Broccoli’s Extreme Makeover

Even if it is possible to increase Americans’ desire for produce, little is being done to bring prices down to the point where selecting produce over processed food is a clear choice for millions of Americans. Blueberries that cost $5 a pint stack up poorly against the frozen pizza that can feed the whole family for the same cost. Yet the agricultural system offers precious little incentive to farmers wanting to grow more of the crops that would be better for us. From direct subsidy payments, to insurance when crops get blown away by bad weather, to research dollars for increasing yield and profitability, the deck is stacked against produce farmers.

In July, I traveled to upstate New York to meet Brian Reeves, a fourth-generation farmer with 1,500 acres, on part of which he grows a range of produce that he sells locally. As a general rule, Reeves said, he does not let visitors onto his farm before 10 a.m. during harvest season. The wisdom of that was made plain when I arrived. At 9 a.m., the place was a madhouse. Local grocers had placed orders for 12,000 pounds of tomatoes, blueberries and other produce to be delivered to 52 stores within 100 miles. But one of Reeves’s trucks had a flat. And a driver had loaded another truck with the wrong stuff, costing his crew a time-consuming reshuffle. On top of which, 117 boxes of squash were scheduled to be on the loading dock for delivery, but the golden zucchini was still in his fields, on the vines, being picked.

“It’s like that T-shirt says: ‘It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity,’ ” Reeves said when he, in turn, couldn’t remember the errand he wanted one of his drivers to run on the way back to the farm. And these were just the everyday glitches to contend with. Earlier this year, a freakish chill wiped out his entire crop of early cucumbers. Then his plans to pass on the running of the farm to his stepson, Jeffrey Reeves — home from Iraq and initially excited to become the fifth-generation Reeves to operate the farm — backfired when Jeffrey realized just how little time he would have for a social life. “Part of my reservation about being here is my happiness,” Jeffrey said, watching his stepfather work his way through the morning delivery, two phones and a clipboard in hand. “I can’t just be a machine.” (Not long after I visited the farm, Jeffrey left to get a degree in social work.)

It was perhaps not the best moment to be asking Reeves the question that brought me here: What would it take to get him to grow more? To till more land, buy more seed, run more irrigation lines, fight more pests, apply more fertilizer, endure more inspections, fix more old tractors, fill out more paperwork, miss more summer-leisure fun and generally wear himself further down in order to grow more produce so people could eat better.

The paradox of this last point was not lost on him. His own meals, especially during the summer months, were a wreck: coffee for breakfast, Mountain Dew for lunch, baked beans for dinner eaten straight from the can to save time for sleep — though he does get to snack on his crops. But Reeves is in many ways perfectly qualified to ponder the problems of increased production. The farm that he runs with his three brothers and one of their sons is an example of the kind of nonindustrial farm that’s necessary in a revamped vision of American food production and consumption. Last year, Reeves turned out 420,000 pounds of tomatoes, 65,000 pounds of strawberries and 2.4 million ears of sweet corn. And while they have a nice little farm stand just outside the small town of Baldwinsville, with a quaint patch of pick-your-own organic blueberries behind the sales shed, they mostly sell their crops to big grocers, including Tops, Price Chopper, Wegmans and, biggest of all, Walmart.

Reeves is particularly proud of being Walmart’s first farm supplier in the area, even if that adds significantly to his workload, from filling huge orders to enduring their painstaking food-safety audits. Only a fraction of his output is organic, but more would qualify with minor adjustments in his already-cautious use of pesticides and fertilizers. “I’m a personnel manager, bookkeeper, salesperson, computer guy, logistician and food-safety expert,” he said. “I didn’t sign up for that. I signed up for the sunshine, to grow crops and get my hands dirty. And that’s why I’m not as happy as I used to be. But I want this farm to be successful.”

What’s most telling about Reeves’s farm, though, when it comes to the question of produce supply and price structures, is that more than half of the land he owns, about 800 acres, is rented to farmers who grow soybeans and field corn, the type that’s used to make animal feed or corn syrup for soda and cookies or is turned into ethanol. The abundance of corn on Reeves’s land reflects its dominance nationwide. Ninety-seven million acres are planted with corn that goes toward syrup, cattle feed and ethanol, compared with the 240,000 acres planted for spinach, broccoli and cabbage.

by Michael Moss, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Victors & Spoils

The End of the Waffle House

On the last morning, before the waffle irons went cold and the pictures came down, before the lock refused to lock, before the claw crashed through the roof, the old man paced.

Tap, tap, tap. Bud Powell’s aluminum cane led the way as he circled the floor of Bloomington’s Waffle House. His Waffle House.

