Some Notes On The Grocer

I want to write about food a little more. I enjoy planning big meals, the marketing, the cooking, and sitting around a table with friends and family. I am also working on a post on cloning food animals, yuccch!)

I own stacks of cookbooks. These allow me to compare recipes I might enjoy, they teach me some about ingredients, methods, and even the history of modern cooking. I especially enjoy reading the cooking writing of Richard Olney, an American who lived most of his working life in France. His book Simple French Food will blow your mind! Olney cooked in a rustic kitchen in Solliès-Toucas in Provence, France; and it affected his cooking. He cooked directly from the land with the freshest ingredients available to him His food ethic profoundly impacted Alice Waters and he American restaurant Chez Panisse. Olney’s food ethic gets an homage in Waters Chez Panisse cookbook: “The recipes of Elizabeth David and Richard Olney provided a starting point and inspiration to us; and we soon realized that the similarity of California's climate to that of the south of France gives us similar products that require different interpretations and executions. My one unbreakable rule has always been to use only the freshest and finest ingredients available.”

I find trips to my local market increasingly disturbing (even before cloned meats). I avoid the center aisles. Start with the fresh produce, then move to talk to the butcher about grass-fed beef. In the winter I move into frozen for organic corn and peas in poly bags. Next I make my way to the baker for whole grain breads. I admit this is easy. I have an Organic co-op not 7 miles away in two directions, and a bakery across from them. Also I know how to cook.

It can be disheartening sometimes. I find myself biting my tongue every trip to the local big chain. Inevitably I pass along an aisle with another couple pushing their cart. In the bottom , they have loaded as many cases of soda as will fit, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, Sven-Up, and the odd Diet Coke. The cart bottom will be filled with frozen entrees, usually in green boxes or otherwise denoting “Natural” or ‘Light” terms with no real nutritional meaning. Next are packets of white bread, hot dog and burger buns, and maybe English muffins. The vast center will be filled with chips. Sour Cream and Onion, Bar-b-Que, Mesquite, Cheese puffs, tortilla chips with salsas, and then cracker. Saltines, Ritz-Bits, Gold Fish feature heavily. On top are those green boxes of “snack well” cookies, as though these make up for the excesses of the whole.

I hope that America can shake it’s addiction to high-fructose corn syrup HFCS. Run a web search and you will notice an unending number of hits. On one side, researchers find a direct ,ink to HFCS and obesity (we drink millions of pounds in our daily soda). Opposed to the science will be the industry stooges, who generally argue that the direct link can be disputed, a little. Better that we should turn all this extra, federal subsidized corn production into gasoline. At least in the short term it will make a better fuel for cars then people.

Christmas Menu

(form my cookbook available for download at http://www.savefile.com/projects/1056511)

House Salad with Pomegranate Seeds

Carrot and Orange Soup

Roasted Red Potatoes

Cole Slaw

Spiral Cut Honey Ham

Pineapple Bake Dressing

Pomegranate Granité

Apple Crisp À la mode

Have a safe and Happy New Year--Party on Dude!

What I Did Over Christmas Break

I gathered with my school-age children around the dinner table. The conversation drifted naturally to assignments over Christmas break. I expected at least a short reading list, appropriate to the different grades. No such luck. Apparently merely reading literature for pleasure serves no place in testing well under the Bush education regime.

The fetishization of standardized testing must serve some goal. A goal consistent with Bush’s ideology. Bush essentially embraces a Christian Republican world view. His education goals seem to be 1. Demonstrate the inadequacy of inner-city schools, 2. promote government patronage of parochial education, 3. intrude the “private sector” into those failing schools, and 4. rid the system of unions to cut costs.

