Everyone,

I couldn't decide whether to post this link here or on Food & Drink, since it obviously overlaps both categories. Probably even more categories than that--politics and economics being the big ones. Anyway, here's the link:

Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle For the World Food System

The author is Raj Patel. What impressed me right away about this book is the title. "Stuffed and Starved" reflects the conclusions I've been coming to myself about our increasingly corporatized food supply and the negative effect it's having on our collective health, both America's health and the world's. Some of us become obese and some starve, and most revealing of all--some especially in America do BOTH at the same time, becoming dangerously overweight while being malnourished at the same time.

More tomorrow when I'm not so tired.

--Linda

quote:

More tomorrow when I'm not so tired.

     Rest all you want: I ordered the book but it won't arrive until May 11.
Seán

Sean,

I wish I could afford to order all the books I want, or even some of them. Two more very important writers on the global food supply are Michael Pollan and Vandana Shiva. My friend Kathe who used to post on Aantares, until she got fed up with the righties and heavily involved in Facebook, is a big fan of both of them. My daughter also read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan and loved it. If you check out the Amazon link you'll see that it has 609 reviews! So a lot of people feel the same way. Amazon links:

The Omnivore's Dilemma
Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply

Michael Pollan's books have more of a consumer-oriented focus, while Vandana Shiva focuses on globalism (political and economic) and the negative effect it has had on local farmers, especially in her native India although the same forces are at work in many countries.

--Linda

Linda,
     My profligacy in buying books is not a thing to emulate; I justify it as a compensation for the rigors of my otherwise ascetic life but, deep down, I realize that excuse is just a pile of poo. Over the years I have collected a considerable library relating to the availability of food for the increasing human population. This book will only be the most recent in a series.
     As a working source of information I rely heavily on reports from WHO. (Choose Health Topics and select Nutrition). The information there is free of political undertones, but it does little to dispel the grim shadow cast by the Reverend Malthus.
Seán

You deserve a break today...

so get up and get away...

What? Oh.

Never mind.

quote:

My profligacy in buying books is not a thing to emulate; I justify it as a compensation for the rigors of my otherwise ascetic life but, deep down, I realize that excuse is just a pile of poo. Over the years I have collected a considerable library relating to the availability of food for the increasing human population. This book will only be the most recent in a series.

Sean,

Who said anything about "your" profligacy in buying books? I promise you, I am NOT emulating you nor trying to emulate you. You think you're the only one with that particular weakness? Yes, I *know* there are such things as public libraries, but as far as I'm concerned any book worth reading is worth owning. After all, who knows when I'll want to re-read it or refer to it?

It sounds like you know a lot more than I do about the global food supply. Also, from what you've said about yourself in the past, you also know a lot more than I do about growing food. You said that you grew enough food on your land in New Mexico to feed a large family. It sounds like Kathe and Rebecca and I have a lot we could learn from you, not to mention the rest of our homestead-oriented friends.

Enough of these small grassroots efforts can add up to a lot of food, so don't sell them short. I've heard that during WWII 40% of America's food supply (at least when it comes to fruits and vegetables) was grown right at home in small victory gardens.

--Linda

quote:

It sounds like you know a lot more than I do about the global food supply.—Raksha

Linda,
     Possibly I do; the subject has commanded my attention for a lot of years. On the other hand I may not, since I have followed facts and figures and regretfully neglected humanitarian issues because I've seen no way to help.
     As for home gardening, I can hardly help at all because each place has its individual problems. Most important for my learning, beyond simple trial and error, were conversations with local people who actually were gardening. The fundamental truth is that anyone can garden, but it takes a lot of effort that will lessen with experience.
     One bit of advice that I can offer everyone is to go easy on growing squash and cucumbers. They are so prolific that, before you know it, you have five times more than you can cope with.
Seán

quote:

One bit of advice that I can offer everyone is to go easy on growing squash and cucumbers. They are so prolific that, before you know it, you have five times more than you can cope with.

Sean,

I have prior experience with zucchini, but never to the point where I've had more than I could use. I have had that happen with tomatoes, though. But as far as cucumbers are concerned, I have NEVER had a cucumber plant produce an actual fruit! I have no idea why not and I haven't tried to grow them very often, but personally I'd be overjoyed if I had more cucumbers than I could use! I'd make kosher dill pickles out of them...real honest-to-God half sour pickles like the kind they cure in barrels and serve at Canter's.

For the enlightenment of the culturally deprived, Canter's is a landmark Jewish deli in my old stomping ground, the Fairfax area of Los Angeles. I've been promising myself that one of these days I'm going to do an entire blog post about Canter's and my decades-long association with it.