That Wednesday in September, the owner didn’t know what to do with himself. The smell of frying oil, the same greasy perfume that had greeted customers for 46 years, wafted into his nose as he wandered past the vinyl booths. He sat down, then stood
up again.

Bud — everyone called him Bud — checked on the dwindling supply of breakfast sausage, peered into the nearly empty freezers, tried to explain to his regulars why it had to be this way.

“It’s time,” he said over and over.

At 79, Bud was tired. Except for Christmas, the restaurant was always open, day and night. Now a developer wanted to replace it with another apartment building for college kids. The offer was too good to pass up.

“Where are we gonna eat?” the old-timers kept asking.

“I don’t know,” Bud said. “Where am I gonna eat?”

This had been his place for 16,767 mornings. None ever felt like this.

The weariness showed in his eyes, behind the wire rim glasses and in the hunch of his shoulders. After the Waffle House was torn down, he knew that he wouldn’t see most of his customers again.

Tap, tap, tap. Bud plodded past the grill, where the last of the eggs sizzled. The ever-dependable waitresses whizzed by, balancing plates, like today was no different.

Most of the students had stopped visiting years ago. The smoking ban forced out the puffers. Many of the regulars grew so old that they died or went to nursing homes.

Once Bud decided to close, it all slipped away even faster. Some of his staff had taken other jobs. The gumballs emptied out of the shiny red machine. No one bothered to mark the white board with the daily special.

They would close at precisely 3 p.m. Bud checked his watch, ignoring the broken wall clock, its hands frozen for more years than he could remember, stuck in time. 

It suited the place.

by Jessica Contrera, IDS |  Read more:

Image: Anna Teeteri

Banksy, October 2013.
via:

Gueorgui Pinkhassov, INDIA. Rajasthan. Jaisalmer. 1995

via:

Food Fighter

Kyoto, Japan—The meal begins simply, almost religiously: a bowl of rice, a plate of pickles, a pot of green tea. Pour the tea over the rice and take a sip, then pinch a half moon of daikon between your chopsticks. Later comes a plate of tofu scraps dressed with green onions and dried fish, a seaweed salad, and a small bowl of miso soup.

This is obanzai, Japanese home-style cooking, but the cook is no ordinary homemaker: Setsuko Sugimoto is the matriarch of one of the oldest families in Kyoto, a city where everyone knows exactly how far your family goes back. Her home is older than the United States and protected by the Kyoto government. Tonight’s dinner stretches back to the Edo period, and to prove it she drops before me a telephone book–thick copy of the original recipes her family has preserved for 10 generations. “These are the traditions that we are starting to lose,” she tells me.

Not more than a few blocks from Sugimoto’s centuries-old home is a thicket of unwelcome invaders: Starbucks slinging monster soy lattes, a pizza delivery chain prepping seafood pies, a rainbow array of 24-hour convenience stores, portals of warmed-over carbohydrates and general gastronomic mischief. It’s a familiar tale: waves of brutish Western culture crashing on the shores of foreign countries and encroaching upon their long-held traditions. But the phenomenon is all the more striking here in Kyoto, in the heart of one of the world’s richest culinary cultures, with cooking traditions that stretch back millennia and more Michelin stars per capita than any other city in the world.

But Kyoto and the rest of Japan are not prepared to see their food yield to the mitigating forces of the modern world. Sugimoto is a part of a formidable coalition of government officials, nonprofit organizations, scholars, and food luminaries who have been working for two years on a proposal to include washoku—the traditional dining cultures of Japan—on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s list of “intangible world heritages.” On Thursday, they received word that their bid had advanced to the final stage, making Japanese cuisine all but certain to win this prized UNESCO designation in early December. It may seem a benign marker, but the UNESCO program is itself not without controversy. Moreover, it begs the question: Can a U.N. body’s imprimatur do anything to protect something as intangible as a style of cooking?

by Matt Goulding, Slate | Read more:
Image: Matt Goulding

Big Mother is Watching You

The other day, my eleven-year-old son handed me my iPhone with an accusatory air, as if to say: So this is what you people do behind our backs. While he was looking at stocks, he came across a news item reporting that AT&T, with another company, was about to introduce a snap-around-the-wrist, GPS-tracking, emergency-button-featuring, watch-like thingie for children. It’s called FiLIP, comes in bright colors, and has two-way calling and parent-to-child texting. It allows you to set safe zones, so that you’re alerted when your child enters or leaves a designated area.

