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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Grandpa K.'s Lesson: A Bit Of Sanity For Food Safety 

...Grandpa K. was a farmer his whole life. His father moved the family from back east to the high prairies of Central Idaho in the late nineteenth century to homestead a small chunk of land that Grandpa K. eventually took over, where wheat was grown and a few head of dairy cattle were tended and a subsistence vegetable garden was raised and where my father was raised. In his middle age, a series of medical afflictions that were never properly explained to me forced Grandpa K. to move to the relatively low elevation of the Idaho-Washington border at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers in what was at the time the outskirts of Clarkston, WA, where he bought 10 acres of what would today be called a mini-ranch. Grandpa K. accepted this medical challange and chose to create a business/retirement hobby that consisted of a coop full of laying hens and a barn with three dairy cows (that he milked by hand every morning and every evening) and - eventually, as suburbia moved out and surrounded his little spread - a bunch of neighbors who more than happily purchased his excess milk, cream, eggs, and the occasional portion of beef or chicken that he would produce...

Grandpa K. was a stickler for the protocol of cleanliness. The ancient but remarkably efficient Rube Goldberg contraption that he poured pails of fresh milk into every morning and evening to separate the milk from the cream - it was called, not surprisingly, the 'separator' - was cleaned after every use with the sort of devotion that one would only hope one's surgical team would spend on the tools being used for one's own operation. Critters that may turn into meat on the table - be they the calves that Grandpa K. occasionally allowed his dairy cows to birth or some portion of the chickens that he tended - only became cuts of meat if they didn't look "off". Sick animals were never butchered for food...never...

While it would be comforting to think that he made these decisions for purely altruistic reasons, the reality is probably a bit different. Because so much of the food that Grandpa and Grandma K. put on their table came from their own efforts and could sooner rather than later directly affect their ability to keep producing the food they needed to survive - especially back in the day when they were raising a brood of laborer/children - the quality and safety of the food that appeared on the dinner table was a matter of real, personal importance. Grandpa K. was the product of an era where there was a simple understanding that you can't survive your family getting sick from the food you produce and you can't survive your neighbors electing to avoid your products because those products made them sick...

There once was a time when we used to be able to be comforted by the idea that the federal government felt the same way about food safety as Grandpa K. As is the case with so many other aspects of the Dark Cloud that was the administration of George W. Bush, it turns out that we weren't nearly as safe as we might have hoped or anticipated we should be. The risk of being exposed to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as BSE or "Mad Cow Disease" hasn't necessarily been a significant risk in the U.S., but the problem has existed and has raised the specter of people being afflicted with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. The odds of actually being afflicted are down there in "winning the Lottery" territory, but that doesn't really matter to the people who actually came up with snake eyes in that particular gamble. Fortunately, today, the Obama administration took a stand on how those odds play out and issued direction that "downer" cows can't become part of the food system...

Call me a totally unreconstructed, old-time wild-eyed hippie liberal if you will, but the fact remains that nobody who lives in what is supposed to be the 'Greatest Nation In The World' should ever die because of some failure to adequately protect the national food supply. It doesn't matter to me whether the "reason" is grounded in some sort of care for fellow human beings and doing the right thing or whether that "reason" is based on a fear of liability. There is a simple bottom line: things that I buy in the grocery store shouldn't ever run the risk of killing me. I pay taxes, just like Grandpa K.'s kids did, to maintain some sort of bureaucratic infrastructure that makes sure that I don't die because of unfortunate/unregulated/unsafe food choices. It's almost sad, but greatly appreciated, that we finally have an administration ensconced in the White House that understands that whole straight-up idea of taking care of the public welfare through food safety, even if it conflicts with corporate interests...

Grandpa K., life-long Republican voter that he was, would probably approve...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:56 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

OK, Tell Me Something I Don't Know 

...and in today's episode of "Information to be filed under "Well, Yeah!!" ", we are informed by Senator Kent Conrad (D-N.Dak.) that President Obama doesn't have the votes to get his budget plan passed by Congress "in it's current form"...

Shocking news, I know, and just as vitally important to the continued survival of this great nation of ours as the equally shocking and meaningful news that Bristol and Levi are splitsville. A quivering, fearful nation, watching its 401K's reduced to the street value of the cat food that we will all soon be eating as the economy collapses around our heads (and that's only if our luck holds and all the cat food manufacturers don't go into Chapter 7 bankruptcy), clearly will be stunned to a nearly comatose state by vicious body blows such as these...

