Smart Energy

At work at WSU I try to employ (in the loose sense of the word: we don’t pay but they do get course credit) student interns from the Murrow College of Communications. We’ve had some fantastically talented and industrious students come work with us, primarily as news and marketing writers. Rachel Weber was our intern a while back. She’s since graduated but while she was at WSU she started a blog. The blog has morphed since she’s graduated and is now called “Rachel in the Real World.” As if college weren’t real! In any case, she’s a witty-as-hell writer with a wonderfully wry sense of humor, so I do recommend you check her out. She’s started a new feature called “What Does It Taste Like Wednesday.” Here’s the low-down:

We are people. People eat. And even though we go to the grocery store all the time, I never really stop to look at how many different foods exist (acknowledging, of course, that so much of it is the same: modified corn). That is, until my aunt and I took a pit stop at Safeway last night. While browsing through gefilte fish, she inspired me to start What does it taste like Wednesday. No, it isn’t about the flavor of the actual week day, but instead the opportunity to embrace delicious, odd, never- before-tasted-in-my-life “cuisine.” Two rules: 1) I can’t have eaten or remember ever eating the item. 2) No purchases over $5.

Her first foray was into something called “DONA MARIA, NOPALITOS TENDER CACTUS”:

After duking it out with can openers, oven mitts and finally a corkscrew, I popped open the yellow lid to smell vinegar and what I think would be okay to describe here as tangy. What does it taste like? Like a light kick to the back of my throat leaving a lingering spice–like the tequila of edible plants. A crossbreed between a pickle and a hot pepper in the texture and shape of the green bean and length of a worm… And like many things in life, once you get through the spikes, it isn’t so bad.

Great pics, too!

In past years, illegal commercial trawlers parked off Somalia's coast and scooped up the ocean's contents. Now, fishermen on the northern coast of neighboring Kenya say, the trawlers are not coming because of pirates.

“There is a lot of fish now, there is plenty of fish. There is more fish than people can actually use because the international fishermen have been scared away by the pirates,” said Athman Seif, the director of the Malindi Marine Association.

via Kenya fishermen see upside to pirates: more fish.

For the first time, a study on humans proves what we’ve known for years: corn-derived fructose is bad for you.

“This is the first evidence we have that fructose increases diabetes and heart disease independently from causing simple weight gain,” said Kimber Stanhope, a molecular biologist who led the study. “We didn’t see any of these changes in the people eating glucose [natural sugar].”

A spokesperson for the processed food industry of course denies that HFCS is dangerous: “It makes no sense to highlight one single ingredient as a cause of obesity.”

More details in the Times of London online…

From this week’s Harper’s Weekly:

Chicago rats fed a diet of sausage, pound cake, bacon, cheesecake, and Ho Hos began to behave like rats addicted to heroin, consuming increasing amounts of food to feel satisfied and continuing to eat even when to do so meant that electric shocks were delivered to their tiny paws. When switched to healthful food (“the salad option”) the rats, which had become obese, their brains numbed by junk, simply refused to eat. A man in Iowa punched another man, who was ordering Mexican food, for being a zombie. Researchers from Oregon determined that ancient beavers did not eat trees, and a firm in New Jersey was distributing vaginal mints.

Subscribe to said Weekly by visiting this link.

The study on junk food addition in rats was reported recently in ScienceNews: “This is the most complete evidence to date that suggests obesity and drug addiction have common neurobiological underpinnings,” says study coauthor Paul Johnson of the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about a couple pieces of federal legislation that folks were getting up in arms about, saying they would “ban organic farming.” As I pointed out, the bloggers writing about the bills were, at best, misreading and perhaps deliberately using scare tactics in order to stir up trouble, comments and links. The bills in question have spawned a netroots fever of apocalyptic (non)thinking which, as the Ethicurean points out, distract from the truly bad legislation floating around the Hill. Snip:

Perhaps the worst of the lot is HR 1332, Rep. Costa’s Safe FEAST Act of 2009, which is backed by the Big Ag group Western Growers. It would create a HACCP system for produce. (HACCP is the set of burdensome recordkeeping requirements credited with hastening the demise of many small-scale slaughter facilities.) It doesn’t take the size of operations into account. It would pay for inspections by charging fees to farms and processors and would hand the duty of inspection over to third-party certifiers. Because yeah, that’s worked so well for us to date.