A little stunned, I checked it out online. FiLIP, I found, is far from the first such gizmo; this one just has more bells and whistles than most. “The world used to be a little simpler,” went its mom-and-apple-pie pitch. “Kids ran free and returned at dinnertime, and parents didn’t worry so much. But today, parents are under more pressure than ever. ... FiLIP has a simple mission—to help kids be kids again, while giving parents an amazing new window into their children’s lives.” Right. And the Invisible Fence collar on my late lamented cairn terrier let my dog be a dog.

All parents have to let their children off the leash eventually—to let them go out unsupervised, to grant them free-ish range on the Internet. That moment always comes before you’re ready for it. For me, it came after a ninth birthday, when we hooked up a Nintendo Wii, then discovered, months later, that it could be used to roam the Internet. Another point was reached toward the end of elementary school, when my children announced that they were the very last kids in their class to get a smartphone. I stalled. Then my son showed me the FiLIP ad, and I discovered a universe of options.

For the iPhone I will soon be buying him, I can get an iPhone Spy Stick, to be plugged into a USB port while he sleeps; it downloads Web histories, e-mails, and text messages, even the deleted ones. Or I can get Mobile Spy, software that would let me follow, in real time, his online activity and geographical location. Also available are an innocent-looking iPhone Dock Camera that would recharge his battery while surreptitiously recording video in his room, and a voice-activated audio monitor, presumably for the wild parties he’s going to throw when his father and I go out of town.

by Judith Shulevitz, TNR |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Harry Callahan, Untitled (Atlanta), 1984
via:

via:

NSA Broke Into Yahoo, Google Data Centers

[ed. Out. Of. Control. The NSA's revealed data gathering activities are the biggest threat to democracy I think I've ever experienced. Not to mention business - with tech companies pushing consumers and corporations to migrate to the "cloud" where everything now mostly resides on NSA servers. Good luck with that. See also: Europe Erupts and NSA Chief wants Media Stopped; and Angry Over U.S. Surveillance, Tech Giants Bolster Defenses]

The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, The Washington Post reported Wednesday, citing documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

A secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, indicates that NSA sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters. In the last 30 days, field collectors had processed and sent back more than 180 million new records — ranging from "metadata," which would indicate who sent or received emails and when, to content such as text, audio and video, the Post reported Wednesday on its website.

The latest revelations were met with outrage from Google, and triggered legal questions, including whether the NSA may be violating federal wiretap laws.

"Although there's a diminished standard of legal protection for interception that occurs overseas, the fact that it was directed apparently to Google's cloud and Yahoo's cloud, and that there was no legal order as best we can tell to permit the interception, there is a good argument to make that the NSA has engaged in unlawful surveillance," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of Electronic Privacy Information Center. The reference to 'clouds' refers to sites where the companies collect data.

The new details about the NSA's access to Yahoo and Google data centers around the world come at a time when Congress is reconsidering the government's collection practices and authority, and as European governments are responding angrily to revelations that the NSA collected data on millions of communications in their countries. Details about the government's programs have been trickling out since Snowden shared documents with the Post and Guardian newspaper in June.

The NSA's principal tool to exploit the Google and Yahoo data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency's British counterpart, GCHQ. The Post said NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.

by Lolita C. Baldor, Yahoo News |  Read more:

Image: AP/Google

Mario Cravo Neto
via:

Helmut Newton, Karen Mulder & Yves Saint Laurent
via:

Bertien van Manen, A Hundred Summers a Hundred Winters, Tomsk, Russia railway station, 1992
via:

Slaves of the Internet, Unite!

Not long ago, I received, in a single week, three (3) invitations to write an original piece for publication or give a prepared speech in exchange for no ($0.00) money. As with stinkbugs, it’s not any one instance of this request but their sheer number and relentlessness that make them so tiresome. It also makes composing a polite response a heroic exercise in restraint.

People who would consider it a bizarre breach of conduct to expect anyone to give them a haircut or a can of soda at no cost will ask you, with a straight face and a clear conscience, whether you wouldn’t be willing to write an essay or draw an illustration for them for nothing. They often start by telling you how much they admire your work, although not enough, evidently, to pay one cent for it. “Unfortunately we don’t have the budget to offer compensation to our contributors...” is how the pertinent line usually starts. But just as often, they simply omit any mention of payment.

A familiar figure in one’s 20s is the club owner or event promoter who explains to your band that they won’t be paying you in money, man, because you’re getting paid in the far more valuable currency of exposure. This same figure reappears over the years, like the devil, in different guises — with shorter hair, a better suit — as the editor of a Web site or magazine, dismissing the issue of payment as an irrelevant quibble and impressing upon you how many hits they get per day, how many eyeballs, what great exposure it’ll offer. “Artist Dies of Exposure” goes the rueful joke.

