Green Beans: Deer Fail

I found something else that grows in a container and can handle minimal sun: green beans! Fortunately, the plants only grew about 15 inches so I didn't have to stake them. They seemed to intertwine and hold onto each other for support.



I planted one among some similar-looking weeds as a deer test case. They found it, ripped it up by its roots, leaving a gaping hole among the remaining indigenous undergrowth. Even before it fruited. Deer fail.

I had such luck with the beans I started sugar snap peas. Don't know how these will fare, although they did hold up over last week's hurricane-force winds.


________Photos: Bix

Shoppers In Ireland Pay 33 Cents Per Plastic Bag

California is thinking about banning bags - paper or plastic- that stores use to pack customer's groceries:

Assembly Bill Would Ban Free Bags At California Grocery Stores, San Jose Mercury News, June 26

They say it generates unnecessary waste. Surely, if you need a bag they oblige, for a fee.

What do you think? Ban bags? I think it's a good idea.
________

Acid-Producing Diets

Note about photo: Squash reduce acid load and are beneficial.

Diets that present more acid than alkaline to our kidneys may:

• Promote insulin resistance¹
  
• Lower vitamin D levels¹
  
• Cause loss of minerals from the skeleton, contributing to osteoporosis. (Minerals are used by the body, in compounds like calcium bicarbonate, to neutralize acid.)

They may also be responsibe for other things I'm still reading about:

• Muscle wasting
  
• Reduced capacity for exercise

Those shockingly healthy soccer players down at the World Cup right now probably share the secret of sodium bicarbonate to neutralize body acid, improving athletic performance.

What Is An Acid-Producing Diet?

An acid-producing diet is one that, once digested and metabolized, pushes body fluids to a lower, or more acidic, pH. (The body maintains blood in a tight, slightly alkaline pH range of 7.35 to 7.45.)

The pH of a food does not indicate its pH effect on the body. Acidic citrus fruits, for example, have an alkalizing effect ... eating a lemon will not make the blood more acidic.

The Potential Renal Acid Load (PRAL) is an equation used to estimate how acid-forming a diet is. (It appears to have been developed by Thomas Remer in the early 1990s.²)

PRAL = 0.49 Protein (g/d)* + 0.037 Phosphorus (mg/d) - 0.021 Potassium (mg/d) - 0.026 Magnesium (mg/d) - 0.013 Calcium (mg/d)¹

*Protein is used as an estimate for sulfate. Protein is made up of amino acids. Of the 20 common protein-sourced amino acids in food, only 2 contain sulfur: methionine and cysteine.

Just looking at that equation, you can tell (by the positive or negative signs) that:

• Foods high in protein are more acid-producing (especially proteins high in sulfur).
  
• Foods high in phosphorous are more acid-producing.

Alternatively:

• Foods high in potassium are more alkaline-producing.
  
• Foods high in magnesium are more alkaline-producing.
  
• Foods high in calcium are more alkaline-producing.

Looking at the coefficients, you can tell that foods high in protein pull the most weight. Phosphorous, potassium, magnesium and calcium have much less of an effect. In fact, Remer et al. found that eliminating calcium from the equation actually improved prediction of acid effect - including calcium tended to underestimate acid load.³
________
I was going to plug some foods into this equation but the authors of GoutPal did such a beautiful job of that already:
Acid / Alkali Food Tables

Generally:

• Dairy - Acidic
  
• Meats (beef, poultry, pork, seafood) - Acidic
  
• Grains (wheat, rice, corn) - Acidic (not as acid as dairy and meat)
  
• Beans and legumes - Slightly alkaline to slightly acidic
  
• Fats and Oils - Neutral
  
• Fruits - Alkaline
  
• Vegetables - Alkaline

The acid-forming potential of a food also depends on how much of it you eat. You can go to a database like NutritionData.com and pick up protein, phosphorus, etc. of a food you like, in the amount you eat it, plug it in the equation, and see its effect.

For example (positives are acid, negatives are alkaline):

3 ounce beef tenderloin, broiled:
PRAL = 0.49 (23) + 0.037 (180) - 0.021 (290) - 0.026 (19.6)
PRAL = +11 (very acidic)

1 ounce cheddar cheese:
PRAL = 0.49 (7) + 0.037 (143) - 0.021 (27.4) - 0.026 (7.8)
PRAL = +8 (very acidic)

1 large egg, hard-boiled:
PRAL = 0.49 (6) + 0.037 (86) - 0.021 (63) - 0.026 (5)
PRAL = +5 (acidic)

1 cup brown rice, cooked:
PRAL = 0.49 (5) + 0.037 (150) - 0.021 (154) - 0.026 (85.8)
PRAL = +2.5 (slightly acidic)

1 small box (1.5 oz) seedless raisins:
PRAL = 0.49 (1) + 0.037 (43.4) - 0.021 (322) - 0.026 (13.8)
PRAL = -5 (alkalizing)

1 cup butternut squash, baked:
PRAL = 0.49 (2) + 0.037 (55.4) - 0.021 (582) - 0.026 (59.4)
PRAL = -11 (very alkalizing)

1 sweet potato, baked in skin (large, about 1 cup, 200g):
PRAL = 0.49 (4) + 0.037 (108) - 0.021 (950) - 0.026 (54)
PRAL = -15 (very alkalizing)

These are just estimates. We can't know the real-time constituents of a food. We can't know the absorption of those constituents in a given individual. We can't know the buffering ability of an individual's blood at any given time.