After four months of nothing, I finally put up a new blog post last night--or rather very early this morning. The post itself explains the circumstances.

Just To See If I Can Do It...

--Linda

Linda,
     I'm surprised you had bad luck with cucumbers; they grow for me like weeds. Perhaps your soil was deficient in one way or another. The cure for that is compost. Compost everything available including uncongenial neighbors and the occasional missionary. With good soil and sufficient water you can create a private jungle sufficient for feeding an entire community and at least a hundred million bugs.
     I read your new blog with pleasure; you wrote it very skillfully. I was unaware of pepper trees. Are they the source of ordinary black pepper? For no good reason I always thought peppercorns grew on little bushes.
Seán

Linda,
     Stuffed arrived today, much earlier than expected. The book is replete with historical insights and rich with anecdotal information about the societal damage caused by the Green Revolution. Patel, writing with great passion, assigns the blame for our troubled food on big agribusinesses. He says their sole intent is maximizing profit and that they do so by engineering foods that are optimally marketable but inferior as nutrition. His case for that conclusion is not adequately substantiated, but I suppose he is correct. A tabulated list of differences in nutrients would be truly helpful here, but it is lacking.
     I have only had the time for a superficial scanning of the book. I hope to read it carefully this weekend.
Seán

quote:

I'm surprised you had bad luck with cucumbers; they grow for me like weeds. Perhaps your soil was deficient in one way or another. The cure for that is compost. Compost everything available including uncongenial neighbors and the occasional missionary.

Sean,

Well, you KNOW what kind of compost I'd use on missionaries, don't you? Hint: It's the cheapest kind sold, and it's of animal origin, not vegetable or mineral.

That could have been my problem with the cucumbers--not enough compost. I've even heard that the best cucumbers are grown right on the compost pile itself, but I don't have one. Don't have a container for it, and I refuse to make a pile on the ground and call it a compost pile. For one thing, there isn't room for it in my tiny back yard--I'm on a big corner lot, but the house is set way back from the street, so the property is mostly front yard.

Also, it's difficult to get the right volume for the compost to "work" and actually turn into compost. It really does take a cubic yard of "stuff" for anything to happen. The way I know this is because we actually did have a compost bin in Pomona--unfortunately in an inaccessible location, just like everything else in that place. Even if it didn't start out that way, it eventually became inaccessible. I lived with a couple of pack rats and avid do-it-yourself types who were actually worse than me, if you can believe that. They were always piling metal objects of various kinds in any available space--broken bicycles, motorcycle parts and quite a few unidentifiable found objects that all had one feature in common: They were too heavy for me to move on my own. That's a digression, though.

quote:

I read your new blog with pleasure; you wrote it very skillfully. I was unaware of pepper trees. Are they the source of ordinary black pepper? For no good reason I always thought peppercorns grew on little bushes.

I guess I was really fishing for compliments there, huh? That post was actually a trial run for my new blog about Southern California gardening, basically Mediterranean-climate gardening which is the only kind I know about. That blog still doesn't exist, but hopefully it will in the near future. Before I started it, I had to know I could upload pictures to my blog, just like a real blogger. As it turns out, it's not difficult at all--I just never had the nerve to try it before.

I'm still stuck with my old Sony Mavica digital camera that uses 3 1/2" floppies, but I'm getting more efficient at transferring the pictures from my old computer to my new one using my flash drive. The weather is really beautiful and everything is in bloom now, so I've been taking lots of flower and plant pictures.

About those pepper trees: They are in no way related to black pepper, although I learned just today that the red or pink berries are often dried and sold as "pink peppercorns." The botanical name is Schinus molle and it has about 10 different common names besides "California pepper tree."

Sorry about the delay in getting back to you on these new posts. I haven't been spending as much time on Aantares as I usually do because of all the time I've been spending taking pictures, uploading them, TRYING to organize them (not too successfully) and finally germinating a few seeds!

--Linda

Linda,
     My compost box consisted of resawed lumber nailed to four posts, 3 feet tall, that were the corners of a six-foot square. I also had a compost pile consisting of manure from the stables at the State Fairgrounds. The manure was free to anyone willing to haul it away, so I took truckloads of it.
     That is how I learned that large piles of horse manure get hot enough to flame spontaneously from the heat of fermentation. Another disadvantage is that it contains bindweed seeds, which grow luxuriantly and are virtually impossible to eradicate. Piles are bad in that respect: Weed seeds escape composting. That doesn't happen when a box is used and the mix is turned repeatedly.
     Thanks for the link to Wikipedia. I took the liberty of editing the article a little by rewriting the last line of the introductory paragraph.
Seán