In fairness, most of the people who ask me to write things for free, with the exception of Arianna Huffington, aren’t the Man; they’re editors of struggling magazines or sites, or school administrators who are probably telling me the truth about their budgets. The economy is still largely in ruins, thanks to the people who “drive the economy” by doing imaginary things on Wall Street, and there just isn’t much money left to spare for people who do actual things anymore.

This is partly a side effect of our information economy, in which “paying for things” is a quaint, discredited old 20th-century custom, like calling people after having sex with them. The first time I ever heard the word “content” used in its current context, I understood that all my artist friends and I — henceforth, “content providers” — were essentially extinct. This contemptuous coinage is predicated on the assumption that it’s the delivery system that matters, relegating what used to be called “art” — writing, music, film, photography, illustration — to the status of filler, stuff to stick between banner ads.

Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge. I now contribute to some of the most prestigious online publications in the English-speaking world, for which I am paid the same amount as, if not less than, I was paid by my local alternative weekly when I sold my first piece of writing for print in 1989. More recently, I had the essay equivalent of a hit single — endlessly linked to, forwarded and reposted. A friend of mine joked, wistfully, “If you had a dime for every time someone posted that ...” Calculating the theoretical sum of those dimes, it didn’t seem all that funny.

I’ve been trying to understand the mentality that leads people who wouldn’t ask a stranger to give them a keychain or a Twizzler to ask me to write them a thousand words for nothing. I have to admit my empathetic imagination is failing me here. I suppose people who aren’t artists assume that being one must be fun since, after all, we do choose to do it despite the fact that no one pays us. They figure we must be flattered to have someone ask us to do our little thing we already do.

I will freely admit that writing beats baling hay or going door-to-door for a living, but it’s still shockingly unenjoyable work. I spent 20 years and wrote thousands of pages learning the trivial craft of putting sentences together. My parents blew tens of thousands of 1980s dollars on tuition at a prestigious institution to train me for this job. They also put my sister the pulmonologist through medical school, and as far as I know nobody ever asks her to perform a quick lobectomy — doesn’t have to be anything fancy, maybe just in her spare time, whatever she can do would be great — because it’ll help get her name out there.

by Tim Kreider, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Post Typography

Anchovies Elevate a Pan-Seared Chicken Dish

There’s nothing wrong with a dinner of pan-seared chicken seasoned with salt and pepper. But there’s everything right about the same chicken when you add anchovies, capers, garlic and plenty of lemon to the pan.

What was once timid and a little dull turns vibrant, tangy and impossible to stop eating. And the only real extra work is chopping the garlic and a little parsley for garnish.

In this dish, the cut of chicken is less important than the pungent pan sauce. Most people will probably want to use the workhorse of all poultry dinners, the boneless, skinless breasts. But being a dark-meat lover, I prefer the thighs. They cook nearly as quickly, and have a greater margin of error in terms of doneness. Overcook your breasts by even a minute, and you’ll get dry, tough meat. Thighs are more forgiving. However, if your family insists on white meat, you can substitute breasts and subtract about 3 minutes from the cooking time.

Although you can make this dish entirely on the stove top, I take a cue from chefs and finish it in the oven. It cooks more evenly there, with less monitoring. This frees you up to toss a salad and slice up a crusty loaf of bread for mopping up the juices. If you love anchovies and garlic, you won’t want to leave even a drop behind.

Recipe: Garlicky Chicken With Lemon-Anchovy Sauce

by Melissa Clark, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: via:

#$%@!

[ed. Internet connection problems today.]

Stephen Hawking
via:

via:

A Curmudgeon’s Guide to Praise

Occasionally I meet someone else who’s weathered the extravagant praise of a parent, like the writer who published six books of poetry but whose dad brags that she’s won a Guggenheim. That would certainly be miraculous and worth bragging about, because she’s never applied. This kind of praise misconstrues facts “accidentally on purpose,” and a parent has plausible deniability (“I must have misheard you”) until a pattern sets in; though, from their point of view, they really don’t know what the problem is. If praise masquerades as an objective assessment that really conveys the subjective feeling of their love — that boundless, intoxicating feeling — why not sacrifice a few details? Heck, why not sacrifice them all?

A sense of truth — the difference between potential and accomplishment, dream and fact — can be the first casualty in families like this. Growing up I felt like a private eye tracking down unseemly rumors about me, adapting a private eye’s worldview along the way: dark, noirish and suspicious of anyone who claimed to “know” what “happened” about “anything.” I was desperate for praise but paranoid about its ability to manipulate. If you paid me a compliment I’d love you for a second, then squint suspiciously, spit out an imaginary cigar and ask “What do you want, anyway?”

