official 2012 post-election rant

It wouldn’t be an election year if I didn’t have at least one ranting post, so here it is: Maryland voters upheld the state’s equal marriage law! You’d think this would be great news. Historic, unprecedented, heart-warming, uplifting, community-affirming, ground-breaking news, right? Yes. It is.

So, why am I hearing kvetching from rich white gay people about how aggravating it is that this even needed to happen? Can we not just take one day to enjoy the moment? To look around at our neighbors in our various towns in the majority black counties in one of the most diverse states in the country and think, “Hey, these people consider me part of their community and actively support me and my family. They are not waiting for DOMA to be overturned to grudgingly accept my civil rights nor are they acting like Virginia and passing crazy laws to the bitter end to overtly deny me even normal contractual guarantees. Nope, instead they supported their elected officials in passing a marriage equality law and then they went to the polls to uphold it. Wow, I feel so happy to be part of this moment and this place.” Apparently not.

I know that it’s frustrating to be the last bogeyman standing in the marriage equality ring and I know that DOMA is a turd in your wine every single day. I know that it has sucked to work in the DC area and have to choose to between legal marriage, voting representation in Congress, or Virginia. I know that it is absolutely not right in the least that civil rights be denied people based on majority rule. This can all be true and we can still be pleased and happy and, yes, even grateful to live under a president who is willing to spend political capital on this issue, in a state where people who are not just contrary New Englanders are moved to positive action on our behalf.

I know I am. So, Prince George’s County, Maryland, black people, and President Obama: cheers! Thank you. And, all you white people in Maine, Minnesota, and Washington: you’re not so bad yourselves.

official 2012 post-election rant

the new pro-GMO “Big Organic”

It’s with a heavy heart that I’ve realized I need to cut the cord on some of my favorite companies. There are many I already avoid because of their deceptive packaging (Silk), CAFO-like practices (Horizon), or just simply because I don’t want to be putting money in the pockets of the major conventional junk food producers (Odwalla, Naked, Izze, Muir Glen, Santa Cruz). Now that the fight for GMO-labeling is on in California, however, I’ve learned that two of our household favorites have been acquired: Honest Tea and Larabars are no longer independent companies (and probably haven’t been for a while, if I think back to when plastic bottles became the packaging of choice). It’s one thing to be owned by a parent company, it’s another to have that parent company donate big bucks to fight a labeling law that “small organic” and most of their customer base support. No surprise that Monsanto is at the top of that list, nor that the “natural” products relying heavily on soy (which is almost certainly GMO unless certified organic) are also major opponents.

Lucky for the sprout, who is a date-and-nut bar junky, I already have a recipe on deck for making Lara-like bars. I’ll get right on that just as soon as I process the (literal) gallon of plum tomatoes on the kitchen counter. I need to go to the coop for more storage containers for said tomatoes (and whatever I make them into), so a quick trip to the bulk date-and-nut aisle and we should be golden.

the new pro-GMO “Big Organic”

is this thing on?

Not only is it already March, but the month is nearly half over. Yikes! I got sucked into a black hole of sick household members and even less sleep than before that led me to not be able to type anything coherent but instead simply stare at the computer screen and try not to drool whenever I’ve had a couple of free moments to myself. I’ll try to do better.

What have you missed? I took the lazy man’s path and stopped doing the Dark Days Challenge when the host became unable to keep up with the round-ups due to circumstances in her own life. We continue to eat locally, I just am not making any effort to be creative or branch out from our regular recipes. I did plan to post about the soup I made in the summer that we recently ate from the freezer, and the recipe is this: make leek and potato soup, dilute with a bit more water, add pre-cooked chopped kale and a can of white beans at the end (and probably more salt; I use the mushroom seasoned salt that we get from our farmer). It’s good, and makes for more of a meal than regular leek and potato soup. I also made macaroons, since I was craving the ones I’d had in Portland with dried apricots, pecans, and a dark chocolate bottom. The macaroons were delicious, and I managed to make them last a whole week (!) by putting them in the freezer. I need to remember that option for future cookie cravings, because I love to make them but really don’t need to eat quite so many at a time.

