EPA Will Mandate Tests On Pesticide Chemicals

OK, get this, you know how I rage on here all the time against big chemical corporations like Monsanto? How I like to show you their videos and point out how absurd our war on weeds is? Well, this will make you laugh, guess what? The EPA 13 years after the passage of the of the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 is finally starting to test pesticides to see if they have any negative affects on animals or humans. Hysterical, isn't it? I mean, really, Rachael Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962 and you bet that Dupont Chemicals, Monsanto and the rest of the crew already know what the EPA is going to find (and it's not good) and have been keeping it in a vast secret vault that Dick Cheney sleeps in every night, just to help out.

Read the less sarcastic version in Juliet Eilpern's article in the Washington Post.

Interconnectivity

They took all the trees
and put them in a tree museum
and they charged the people
a dollar and a half just to see em
don't it always seem to go
you don't know what you've got
till it's gone
they paved paradise
and put up a parking lot

Hey farmer farmer
put away that DDT now
give me spots on my apples
but leave me the birds and the bees

Joni Mitchell - Big Yellow Taxi

Something is a foot, a tipping point of sorts. Yesterday I was talking to a dairy farmer from Ronnybrook Farm Dairy at the Avenue A market. She was telling me about why they choose not to have organic certification, it costs $35,000 to get (yikes, why are we penalizing farmers for wanting to be come organic and making it so out of reach?) and there are lots of ways around it. She suggested that if for example you had an orchard that was certified organic yet you had three other orchards that were not you could easily mix and match your fruit so the consumer would see your organic certification, but you would not necessarily be getting an organic apple or grape or whatever. So I thought I would write an post today called Talking to Farmers, something I do a lot of these days. Then this morning I was reading Ann Saxelby's wonderful weekly newsletter where she talks about all the wonderful things that are happening in the world of food and sustainability, she mentions my favorite FoodDemocracyNow.org then goes on to talk about a site by the radio show host Majora Carter ThePromisedLand.org. She talks to "inspiring people from around the world" and has a ton of great interviews, I'd never heard of her or the site before and I can just tell from my brief visit I'm going to be spending a lot of time there! Finally the site that I most was excited about is the brainchild of a local couple retrovore.com. I love this site, it's all beige and brown and very Williamsburg retro funky in it's aesthetic so it's no surprise that there slogan is: The Future is in the Pasture. So you see where this is all going? Just yesterday I was talking to a farmer and a few days before that I wrote a posting here that started: let us begin on a journey backwards that is all about slowing down and re-evaluating our ideas about food, cooking and time well spent. Retrovore is a great site and low and behold what is on their home page, audio clips of interviews with farmers talking about their products.

It reminds me of the Tom Waits song I Never Talk to Strangers from his album Small Change, it's a duet with Bette Midler and at one point after she has just perfectly nailed him and his wayward ways he exclaims: "you must be reading my mail!" It always makes me laugh and today it just seems downright prescient. Not that what I do here is at all unique or that I ever thought I was the only person that was doing it, but look their is a lot of people thinking the same things and feeling passionate enough about it to start writing about it bad talking about these issue so important to the way we live now. Or more to the point the ways in which we need to change how we live in order to maintain our health and the health of the planet. Very exciting.

The interview that peeked Anne's interest on The Promised Land was with a guy named Andy Lipkis who is the founder of an organization called www.TreePeople.org certainly you need to take a moment and listen to this inspiring interview. The real nugget of what he suggests is that about schools, he has the really amazing idea, he convinced the school board of LA to tear up asphalt in school yards and plant trees instead. How amazing is that? I grew up going to public schools in Hamilton, Canada. Every school in this 6th largest city in Canada is surround by large swaths of asphalt, just think what it would do to the landscape of the city if these graveyards of asphalt where we expect our children to play was a forest, filled with shade, birds and soft moss and wild grass patches to play in? Creating better air and cooling the schools in the summer time and cutting down on air conditioning costs. Now I have to wonder where did the idea that asphalt was a good thing? That this hard dead fossil fuel based substance that needs constant maintenance at great expense was better then nature? That's a rhetorical question because I think we all know the answer. The good news is thanks to Tree People and Andy Lipkis we know what the future of school yards should look like.

As an urban guy I find it very exciting to see how people are working towards making the city a place that isn't just about concrete, asphalt and the occasional park. For years I have walked up and down the streets of New York and gotten angry because you could walk for blocks and blocks and never see a tree on a street. Thanks to Mayor Bloomberg's commitment to planting tress and Andy Lipkis's visionary ideas I feel like the whole concept of what a city is and can be is changing and greening for the future.


PS

Joni Mitchell is a Goddess and in re-reading those lyrics above I realize what a profound influence she has made on my life, an influence and an inspiration that has been, well as constant as a northern star.

FDA Broken - Food Saftey at Risk in US

not surprising with everything else they fucked up, the Bush Cheney cabal was too busy trying to find justification for the Iraq war to actually worry about Americans.