Senator Conrad is to be lauded for this brave public service he has engaged in by lowering our expectations...about the budget, I mean, given that there seems to be no credible evidence that he had a hand in the Bristol-Levi breakup. A hopeful but fragile nation might otherwise not be able to handle being blindsided by the notion that the president's budget might not make it through the process unscathed, that it may somehow be "Dead On Arrival". I mean, who could imagine the very idea that any one of the 535 members of congress might have a different take on pressing budgetary priorities than the person in the White House and the shear audacity and clout to make that different take stick?

This revelation by the Senator must be what tough love looks like. Either that or it has been a slow news day on the Hill...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:20 PM 0 comments

Monday, March 09, 2009

Explaining Beaver Management And Other "Pork" To John McCain 

...I will confess, once again, that there once was a time back in 2000 when I was somewhat in the thrall of John McCain. Shouldn't be surprising; I've never claimed to be a stone cold wild-eyed full-blown progressive in any case, although the fact that there isn't a NASCAR race on Sunday - which means that when I get home from church I will probably clean my firearm collection rather than drive my big blue 4x4 pickup truck through a bunch of mud holes for the hell of it - has nothing to do with all that, so never mind just exactly why I don't view myself as an icon of the progressive movement. I'm not; that's it. Sorry...

I did find myself falling out of thrall with the ol' Maverick over a fairly short time frame way back then, though. I didn't do so because he decided for crass political reasons to try to out-W Gee Dub; no, I lost my interest in McCain because his little 2000 foray into the world of populism turned out to mask what is little more than a small set of simply held principles that has appeared to be perched in some fantastic cliff-top redoubt that is perfectly defended against the vicious assaults by the forces of reason or reality...

This is where we turn to North Carolina beavers, as they represent Big John's larger reflexive distaste about the whole subject of congressional earmarks. As it just so happens, I have a great deal more direct personal knowledge about beavers and their influence on both the human and natural condition than does Big John McCain. So does North Carolina. This is perfectly understandable, given that McCain claims as his home state a desert hellhole mostly remarkable for it's lack of beaver habitat (although I should point out, in the spirit of fairness and full disclosure, that I have been to the Beaver Creek Ranger Station near Wet Beaver Creek on the Coconino National Forest, near McCain's "cabin" in Sedona). The fact is that beavers present a conundrum for anyone who cares about the natural world and its relationship to what is called "the human environment". Beavers are part of the intricate web of an ecological community, creating through their construction ability all sorts of benefits to riparian- and aquatic-dependent species. They create and expand the wetland systems that are in many cases the original building block of ecosystem and species diversity throughout much of the once wild unmanaged lands in the United States...

From the standpoint of that "human environment", they are a pain in the butt, given that mountain men who trap beavers and beaver felt top hats are no longer a meaningful part of the economy. Beavers plug culverts (resulting, in the worse case, in road failures); their dams flood property that is otherwise intended for uses other than being underwater; they damage and weaken levees with burrows and chew on trees intended for commercial purposes. "Managing" beavers is a thoroughly human concept (and one that I suspect that McCain would support), given that they were here first, but humans have made that decision in response to the need to minimize the impact of reintroduced beavers in places like North Carolina, and folks in North Carolina do understand that and it's safe to say they aren't all that pleased with Big John's Twitter shout-out...

This is all symptomatic more than actually informative when you drill down to the "who" and "why". The only obvious solution - and an elegant one, I believe - is to move the sources of all these egregious earmarks to McCain country. Move the Iowa pig farms to the greater Phoenix metropolitan area (Scottsdale would be a supremely ironic and appropriate destination); live-trap every beaver in North Carolina and air-drop them all on the Oak Creek drainage immediately adjacent to McCain's "cabin" in Sedona, Arizona; live-capture every Mormon cricket in Utah and rain them down like a slick, ugly cicada storm over Phoenix, Flagstaff, Tuscon, and all of Arizona's agricultural centers. If the ol' Maverick wants to keep insisting that all of these earmarks, and so many others, are just simply "pork", then he should be all the way down with forcing himself and his constituents living with the issues that all these examples of "pork" are trying to address...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:33 PM 0 comments

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