I have listened to educators and those who study education declaim against the system. Especially troubling to me the obvious re-segregation of American schools. Inner-city children are not prepared for school. The forces at work against this are insurmountable by this government. They are undernourished, both in body and mind. Their caretakers are absent at low paying jobs, often spending hours traveling from one to another. Their homes are not filled with enriching books, or magazines, or newspapers; nor do they see others using these media. There may be a television, but commercial television only complicates the problem. Their school are old, decrepit. They smell. These children learn to take bubble tests. They may begin at kindergarten. Any program or curricula that does not move towards this goal is discarded. Recess may even fall victim to more practice time.

If these children manage to learn to pass these tests their schools do not go on the endangered list. They do not lose funding. But they also do not get the new plant and resources they so desperately need. They do not got the empowerment of their families in their education. If these children fail these tests, schools lose funding, or close, or are taken over by corporations to run. The children may end up in parochial schools.

The parochial school serves various ends. First, consistency with Bush Christian values. Also, they are generally cheaper t operate. These schools do no operate with union labor, in the class, the halls, or the furnace room. Also, the door opens for federal funding of other religious institutions. There already stands a west wing office promoting faith based initiatives.

In suburban, and more affluent schools, the testing continues to occupy more teaching time. We lose foreign languages, music and drama, athletics, and many other activities once a part of every student’s experience. Now these programs, if available at all, come through a fee-based “community education” program.

We have lost so much and I do not understand how. Were we seduced by our liberalism away from traditional western methods epitomized in “great books” and Socratic methods. Did we yearn for a business model, to save costs, which allowed us to “measure success’ in some more concrete way? Did the costs of education become so overwhelming that anything would do.

I propose that we return to a decentralized approach. Allow the states to experiment with providing education without the straightjacket of No Child Left Behind. As we compete internationally for scarce resources, America must have children prepared with rigorous education in the sciences, math, technology, but also enriched by exposure to culture in art, music, and athletics.

Let the children read.

Hang On To Saddam

Saddam Hussein's attorneys plead that his POW status operates to forbid the US from releasing him to Iraq, and obviously, hanging. They are right. As the commander in chief of Iraqi forces during military operations, he deserves to be treated as a POW.

We may also need him. A much more clever Bush, would turn him out, let him surrender, and withdraw American forces. “The war is now over.” Let the Iraqis battle over the peace, which they will do anyway.

Sectarian and secular divisions fracture Iraq along too many fault lines for any American to follow. Our military can never even identify the sides, much less choose the “right” side.

Simplistic statements about defending a legitimate government have no value in the face of overwhelming evidence that Iraqi forces do not derive their power or legitimacy from their government. The Times reported this week on Americans’ witnessing secular violence under official cover. Sectarian Ties Weaken Duty’s Call for Iraq Forces.

The military cannot sustain these deployment levels. Even the Iraq Study Group admits that, and they work not to embarrass the President.

Second, the long-term commitment of American ground forces to Iraq at current levels is adversely affecting Army readiness, with less than a third of the Army units currently at high readiness levels. The Army is unlikely to be able to meet the next rotation of troops in Iraq without undesirable changes in its deployment practices. The Army is now considering breaking its compact with the National Guard and Reserves that limits the number of years that these citizen-soldiers can be deployed. Behind this short-term strain is the longer-term risk that the ground forces will be impaired in ways that will take years to reverse.

Page 50.

America should hang onto Saddahm. We gain nothing by killing him. Even the visceral satisfaction his death might bring passed after watching any of the kangaroo court proceedings of his trial. His death would be a footnote in the long history of short-sighted Bush blunders.

Out With The Old And In With The Old

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many…The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of their inadequacy and impotence. They hate not wickedness but weakness. When it is in their power to do so, the weak destroy weakness wherever they see it. Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (1995)

The 109th Congress ends with a whimper. A Congress in which President Bush enjoyed control of the House, the Senate, the Courts, the Pressure Groups, and the monied. Yet they enacted very little real legislation. They lined their pockets and proved that big government does not work. They gave scary names to scary programs. Straight out of George Orwell we have: Homeland Security, Healthy Forests, Clear Skies.