MSNBC reports

Know Your Scum Bags

As a gay man who came of age during the AIDS crisis when a week didn't go by that someone I knew didn't die a horrible death I understand what urgency feels like. It was with this urgency to save the lives of our loved ones during this dire time that Larry Kramer started ACT UP (AIDS coalition to unleash power). A grass roots community organization to bring awareness to the plight of PWA (people with AIDS) and to focus on government inaction and pharmaceutical companies maleficence. A group called Gran Fury was at the time making posters and doing gorilla postings of them all over the city. These guys were really smart, talented artists who understood the power of a good graphic. They're the ones who created the Silence=Death logo. They did a lot of great work, but one of my favorites was a split screen image with one side being the Pope at the time and the other side being a used, filled condom. The whole poster was done in this shocking yellow, with the head line: Know Your ScumBags. After much searching on line I was unable to find it, but I did find the silence = death poster and thought it was also appropriate for this posting. If there is a talented artist out there I'd love to come up with a version for AG Sec Tom Vilsack although to be honest I am at a loss for what would replace the condom. A jar of Karo High Fructose GM modified Corn Syrup maybe?

Monsanto toady and Secretary of Agriculture Scumbad Tom Vilsack

In an article over at Grist.org journalist Tom Philpott discusses Mr. Vilsack's showing at the recent G8 meeting, it wasn't good, unless of course your an executive for an agribusiness.

Vilsack said the U.S. experience with such schemes had shown it was better to focus on technical advances in irrigation, seed varieties, machinery and farming methods.

The article in Grist ends with:

Is that really the lesson we want our ag secretary to be drawing from the last 50 years of U.S. food history?

Grist and I agree, bio tech is not the solution for the future, bio tech is a way to make sure there isn't a future. Some real solutions as I see it are to re-introducing traditional farming methods, get rid of commodity based mono-cultures, eat less meat and get rid of corn subsidies, as a start. Oh and I would add for the record that I think GMO products are dangerous and the making of them should be stopped immediately for at least another 20 years until we see what effects they have in the long term. I would also over turn the law that allows companies to patent nature. You can patent a discovery but you can't have the right to own nature. Only bad things will come from a furthering of the GMO agenda, the proof is everywhere that this technology doesn't work, look at the article quote and the subsequent article it quotes in Reuters or google GM foods and ignore all the sites run my the companies who make them. It is very scary and I don't think this is something we can shrug, feel dis empowered by and go out an by a diet Coke to mull it over. At the beginning of this posting I evoked ACT-UP, probably the most successful grass roots movement in the last 50 years. Why? Because you had a group of people who were dying and had nothing to lose taking to the streets and getting their message out there. I believe it's the only way to change the entrenched, super wealthy, corporate structure that is killing our planet and making a future for your children look less and less likely. As long as you read these words and think I'm crazy the clock will only tick closer to what I see as an inevitable reality. We can no long be silent about this, because our silence will indeed result in our illness and our death at the hands of the bio tech chemical boys who really only care about their bottom line. If this isn't something to be really upset about then what is?

Monsanto for dessert

Yesterday I got my last copy of Saveur magazine. My financial situation is so grim that I have started getting rid of anything that isn't essential so all the magazine subscriptions have been 86'd (maybe I'll read them occasionally as a treat at an airport). Magazines are in general a huge waste of natural resources (old growth forests! who needs them?) that it made sense, to me, to just stop the madness.

So when I got my last copy, which had a big sign on it saying LAST COPY! I was sad and opened it up promptly to see what I was going to be missing henceforth. On the cover is a wonderful picture of a luscious chocolate caramel tart, chocolate crust with a gooey caramel filling topped with a layer of chocolate and sprinkled with sea salt. I showed the picture to Neil, he looked at and said "we've had that!" Indeed we have, this recipe is from a restaurant I have written about many times, one that I respect greatly for their dedication to sustainable agriculture and local ingredients Marlowe & Sons.

By this point my heart is pounding and I'm all ready to get out my pen and write a grocery list and plan on making this piece of heaven immediately. There on page 102 is my soon to be, most favorite tart to make. Then I look at the ingredients. It starts off good with butter, flour, cocoa...then I see confectioners' sugar. Why don't they say organic or offer a substitution? Commercial confectioners' sugar is made with genetically modified corn starch, unless of course you specify organic or add a little asterisk to it and say at the bottom: "oh hey you might not want to help Monsanto ruin the planet by buying products that contain genetically modified organisms", but then I breath and think "it's just icing sugar, get over yourself."

[A side note on icing sugar is that instead of spending more money on another food "product" you can just put regular organic sugar into a food processor and whizz it about until it's ultra fine, a perfectly fine substitute or you can go out and by one of the many brands of organic confectioners' sugar. Or in the case of this pastry you could indeed just use sugar. The French have used it to great effect for a long time now. Although a very fine baker and friend of mine who owns a very successful business here in NYC, Maury Rubin, uses it in his pastry and he is French trained, but I also know he uses all organic ingredients at City Bakery. Who knows? I'm self taught, I never went to any fancy school to learn how to make fancy pies, maybe the French have discovered icing sugar as the new ne plus ultra of pate sucre.]

