wish he lived around here because I want to be one of his customers. 

He has something to say about nearly everything from the USDA, the FSIS (Food Safety Inspection Service), Land Grant Colleges, CAFOs, child labor laws, drug laws, agribusiness and factory farms, liberals, conservatives, zoning restrictions, building codes, taxes, government subsidies to farmers, illegal immigrants desegregation, and avian flu, just to name a few.  He tells about how one government inspector wrote him a letter of commendation for running an outstanding operation, the next tried to shut him down for being "non-compliant."  The only difference between what Joel was doing between those two incidents was the inspector, himself.  After a year or so of legal wrangling and great expense on both sides, Salatin was allowed to keep doing what he's doing, raising pastured poultry and slaughtering and packaging the animals for sale himself.

The book is full of stories like that from his decades as a farmer.  Some of the incidents are so ridiculous they'll have you rolling on the floor laughing.  Others are so infuriating that your blood will no doubt boil at the arrogance, stupidity, and downright foolishness coming from Washington, D.C.  No, really, it's much worse than you think.

Salatin's book is very personal, folksy, but very well written.  He's ever the polite southern gentleman but he doesn't mince words.  There's no love lost between Salatin and the government inspectors he has to avoid, evade, outsmart, or cow to just to stay in business.  He repeatedly points out how the rules are stacked against the small farmer and small business in favor of large multinational corporations. Even in cases where the rules should control big corporations--such as with their flagrant hiring of illegal immigrants--they have so many lawyers and corporate lobbyists that they can keep the government tied up with lawsuits for years, if the inspectors even bother to make a case.

If you enjoyed the aforementioned Michael Pollan books, take the next step and read a book by someone who has been in the trenches of the Local Food movement for nearly 50 years.   Maybe it won't convince you, but it will certainly give you a lot to think about.  It's an eye-opener.

You may be familiar with the Twitter feed ShitMyDadSays, afterall, it's got 1.3 million followers, including me.  It's about things a 29 year old guy's 74 year old dad says to him.  It has been turned into a book and will soon be a sitcom staring William Shatner as the dad.  On CBS.  Um...

Right.  I could see it working on HBO or something where there are few restrictions on what one can say and do, but on regular network TV there are too many rules against profanity.  Without the profanity to punctuate the statements, it becomes little more than an Archie Bunker parody.  There was only room for one Archie Bunker in the world and his time came and went a long time ago.

For those of you with more of a sci-fi bent, there is ShitMyDarthSays, but I haven't heard of any plans to turn it into a book or TV show.

...and thanks for all the great songs!   New Hampshire born singer, Ronnie James Dio, is dead at age 67.  He was born in the old Portsmouth Hospital.

Let's just end the myth about saturated fats once and for all, shall we?  All that crap the government and the corn/canola/flaxseed/peanut oil lobbies have been spewing for years about how saturated fat is going to kill us all with heart disease is completely and totally WRONG!

The Independent as a nice summary article that quotes from a new scientific study published in the much heralded American Journal of Clinical Nutrition which concludes that Dr. Atkins was definitely on the right track.

That's right, the fat in your juicy steak and the lard that made the doughnuts I remember as a kid so much yummier than anything on the market today is not the enemy.   Quite the opposite, in fact, as the carbohydrates and sugars we've all be substituting for fat in our diets for the past 30 or so years does increase the risks of heart disease  and diabetes.  Oh, but why take my word for it:

The latest witness for the defence is a meta-analysis (a study combining the results of other studies) published in March that found: “There is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD.” It’s very legit, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and big – involving 21 studies and nearly 350,000 patients.

What’s more, the authors point out, replacing saturated fat in the diet with more carbohydrates, especially refined carbs, makes all the risk factors for heart disease and diabetes worse.

Start frying the doughnuts and french fries in lard again and let your kids taste how great food used to be.   Give me an extra slice or two of bacon and bring on the juicy steaks and ribs.   Hold the rolls, please.

I'm not saying you should give up your leafy greens or that apple-a-day that purports to keep the doctor away, but they sure would go good with a side of pork chops, wouldn't they?

From a local newspaper article about a vocational program that is both teaching kids about raising chickens for food and is helping out needy families:

When Bradley Cyr came home to Alton with the permission slip earlier this week, his grandmother, Helane Shields, and mother, Andrea Shields, could not believe Cyr would potentially be subjected to the killing of animals at school.

"Kids should not be viewing this type of thing in school," said Helane Shields, who keeps a number of chickens as pets. "This will be an extremely traumatic experience for these kids. This is beyond the pale."

Where do these people come from?  My parents grew up in what was then the third biggest city in the state, yet they had chickens for food and cows for milk in the back yard.  They knew how to slaughter animals--it was part of every day life.  You want chicken soup for dinner?  Go out to the back yard, kill, pluck, and gut a chicken, then toss it in a pot.

Even I grew up hunting and being involved in various adventures raising pigs and other animals for food.  It was just what we did.

Now to find out that people are outraged over kids being taught about slaughtering in school is "beyond the pale."  Where do these people come from?  Do they think meat magically appears at the grocery store without any slaughter involved?  Do they doubt that their own parents or grandparents were already experts at slaughtering chickens by the time they were in high school?

America, we're turning into a nation of pansies who are too damn sensitive for our own good.  In the future I would suggest that all schools make participation in such vocational programs as this mandatory for all students.   It's for our own good!

Again this year I've pulled some rather intriguing items from the ground while working in my garden. Below is a picture of some of the junk, including coal, various bits of pottery, at least four different kinds of glass, and some bones.  Not shown is a very old,  hard, and cracked dog chew toy that I've already thrown out.  I have no idea why all of this junk is there, but more seems to appear almost every time poke around in the garden.

Ever get the feeling that the American agricultural system is headed straight for a disasterous crash? Maybe I just read too much.

Really, people are freaking out over a car bomb in New York and an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.  While those are problems that may affect dozens or even hundreds of people, the problems with our agriculture and food industries are already affecting millions, if not billions, of people and a collapse of the system would definitely turn the USA into a third world country over night.  Yet damn few people seem to give a shit about it.

Come see journalist/author Jake Adelstein TOMORROW NIGHT (4/29/2010) at UNH, Durham, NH, in Richards Auditorium (Murkland 115) from 7-9 pm. What's it about? Check the video from his appearance on The Daily Show to get an idea.

Here's Jake on the Daily Show:  http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-november-16-2009/jake-adelstein