As my girlfriend and I became serious, she spent time with my mom and heard some of the extravagant stories of my childhood. I was concerned if she rolled her eyes any harder she might injure them. Was I really so verbal and wise — and jaded — at age two, after my father died, that I offered my mom irrefutable proof that Santa was a fake? Did I really teach myself to read music at age five? Become a concert-grade pianist without practicing? My girlfriend called bullshit on the highlight reel of my childhood. I didn’t believe half this stuff either, but I believed some of it. That is, I wanted the option in my early 20s of believing it some nights, to lie in bed after a lame day as a secretary and revel in my secret specialness that had not yet been recognized by the world. Doubting the myths of your childhood can be more destabilizing than reading you’re a finalist for a prize you didn’t apply for. Our parents are the historians of our lives. We want to think we have a coherent identity that stretches back to birth, and for the first time I stared back and saw what looked an awful lot like nothing.

Careless praise and exaggerated stories are just a quirky part of growing up in some families, but they can be damaging when they amplify the weird romance kids already have about themselves — the secret identities and magical powers they know they have that adults around them can’t see. I can’t walk five minutes in Prospect Park without seeing some girl spin around, sprinkle herself with magic pixie dust and chant I am the princess, I am the princess, I am the princess. I needed no prompting myself to think I was the next Ron Guidry. I had a natural slider that was unhittable — and uncontrollable — and stayed up each night before I pitched imagining how I’d record 18 straight strikeouts, end the game by myself, and set a record. Onlookers would gasp as they saw a small thing of perfection in a fallen world, or the evening would be a tough slog.

You can guess which one it was.

Our first task as children is to dream ourselves into being and, oddly enough, we pretend to be other people to do that, as if life were a drama filled with larger-than-life characters first glimpsed from afar. We try on identities, just as I assigned one to my dad and was given one by my mom, until we find one that fits, but then face the task of insinuating ourselves into a world that’s indifferent or hostile to us or just more complicated than we imagined. That, of course, is the day childhood starts to end, when we may start to suspect that the praise echoing in our ears sounds an awful lot like lying.

I had no idea there might be a cultural component to all this, that the fantasies families weave around their children might have changed over time, until I was expecting a son myself and read some parenting books. Apparently I grew up at the height of the self-esteem movement, and well-intentioned but excessive praise has harmed a number of children. That, at least, is the claim of Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in Nurture Shock. In the first chapter they trace the self-esteem movement back to Nathaniel Branden, who asserted in 1969 that self-esteem is our most important attribute. California even created a self-esteem task force, thinking if it could raise the self-esteem of its citizens, they’d “do everything from lower dependence on welfare to decrease teenage pregnancy.” Soon we were handing out medals to every participant at sporting events and not keeping score. Competition is too competitive —our children’s egos are at stake.

But can self-esteem be pinned on someone like a ribbon? Is it an effect or a cause of competence? Does telling children to feel good about themselves actually make them feel good about themselves? The authors, citing research from Carol Dweck, suggest that constant, overly general praise can have the opposite of the intended effect. Their parenting advice, to treat the mind like a muscle that needs exercise, echoes Seneca, our oldest self-help guru, who insisted that the mind be exercised “day and night.” (All of these writers value effort above all; for Seneca, it is the one way we surpass even the gods.) Constant praise makes children both fragile and risk averse. Since they aren’t praised for their effort, the one thing they control, children take failure as a sign that they were never intelligent to begin with. I got a sense of how far off the deep end we’d gone when an NYU psychiatry professor was trotted out late in the chapter to stress what should have been obvious. Praise, she says, “has to be based on a real thing.”

Well, what has praise been based on? (...)

For the parents interviewed in Nurture Shock, praise is a practical attempt to bolster their children’s confidence before they go out to battle the world, so any amount of affirmation can be justified as long as it works. You might call this the Bluster Theory of Praise. At first it doesn’t sound unreasonable. We all know people whose self-promotion allows them to achieve what their capabilities wouldn’t on their own. The downside — in addition to having irritating children — is that their confidence won’t be based on something that should inspire confidence. They get their way not through their ability but through their aggression and can mistake one thing for the other. It can also start an arms race in which every child is inevitably considered a genius.

by Christopher Wall, LA Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Fitz

[ed... and other quotes from This Side of Paradise.]
via:

Harry Gruyaert, Moscow, 1989.
via: