Category Archives: food

PR Watch

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…has a few links up:

ALEC anniversary being celebrated in Chicago.  A few folks thought they’d drop by….

MOVIE SCREENING: On Wednesday, August 7, at 6 p.m. Common Cause, the Center for Media and Democracy, and others will host a screening of the Bill Moyers documentary the “United States of ALEC” followed by a panel discussion. The screening will be held at the University Center, 525 South State Street in Chicago.

RALLY: At noon on Thursday, August 8, a coalition of groups, spearheaded by the Chicago Federation of Labor, is calling on people to gather outside the ALEC conference at the Palmer House Hotel, located at 17 East Monroe Street for a march and rally. You can tell them you are coming here.

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ALEC, Big Oil, and Big Ag…

 

ALEC and low wages…

 

Public Television pulls funding for documentary on the Kochs…because the Kochs are million dollar contributors.   Selling their soul doesn’t come cheap, you know…

 

 

Searching for Soul Food…

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Michael Twitty has a link up to an article about the loss of soul food recipes…sadly, the history seems to be lost in Asheville.   I think the diet dictocrats that insisted margarine was “good” for us…have scared many people away from food with animal fat in it.  If you recall, the book Nourishing Traditions blows those myths away, along with the myth that raw milk is baaaad for you.  Just the opposite–the enzymes that are removed in the pasteurization process are beneficial.  Folks who have difficulty digesting milk products find that they have no difficulty with raw milk.  But if you want raw milk, you have to go about it in a clandestine way because the food nazis are out to make it illegal.

 

Poverty and Education; Gates and Broad

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The thing that gets pushed aside with “school reformers” is the link between poverty and lower grades.  I never fully understood this country’s contempt for the poor until now.   You truly have to experience it as a poor person to understand.  You’re worse than criminals because at least criminals get three hots and a cot.  What does Congress do?  Cut funding to the Housing and Urban Development and cut food stamps.

And I found this excellent post by Joanne Barkan  on the fallacy of “school reform” by Gates, Broad, et al.  It is sickening how Gates has manipulated data, ignored poverty, and is stealthily racist when you view the public schools that closed being heavily minority.  Gates shoveled millions upon millions towards this boondoggle when instead he could have paid taxes so that those schools would be well-funded and able to have smaller class size so that teachers could help those that had more difficulty learning, or it could have helped the poor kids get nutritious meals cooked from scratch….the simple solutions that would have the greatest impact.

From the website:

In November 2008, Bill and Melinda gathered about one hundred prominent figures in education at their home outside Seattle to announce that the small schools project hadn’t produced strong results. They didn’t mention that, instead, it had produced many gut-wrenching sagas of school disruption, conflict, students and teachers jumping ship en masse, and plummeting attendance, test scores, and graduation rates. No matter, the power couple had a new plan: performance-based teacher pay, data collection, national standards and tests, and school “turnaround” (the term of art for firing the staff of a low-performing school and hiring a new one, replacing the school with a charter, or shutting down the school and sending the kids elsewhere).

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Sickening, isn’t it??

 

More:

States were desperate for funds (in the end, thirty-four applied in the two rounds of the contest).

[…]

Enter the Gates Foundation. It reviewed the prospects for reform in every state, picked fifteen favorites, and, in July 2009, offered each up to $250,000 to hire consultants to write the application. Gates even prepared a list of recommended consulting firms.

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That pretty much says it right there.  States were desperate for funds –they had little choice.

In the same article, the Post broke the news that Bill Gates had “secretly bankrolled” Learn-NY, a group campaigning to overturn a term-limit law so that Michael Bloomberg could run for a third term as New York City mayor. Bloomberg’s main argument for deserving another term was that his education reform agenda (identical to the Gates-Broad agenda) was transforming city schools for the better. Gates put $4 million of his personal money into Learn-NY.

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And this should be great cause of concern:

On October 7 and 8, 2010, the Columbia Journalism Review ran a two-part investigation by Robert Fortner into “the implications of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s increasingly large and complex web of media partnerships.” The report focused on the foundation’s grants to the PBS Newshour, ABC News, and the British newspaper the Guardian for reporting on global health.