What else? I managed to get outside and clean out the garden beds in the front of the house, so now the daffodil sprouts can actually see the sun. The crocuses are up, and I’m looking forward to seeing which daffodils bloom; you never know which ones will survive both the replanting and the hungry squirrels. I’ve been working on my garden plans for this year, but they really deserve their own post. (Stay tuned!)

Finally, politics are driving me a little nuts these days. On the local level, I was heartened by the way our surrounding neighborhoods embraced a rally in opposition to the Westboro Baptist Church (my favorite sign said, “Thanks for bringing the community together!). On the national and state level things are pretty sucktastic, as I don’t need to tell you because you’re an educated person who reads the news, right? Local delegates tried to play politics and sank Maryland’s equal marriage bill: I hope no one votes for anything those two people support for at least a decade (because I’m sleep-deprived, and that makes me surprisingly petty). All the money we have left after donating to NPR, Planned Parenthood, and the unions is being squirreled away so that we can live during the impending (Freudian slip: I nearly typed “impeding”) government shut-down. After using my energy taking care of the sprout, I have absolutely none left for filtering or using polite language: it’s gotten a little sailor-ish around these parts. Thank mother nature for oxytocin, I cannot imagine how much crabbier I would be about all of this without the mama hormones. (Of course, I’d have orders of magnitude more uninterrupted sleep, so maybe it would balance.)

And now: back to thinking about spring and daydreaming about the garden!

is this thing on?

food : the surprising hostility toward organics

Maybe it’s just parenting forums, or maybe it’s just the DC area, but I continue to be surprised by the hostility and derision directed toward people who make it a priority to buy organic food. (I won’t even get into the purchase of other organic products, like toiletries or linens.) I understand that the cost of organic food makes it difficult to directly substitute for conventional food; making that kind of shift in a fixed budget requires making different choices and taking out entire categories of food (for us it’s been packaged food and eating out, for example). The critics aren’t usually (only) focused on the logistics or the financial challenges, though: there’s a way in which the entire commitment to organic food is suspect. Now, maybe this is just the contempt of the majority for the minority, since organic food still makes up only a small percentage of the food sold and consumed in this country. But there’s a component of the judgment that’s puzzling to me, that suggests that people who buy organic food are stupid: they’re getting suckered into paying more for something of lower value (or at least not of a greater value commensurate with the increased price).

Certainly, some of the price of organic food must be driven by demand in some parts of the country where more people want more organic food than is available. I am willing to accept that premise. I don’t believe, though, that most of the basis for the price is inflation based on scarcity; there just isn’t enough demand on a scale that would make such an approach generally profitable. Now, I know that some organic dairy farmers have chosen to “dump” their organic milk in the conventional market in order to keep the price of labeled organic milk at a certain level, but I don’t (personally) believe that’s a choice driven by greed. Instead, I understand that to be a move that’s necessary if the farmers want to have the price of milk stay at a level that allows them to stay in business, in the face of competition with large factory farmers like the ones who supply Horizon milk. If large commercial farms were taken out of the equation, by the government enforcing the pasture requirement differently (for example), small organic dairies would have no need to take artificial measures to keep the price of milk high because demand would naturally compensate (milk being one of the most desired organic products these days).

To bring this back to my original point, it seems that people perceive organic food to have an artificially high price point. All the public awareness and information campaigns that have been undertaken have failed to convince these folks that conventional food is artificially cheap due to subsidies and questionable labor practices. Which brings me to the crux of why I am committed to organic food: I grew up in farmland, and I am not interested in having my money go to people who exploit farm workers through low wages and insecure jobs, or to people who endanger the lives of those workers and their families through the injudicious use of pesticides and herbicides. I am even less interested in having the people who make and sell those pesticides and herbicides profit from my food choices. I hardly ever see these arguments about organic food being made, though, and it’s probably because we can never know for sure that farm workers aren’t being exploited (which is why I don’t believe agricultural workers should be exempted from the federal right to unionize nor from the minimum wage laws, but that’s a whole different discussion for another day). We can and do know that the chemicals used in conventional and industrial farming don’t just poison the water systems, they make people sick. And I don’t mean the people who eat the food, I mean the people who plant, weed, harvest, and process it.