Then there’s Rep. DeGette’s H.R. 814, which actually does mandate a National Animal Identification System, which we and lots of other people have major concerns about. And there’s H.R. 759, offered by Rep. Dingell, which requires traceability of food from farm to restaurants and requires that the recordkeeping be done electronically. It also charges fees to processors — small or large — for inspections.

None of these bills are good for small farmers, and I hope we might agree that they would all be worse than H.R. 875.

Megan Prusynski has an interesting, if not quite accurate, post on Planetsave this morning. Two bills, one in the Senate, the other in the House, seek to standardize a number of aspects of food production that, Prusynski claims, could jeopardize organic farming. She writes:

Provisions include mandatory registration and inspection for “any food establishment or foreign food establishment engaged in manufacturing, processing, packing, or holding food for consumption in the United States,” and sets standard practices such as minimums for fertilizer use. Any food that the agency deems “unsafe, adulterated or misbranded” can be seized and the food establishment or farm fined. It’s not clear how these foods will be deemed unsafe. The bills aim to industrialize farms, standardize farming practices, require registration and inspection for any one producing food, and make practices key to organic farming illegal. Read the rest of this entry »

My friend B. wrote me this:

So I was reading the Bay Area Guardian, something I do exactly as regularly as I vote, and I ran across something that I thought might interest you. It seems San Francisco has a Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force to explore life after fossil fuels. Of course few take them seriously.

And I replied:

Do you mean that people locally don’t take the task force in SF seriously? Or don’t take post-oil seriously?

The peak oilers are sometimes hard to listen to because they’re so apocalyptically pessimistic. They see the energy packed into a hydrocarbon molecule and moan, What can possibly replace this? They don’t see anything on the shelf that can replace oil, so assume we’re all doomed. I do admire their historical analysis, tho, and I think Hubbert was right; well, he was right, US production peaked right when he said it would. A year or so ago the Saudi Minister of Energy said the planet was running out of oil and had to get ready. And now the King of Saudi Arabia has created a $10-billion endowment for a new university, sci and tech research, that will be a mini-kingdom unto itself in order to free it (and thus attract students and faculty) of Sharia, the heinous religious law of fundamentalist Islam. The king’s reasoning was explicit: Saudi Arabia won’t be an energy economy for much longer and needs to transform itself into a knowledge economy. Amen, brother. At last we agree on something. Read the rest of this entry »

Mushrooms. Molds, and Miracles

review by Brian Charles Clark

Mushrooms. Molds, and Miracles
Lucy Kavaler
backinprint.com, 2007

God is fungi. God is the stuff of the web—the food web, the web of life, call it what you will—and without fungi, we’d be less than dead; we never would have existed—“we” meaning every living thing on the planet. Fungi are everywhere, and everywhere essential, and what is god if not the ultimate mixmaster, the one who breaks it all down so the big bang beat can begin again?

“The process of decay,” Lucy Kavaler writes, “is… essential in making room on this small planet for new living things.” Kavaler wrote that line just a couple years after Carson’s Silent Spring was published. “The development of life on earth is related to the evolution of fungi.” Read the rest of this entry »

I just stumbled across a truly bizarre blog called cfact. There, Dennis T. Avery (author of the wacko Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic) counters a report on the dangers of fast food with the suggestion that we “chew on some real danger foods.” Avery writes, with seeming ignorance of basic nutrition science, “There’s a new children’s book out [Avery does not name the book, always a good tactic when you want to create a diversion], telling kids that vicious food-mongers are trying to make them obese with fast food. That’s such a pathetic scare! Any food can make you fat if you eat too much.” It’s hard to imagine getting fat on lettuce, say, which requires more energy to digest than it contains, but let it go. Here’s the real nutso suggestion by Mr. Avery: eat ergot fungus! Now there’s a real “danger food”! This isn’t even comparing apples to oranges, which are both foods. Ergot, need I remind you, is not a food. Talk about a diversionary tactic: spew out a long, misinformed “history” of St. Anthony’s Fire and avoid talking about killer transfats in Micky D’s poisonous offerings. Read the rest of this entry »