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Both Gates and Broad funded “NBC News Education Nation,” a week of public events and programming on education reform that began on September 27, 2010. The programs aired on NBC News shows such as “Nightly News” and “Today” and on the MSNBC, CNBC, and Telemundo TV networks.

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Gates and Broad also sponsored the documentary film Waiting for Superman

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As a vehicle for their partnership, the foundation and Viacom (with some additional funds from the AT&T Foundation) set up a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization called the Get Schooled Foundation.

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There is a reason that Ronald Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s FCC* allowed more consolidation of the media–the press has always been part of the Fourth Estate that kept Congress and the President in check.  If the media was weakened with consolidation, it concentrated ownership which in turn shut off different opinions, viewpoints, and independent voices.  It also stifled competition between media….ironic coming from people who often bring up “encouraging competition”  as a reason for allowing bank deregulation, relaxing EPA rules, and repealing or relaxing antitrust regulation.

The corporate takeover of public schools got a foothold because the media was not doing its job of investigating what was going on and who was behind it….because they were being bankrolled by those very people they should have been investigating.

*The Federal Communications Commission is staffed by presidential appointees.  The American public owns the airwaves, but those rights are being taken away from them by media consolidation.

The link between poverty and how well a child does in school broaches the subject of healthcare.   Children who live in poor areas are more likely to be exposed to toxic environments.  Heavy metals seriously impact one’s ability to learn, one’s ability to remember, and one’s ability towards impulse control–all of these impact a child’s education.  In addition, as anyone who has read this blog knows, ADD is a problem when heavy metals are involved–totally frustrating a child who may get distracted and lose focus during the teacher’s instruction, missing important information.

 

 

 

 

 

Ash Cake and Other Slave Dishes

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Michael Twitty has this up on some of the food the slaves use to prepare.  When I think of the poor folk now, really, it’s not that far removed.  One can only do so much with food stamps, and as I’ve posted before, if you’re on a Celiac diet or try to eat organic/non-processed food, it is pretty damn difficult to stay in budget.

From my experience, I do know that all the stuff that they tell you is bad (which is wrong, btw), such as bacon, fatty pieces of meat, and the like, sure do make the cheap meat and vegetables taste oh-so-much better. There were times when I walked through the building in FW,  the aromas coming from apartments was soo good, I thought there should be some rule that if you make something that smells that good, you should have to share it with the rest of the building.  Heh.

I have to hand it to African American folk–there were some pretty darn good cooks in my building.  They used what little they had to make tasty meals.

And I learned something today–that there wasn’t segregation with the whites on plantations.  That is heartwarming to hear.  Good for them for not lumping all whites together and rejecting those that came around. Poor folk is poor folk, no matter.  It’s too bad that after the commonality of being poor is no longer there, that folks no longer feel that community togetherness.  Why?

 

 

 

Rochester CSA

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The Rochester, New York CSA has put up a promo video on youtube:

I could have given them a couple of tips on a better sound quality and when asking someone to speak, make sure they’re comfortable in front of a camera.

All in all, though, I thought this was a pretty good piece on explaining about community supported agriculture.    It would be great to have them close enough that one could bike over to either put in their hours of work, or on market day to bring groceries home.  I like the idea of rickshaws, as was previously posted about.  There are three-wheeled bikes out there with a big basket but they’re cumbersome to ride–slow as molasses.  I don’t know if the rickshaws would be any different?  Hmmm…

Here’s another video I thought was interesting–some folks use worms in containers instead of having compost piles.  So I presume this is what this guy is doing although he doesn’t really come out and say it:

 

 

I like these two guys below. Folksy.  They do a better job of explaining what they’re doing and why:

 

 

When they talk of cured horse manure, I’m assuming that they’re waiting a year before using it.  I think a year minimum is the standard that they like to let manure cure, so any bad organisms have met their demise by this time.

 

The Role of Food in American Slavery

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I just love this stuff–it gives so much more of history than just names, places, and dates.  The visual and cultural really brings it alive.  I wish Michael Twitty had brought up a little more in the historical aspect of the recipes and cooking methods.  

I am always fascinated at how wise they were back in the day…the women gathered the nuts, berries, and plants to eat…how did they know which were poisonous and which weren’t?  How did they remember one plant from another?  And the ability to put spices together is truly a gift.   