They started two wars, lost New Orleans, reintroduced torture and kidnapping into the arsenal of “accepted practices”, divided the world between Muslims and not Muslims, swept away the last remnants of well-paying labor jobs, and enriched (here to a really quite extraordinarily degree) a minuscule percentage of the population. Prominent events include the filibuster "nuclear option" scare, and the Terri Schiavo debate. This Congress also had a number of scandals: Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Mark Foley, and the Jack Abramoff scandal. All of this managed, because George Bush wears his love for Jesus on his sleeve.

When the Dems swept them out of power this fall, no one really appreciated the magnitude of the message. To me it was clear: get us out of Iraq; stop flooding jobs overseas, stop, and transferring wealth to the rich from everybody else. Essentially end the monopoly hold on power grasped by the monied. Get something done. Maybe even a little bit of Harry Truman like truth commissions to see where all those billions got to. On the legislative end: provide universal health care, establish protect American manufacturing jobs at home, and do something about global warming.

So, what have we got so far. Promises that there will be no fault0finding commissions, no impeachment moves, and maybe a massive influx of troops to Iran. Which even General John Abizaid opposes. Now in order to save face for the President’s last remaining attribute for posterity, steadfastness, may be maintained two years to let some other American President quit the war.

How are the Dems responding? Are they rattling their sabers and demanding to remove Bush from the field? NO. They are simpering about bipartisanship,’ and ‘getting along. “ The Dems seem to have internalized the Republican’s broader lesson that the federal government can only hurt.

There will be no peace in Iraq.
There will be no peace in the War on Terrorism.
There will be no peace in the War on Drugs.
There will be no peace in the war on the American working class.

The Democrats will quickly show that they are equally interested in the trappings of power and the perquisites afforded Washington. After all they have to run again in 2008.

The great Dawn of American renewal will set again, as it has endlessly set. Without bring warmth and relief to the poor and displaced in the Gulf Coast, the working poor in the rust belt, the farming poor in the drought stricken plains.

There may be some fiddling to allow Medicare to buy drugs at discount rates. There will be no universal health care. Some companies may be sued for their theft of Katrina funds, but far more of Katrina’s victims will be persecuted for taking the pennies off the street.
Also, they will pray. Maybe they will include Islamic prayers in deference to Keith Ellison, but they will certainly pray. America’s politicians have joined whole g into the idea that we want them to practice what our preachers preach. Never mind that we don’t really listen either, or that only a very few or very local number of us do. We had always counted on the federal Government to protect us against this onslaught of religion, that is after all why it’s in the First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

What do we want: A return to Honor in Congress. “Everything that is called duty, the prerequisite for all genuine law and the substance of every noble custom, can be traced back to honor. If one has to think about it, one is already without honor.”-Oswald Spengler, Thoughts

Peace in Iraq, which can only begin when we leave.

Publicly funded federal elections, get private money out of the race. Becoming a congressman should not necessarily mean thing the lotto.

Rebuild the Gulf Coast in cost effective way, using federal money and local resources and union labor. Yes it will be expensive.

Instead of a moon shot how about an Earth shot, in which we turn NASA into an earth sciences agency to study global climate change and do something about it.

End federal policy that makes it attractive to move manufacturing from America to cheaper and cheaper labor.

Make our food safe. Keep the big-food lobbies out of control and let the regulators focus on food safety measures that work. We ca pay a little more for real food.

Get the money back that Halliburton and its ilk stole from us with Bush’s connivance.

Pay taxes. We have never both fought war and lower taxes. Where will the money come form to pay these loans. Our economy cannot possibly grow fast enough. We have to pay as we go now.

Learn to live with the Muslims. I know, they can’t seem to live among themselves in peace, but they did it in non-Arab countries.

End the Israel/Palestine problem. Hamas must go. Israel needs an opponent at least ready to let them live in Israel.