Gunthorp Farms

I kind of forgot I have a blog!

Well, anyway ... this summer at a conference, I got to hear chef Rick Bayless (well-known for use of local foods in his Chicago restaurant) talk on some interesting local/sustainable food topics, including the story of his relationship with Gunthorp Farms in Lagrange, IN. This article tells that story and more, and I think it's a pretty great read. Also probably interesting to anyone who read Fast Food Nation.

Olympic sponsorship, China, and Darfur

SaveDarfur.org sends out emails asking people to send messages to political and corporate leaders, pressuring them to take this or that action toward helping Sudan. They give you pre-written messages you can use, or you can change them up and make them your own. The other day they issued a call to write Olympic corporate sponsors and ask them to put pressure on China, as China is in a very influential position with Sudan but currently isn't using their position to help stop the genocide. So I changed up SaveDarfur's message a little bit and sent my email off to coke, swatch, vw, and GE with one click of a button. I got a reply back from Coke today, a stock response that I later saw is an actual press release on their web site. I think it's pretty interesting, and I'll leave it at that. Coke's press release

Well, I guess I won't leave it at that. Maybe a few hundred thousand lives are worth a disruption in Olympic spirit this year. I understand what Coke is saying about the Olympics being a stronghold of unity in the world, and about the Olympic truce making it possible for nations of very 'disparate points of view' to come together even momentarily for something pretty spectacular ... but is there a limit? Would you take kindly to event hosts who had just sold weapons to the group of men who shot your entire family and burned their house down, but first gang raped your mom, your sister, and your daughter? I don't really want to declare a truce with those people. I'll pray for them, but I don't want to a truce with them. Support of genocide is not a 'disparate point of view.' That's like calling the Olympics a junior high track meet.

Now, I'm not saying people should boycott the Olympics or that these companies shouldn't support the Olympics. But I do take issue with a company who believes (or at least states) that pressure on China will not help Darfur, or who suggests that a private company is out of its place to act in any way that doesn't make the most financial sense. It of course would make financial sense for Coke to keep China happy and ruffle no feathers, gliding through the next few months on the highs of pride, competitive spirit, and unity that generally come with the games. But no company, or other entity, is out of place trying——trying, even if not effective——to stop human suffering, especially if the opportunity to do so is staring them right in the face. It's great to do X number of things to help, but if your capacity and moral obligation to help is X + 1 ...

It would be fair of Coke to read this and ask me, then, why I'm eating out for lunch and not donating that $ to relief groups, or why I'm not working for Doctors Without Borders or Oxfam. I don't pretend to have answers to that. I don't know where the line is, where 'X + 1' becomes finite and doesn't lead to X + 2 or X + 3 and so on. I guess we all have to live with making it finite where we choose to. For Darfur, or any other issue in which we're capable of helping.

"Plants have a secret social life."

I read this article this morning and thought it was worth posting. It's about plant 'behavior' and a recent study that found some plants recognize related species and react to them differently than non-related—-something even many animals cannot do.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/science/10plant.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Kind of like how TJ Maxx overwhelms me

I find myself overwhelmed trying to discern what candidates actually believe on different topics. There's so much information, in so many places--even just within a candidate's official web site--that it's hard to know how to make sense of it, how to know you're finding everything he/she has out there on the topic, how to compare it to another candidate when that other candidate has organized and categoried his/her stances in a different way. And it's hard to tell how the info gatekeepers have affected the info and the reader's interpretation of it. I can read who voted for this bill and denounced that one till my eyes fall out (heaven forbid), but without the right context, can we really put much stock into all that listing of votes, pulling of isolated quotations, and whatnot? The context might be able to be found, but it's buried somewhere in that sea of links and related articles. Don't get me wrong; I'd rather have too much information, laid out in platitudes and vetted by campaign writers to ensure just the right balance of detail and complete lack of detail all at the same time, than too little information. But I wish I didn't get overwhelmed thinking I must take every issue important to me and weigh the candidates in complete parallel fashion, with all the relevant facts and details fully and objectively revealed to me, so that I can make the best decision, one that I can be 100% confident is the decision that best fits my agenda ... because I'm pretty convinced that's just not possible, at least for me. And I don't think that's pessimism as much as a realism that on most other days eludes me.

Oh, so I'm voting for your cat.

I think I'll have the ... water. Oh—and with a side of water, please.

From an article:

"Restaurant food is bad for us. You may assume that anything you order at a drive-thru is less than sterling in a nutritional sense, but, in fact, the majority of what we eat at restaurants — even ones with helpful waiters and real tablecloths — is worse for us than we might ever imagine.

A study from the University of Arkansas that found the average diner in this country underestimates his or her caloric intake by up to 93 percent when eating out. Translation: Every time you eat at a restaurant, you're probably eating twice as much as you think."

Yikes! Now, i'm always a little wary of stats that say "up to" x percent ... but still pretty interesting.

Too lazy to walk 20 feet to the door, really?

Would it be unreasonable to find out where my neighbor's ride to school lives, go to her house each morning 30 minutes before her alarm goes off, and honk my horn twice right outside her bedroom window?

Wednesday, April 9

Afflatus is from Latin afflatus, past participle of afflare, "to blow at or breathe on," from ad-, "at" + flare, "to puff, to blow." Other words with the same root include deflate (de-, "out of" + flare); inflate (in-, "into" + flare); soufflé, the "puffed up" dish (from French souffler, "to puff," from Latin sufflare, "to blow from below," hence "to blow up, to puff up," from sub-, "below" + flare); and flatulent.