The next section "for the caramel": ...1 1/2 cups sugar, 3 tbsp light corn syrup..." What?! Did I read that right? Saveur magazine writes a cover article on the RESTAURANTS THAT MATTER, including this beacon of local sustainability, and they publish a recipe with two ingredients brought to you by Monsanto? What is wrong with this picture? If it were in Quick n' Cheap Eats magazine and the recipe was by Paula Dean or Rachael Rae I'd not even mention it, but that's not where it's coming from. It's coming from my favorite food magazine and one of the restaurants I admire most in NYC.

Let me be perfectly clear. Under no circumstances do you ever need to use corn syrup.

In the chocolate pecan pie I make, I substitute dark grade B maple syrup instead of high fructose corn syrup. In this instance you could use any number of things. Off the top of my head, I'd say the fancy grade A light maple syrup or maybe agave syrup or maybe use brown sugar instead of white and just not add anything else? It's just 3 tablespoons. And please don't go on about how the viscosity and sweetness of corn syrup is so unique. Bullshit. It's so sweet because it was made in a fucking lab, OK? It was "developed" in a lab as a cheap substitute for sugar so big corporations like Coca Cola could make more profit. It is sweeter than sugar, it was engineered that way. It's the worst of science and the worst of "products" (I always put "products" in quotes because it is not food). Period, end of discussion. Those are the facts, so why do we ignore them?

The really insidious thing about this is when you buy high fructose corn syrup in a store, as I have had to do for food styling work, it says on the label in big letters "Corn Syrup", but when you look at the ingredients you see the truth: high fructose corn syrup. Of course big food corporations with the help of the previous republican government made it possible for you to not have to state if any of the contents are genetically modified. 65% of American food "products" contain genetically modified substances.

The farming of GM crops wreaks unfathomable havoc on our soil, ecosystems and health. I could list a page of links to medical, scientific, farming and health sites detailing long list of the hazards, both environmental and health, that this kind of agriculture engenders.

When are we going to wake up? What hope is there if smart, talented people cook and publish recipes calling for the use of ingredients that we know are destroying our planet and making us sick?

So tomorrow I am going to make this tart with real food and will report back.

Oh and in case anybody is still reading and wondering why exactly this makes me upset, recently Neil and I watched Werner Herzog's new documentary Encounters at the End of the World. A must see exploration of life in Antarctica. At one point more then half way through the film Herzog, who narrates, says quite casually that the scientific community seems to agree that there will be another massive extinction event like the one that killed the dinosaurs only next time the species that becomes extinct will be humans. Most agree it will happen sooner then we think.

Go ahead have extra GM high fructose corn syrup in your pie, while you can.

For more information check out:

www.deliciousorganics.com/controversies/corn.htm

or watch the video:

Neil sneaks in with a posting! Let's see how long Mark takes to notice I did this.
Its the citation for a research paper by a friend of mine, liver pathologist colleague Beth Brunt, and her collaborative team. It is a nice big, digestible bit of organic scientific research that backs up Mark's concerns about high fructose corn syrup in the diet, i.e. Why Americans (and Everyone Who Eats Like an American, Including Rats) are Fat and Diabetic... Severe Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Dosease with hepatic necroinflammatory changes in mice fed trans fats and a high-fructose corn syrup equivalent.Tetri LH, Basaranoglu M, Brunt EM, Yerian LM, Neuschwander-Tetri BA.in: Am J Physiol Gastrointest Liver Physiol. 2008; 295: G987-95.
Abstract: "The aims of this study were to determine whether combining features of a western lifestyle in mice with trans fats in a high-fat diet, high-fructose corn syrup in the water, and interventions designed to promote sedentary behavior would cause the hepatic histopathological and metabolic abnormalities that characterize nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). Male C57BL/6 mice fed ad libitum high-fat chow containing trans fats (partially hydrogenated vegetable oil) and relevant amounts of a high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) equivalent for 1-16 wk were compared with mice fed standard chow or mice with trans fats or HFCS omitted. Cage racks were removed from western diet mice to promote sedentary behavior. By 16 wk, trans fat-fed mice became obese and developed severe hepatic steatosis with associated necroinflammatory changes. Plasma alanine aminotransferase levels increased, as did liver TNF-alpha and procollagen mRNA, indicating an inflammatory and profibrogenic response to injury. Glucose intolerance and impaired fasting glucose developed within 2 and 4 wk, respectively. Plasma insulin, resistin, and leptin levels increased in a profile similar to that seen in patients with NASH. The individual components of this diet contributed to the phenotype independently; isocaloric replacement of trans fats with lard established that trans fats played a major role in promoting hepatic steatosis and injury, whereas inclusion of HFCS promoted food consumption, obesity, and impaired insulin sensitivity. Combining risk factors for the metabolic syndrome by feeding mice trans fats and HFCS induced histological features of NASH in the context of a metabolic profile similar to patients with this disease. Because dietary trans fats promoted liver steatosis and injury, their role in the epidemic of NASH needs further evaluation."

(This is Mark, the reason Neil talks so funny is because he's a doctor.)