Food.

Did you happen to see Bill Moyers’ Journal this past weekend on PBS. He interviewed Michael Pollan, whose two books, The Omnivore’s Dilemna and In Defense of Food, Moyers mentions at the beginning of the program, and which I have read and highly recommend. They will forever change the way you look at food.

As Time magazine recently put it: farm policy is ‘a welfare program for the megafarms [ed: that would be agribusiness – names like Archer-Daniels Midland (ADM), Cargill, Tyson] that use the most fuel, water and pesticides; emit the most greenhouse gases; grow the most fattening crops; hire the most illegals; and depopulate rural America.’

[Obama was talking of something he read] when he told Time magazine, ‘that the way we produce our food "is partly contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in health care costs."’

What he had read was this article by Michael Pollan. It’s well worth the read.

As long as we think that the supermarket is where our food comes from we will be totally subject to what others are feeding us. Those others are large multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporations. Do you think they have our health interests in mind? Beware the edible food-like substances.

/ - more to come

Alley Garden Update

At the beginning of the month my garden looked like this:


The big plants in the picture are potatoes. There's also a row of broccoli, a row of red cabbage, and a row of collards, all interspersed with onions. Now it's looking like this:


Everything is getting so lush there's competition for sunshine! I've now added four varieties of peppers and some ichiban eggplant to the bed. Yeah it's getting really packed out. The potato plants got so big the stalks are falling down. It's not a big deal, just doesn't look as good as when they stand. A number are blossoming which means they're making potatoes down below. Today I noticed a couple of my pepper plants were blossoming.

If you were to turn directly around from the above view you would see another bed about four feet wide by about twenty two feet long. It took me about a week to prepare it properly, taking out two wheelbarrow loads of roots. Then we laid two hundred pounds of manure compost and eighty pounds of potting soil and tilled it all under. Yesterday I planted a dozen tomato plants, half a dozen yellow squash and a few zuccinni.

By the way, I harvested some servings of broccoli. There's something about eating food that you know where it's been. They also say that every bite of food we take has traveled an average of fifteen hundred miles... and God knows how many hands.

Eat well.
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