 

Scientists against GMOs

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Wake-Up Call has a blog up on a new paper by scientists against genetically modified organisms (GMO’s).

From the paper:

For example, the claim that conventional plant breeders have been “genetically modifying” crops
for centuries by selective breeding and that GM crops are no different is incorrect (see 1.1). The term
“genetic modification” is recognised in common usage and in national and international laws to refer
to the use of recombinant DNA techniques to transfer genetic material between organisms in a way
that would not take place naturally, bringing about alterations in genetic makeup and properties.
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In my view, this “muddying of the waters” as they say, is a way to placate the growing public alarm about what they are
putting in our food supply.  See, if you can claim that GMO’s were there all along, the public is pacified and the current
push of asking for GMO labeling will die a slow death…
….meanwhile, the public continues to suffer from GMO induced leaky gut causing susceptibility to heavy metal poisoning,
allergies, chronic fatigue, etc., and their doctors will be clueless.
Important points of the paper:
1.  They assert that it’s a mistake saying changing one gene is only changing one gene….the scientists assert that changing one
gene has something of a ripple effect. It makes total sense that the genes aren’t isolated and they work in concert with other
genes, thus when you change it, it has unintended consequences:  crop nutritional value, allergens, toxins, environmental harm.
The most striking point of this section:
These unexpected changes are especially dangerous because they are irreversible.
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They go on to say that unlike pollutants that degrade over time, GMO’s do not.  Pandora’s Box, baby.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at the “atomic gardens” mentioned on page 12, but still shocking now, looking back,
at how they were using “peaceful radiation” to change plants beneficially.  Wow.  How naive we were.  I wonder at
the health of the people who ate those plants?  What about the people and wildlife surrounding these “atomic gardens”?
Since we know that people living within 20 miles of nuclear power plants are more likely to have thyroid issues….I
wonder about the effects of this type of radiation…
Well, I’m off to read more–it’s got 123 pages, so it’s gonna be awhile. 🙂

Fruits of Fukushima

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Where’s my fork…??

A picture speaks a thousand words….

It is so obvious to everyone but those in a position to do something that nuclear radiation caused this food to be deformed.

Wonder what it’s done to the animals, birds, insects, and the no-see-ums (microbiological growth in a normally healthy soil).

Wonder how this will show up with the women reproductively?

How many have now been diagnosed with either thyroid cancer or low thyroid or thyroid nodules?

Well, I did a little search and found this.  Good Grief, forty-three percent!!

They’ve found butterflies with abnormalities here.  Note that the scientists say insects are rarely affected by radiation.  This is significant.

I couldn’t find a specific animal they had observed for abnormalities, but I’m sure they’re out there.

Rep. Brown: Shame On You

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Like I posted previously, I’m pretty upset and words fail me, but Rep. Brown speaks for me. 

I think we need to stop spending money on these….useless eaters. (Hillary Clinton and Rush Limbaugh have both reportedly stated such)  ….so I’m trying to find information confirming that Hillary or Bill made the statement, and it’s interesting all the stuff that I came across….one of which is a statement that Cecil Rhodes of the Rhodes scholarship fame, was a racist who called Africans “useless eaters”.  (Interesting that Bill Clinton is a Rhodes Scholar.)

This, for instance.  Well, now.

And then there’s this (2010).  Isn’t it interesting that wherever Clintons go, there is disaster….and they’re always “my bad”   “oops”   “sorry bout that, folks”….and they’re still praised out the wazoo….for doing what, exactly…?  Somebody please tell me.

More on food from Raj Patel here.

Here’s a link Patel mentions in his blog on the hunger summit.

Wow:

So it’s hardly surprising that almost 200 African farmers’ and campaigners’ groups have rejected the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, calling it a “new wave of colonialism” in a statement sent to G8 leaders earlier this week. Their analysis is clear: “Private ownership of knowledge and material resources (for example, seed and genetic materials) means the flow of royalties out of Africa into the hands of multinational corporations.”

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The real causes of hunger are inequality of wealth and power, not a lack of big business.

 

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Word.

We don’t want your GMO’s.  We don’t want your money.  We want decent, livable wages to pay our own way.