This last issue seems to be at the root of another element of the contempt for a commitment to organic food: there’s little evidence that the food is better for the consumer, and most people take a narrow view of what their own interests are. Yes, there are not many studies that support a higher nutrition value of organic produce, but there are increasingly many that suggest negative outcomes from the consumption of pesticides. Still, there are foods that don’t retain as many pesticides as others, and people seem happy to save their money for the worst offenders. The same rationale applies to genetically-modified organisms: there’s little evidence that they are dangerous to our health. The knowledge that they are made and sold by the pesticide companies, or that they are contaminating traditional crops and thereby further limiting the diversity of our food supply, does not factor into people’s consumption choices. Because there’s little evidence to justify buying organic solely on the basis of an immediate physical benefit to the consumer, a person has to take a larger view of what’s in their own interest. You have to believe that it’s in your interest to protect the health of other people’s families, to protect biodiversity, and to minimize the application of chemicals, even when they’re not being applied in your region. You also have to believe that all of those things are worth paying more for what appears to be the same stuff: organic food is not easily identified in and of itself, and is invariably more expensive if you are substituting products one for one in your family’s eating plan.

So, I get that people might not care enough about these things to spend money on them and might simply choose not to buy organic food. What I don’t get is why there’s so much hostility directed at those who do. Now, it may be that folks are just afflicted with the inability to see another person’s divergent behavior as anything other than an attack on them and what they’ve chosen to do in their own lives. I certainly know more than a few people like this, and go out of my way not to engage them in conversation about anything personal. This is what I thought was going on, but lately I have been thinking it has more to do with money. If organic food costs more, to buy it you either have to have more money or stop buying something else. In either case, it becomes just another consumer item that can signal status. Of course, it can only signal status is people know you’re buying it, and unlike your gold Lexus SUV, it’s not something that is immediately obvious. So, if you are buying organic food as a status marker, you would have to let people know by talking about it. Which would be annoying, just as annoying as the person who talks about the thread count of their sheets that they had to have imported from France (or wherever) because otherwise how the hell would you know to be impressed with what they were sleeping on. That kind of talking about organic food would get annoying, so I could see how listeners would become hostile. I could also see how you would think it was a stupid thing to spend money on, if your goal were to gain status, since not only do you have to talk about it all the time but you eat it and then it’s gone. If I had limited funds and were concerned about signaling status, I’d probably get a flashy car and a recognizable handbag, too.

After all this circular talking, we seem to have arrived at: some people care about the practices behind organic food to buy it regardless of price and some people only buy organic food because of what they think the price says about how much money they have. Apparently I only know people in the first category, aka hippies, because I’ve never heard someone put forward their consumption of organic food as a way to impress me (or someone else impressive who might also be listening).

food : the surprising hostility toward organics

Reid gets another chance at Lieberman, which he probably won’t take

I know I promised to never blog about the Lieb again, so I’ll keep it brief. It’s no news at all that Senator Lieberman is a hypocrite and a coward who won’t affiliate himself with a party that actually shares his beliefs because they don’t represent those of his constituency and he dearly loves his title. Instead, he lies about what he’s going to do, collects the money and the power, and then smirks his way back to his true position.

I’ve already used our local favorite you can’t polish a turd as the warning to Senator Reid before he rolled over and re-upped the Lieb, which means I’m left with only lie down with a dog, get up with fleas. Of course, the best way to deal with cowards is to call bullshit on their threats, and I’m hoping that Reid forces Republicans-plus-Lieberman to filibuster the move to bring the debate the floor. It’s possible they’d get everyone on board with that, but I have to believe that there are still a few Republicans who support going ahead with an actual debate and amendments to the bill than not. Of course, a filibuster may actually succeed, but at least they’d have to work for it.

I swear, nothing exposes the Senate for the good old whitey boys club that it still is like this perpetual nonsense around what to do about ole Joe Lieberman.

Reid gets another chance at Lieberman, which he probably won’t take