I should note - other things besides diet affect the pH of body fluids. Excessive exercise lowers pH (low pH is acidic), as does the inability to remove carbon dioxide by effective breathing (lung diseases foster lower pH).

One good thing ... You can combine acid-forming foods with alkaline-forming foods and break even.

A diet that emphasizes fruits and vegetables, and that minimizes meat and dairy foods (such as the Paleo Vegetarian Diet), is a low-acid-forming diet that may reduce the risk for insulin resistance (and so diabetes), osteoporosis, age-related muscle wasting, and other pH sensitive conditions.
________
¹ Effect Of Metabolic Acidosis On Insulin Action And Secretion In Uremia, Kidney International, 1998
² Potential Renal Acid Load Of Foods And Its Influence On Urine pH, Thomas Remer and Freidrich Manz, Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 1995
³ Dietary Potential Renal Acid Load And Renal Net Acid Excretion In Healthy, Free-Living Children And Adolescents, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2003

Photo from my 2005 Farmers' Market Tour.

Farming: "A Life of Drudgery And Toil"?

From "An Edible History of Humanity," by Tom Standage:

"The simple truth is that farming is profoundly unnatural. It has done more to change the world, and has had a greater impact on the environment, than any other human activity. It has led to widespread deforestation, environmental destruction, the displacement of "natural" wildlife, and the transplanting of plants and animals thousands of miles from their original habitats. It involves the genetic modification of plants and animals to create monstrous mutants that do not exist in nature and often cannot survive without human intervention. It overturned the hunter-gatherer way of life that had defined human existence for tens of thousands of years, prompting humans to exchange a varied, leisurely existence of hunting and gathering for lives of drudgery and toil. Agriculture would surely not be allowed if it were invented today. And yet, for all its faults, it is the basis of civilization as we know it. Domesticated plants and animals form the very foundations of the modern world."

Why would humans opt for a life of drudgery and toil? If they didn't have to? Standage offers some guesses, but doesn't weigh in with anything definitive. He says that the switch from hunting and gathering to farming "is one of the oldest, most complex, and most important questions in human history," yet the exact cause remains a mystery.

What do you think?
________Illustration from "Kidipede, History And Science For Middle School Kids." Caption: "Women and men farming in south-eastern North America (1500's AD)."

Semi-Submersible Drilling Rigs

I'm used to aircraft, not seacraft. But these semi-submersible drilling rigs are spectacular.

These are all photos of the Thunder Horse, a BP (75%) and ExxonMobil (25%) joint venture drilling rig also in the Gulf of Mexico, about 150 miles southeast of New Orleans.

Imagine the payload of a ship designed to carry it. Imagine loading it. I couldn't see how they did it ... until I read "[The Blue Marlin] can ballast itself so that the central section is well under water, the semi-sub is then floated across it and the ballast pumped out to lift the rig clear of the water." I would love to see that!



Imagine the fuel used just to light them.



Here's a photo of the Thunder Horse listing after Hurricane Dennis in 2005. It wasn't hurricane damage that caused this, not directly, but "an incorrectly plumbed 6-inch length of pipe [that] allowed water to flow freely among several ballast tanks." I bet there was some finger-pointing going on there too.


________Photos from OilRigPhotos.com, except for listing rig from Wikipedia.

Grains: Ancient or Modern?

Someone asked me if I thought it would be better to eat grains that were grown thousands of years ago, as opposed to what we find in stores today.

"Better," that's such a subjective term. Tastier? Weight stabilizing? Cancer, diabetes, heart disease preventing? Easier to digest? Less painful on the pocketbook? More lucrative for business? Depends on who you ask, I suppose. But I see benefits in preserving ancient grains.

There's a problem with access. It's difficult to feed a population with a food that isn't being cultivated to any great extent. There are reasons today's grains were selected over ancient grains - seed dormancy, height of plant (proximity to soil nutrients), ability to separate husks and glumes from grain, yield of plant, time to harvest, natural drought and pest resistance, and more recently ability to patent (profit).

Advocating a food which is difficult to access is like telling someone who lives in Canada that coconuts are really good for you; it's a shame you can't grow them.

Another thought, if you're comparing older grains to foods found in stores today, that is, if you're grinding these grains to a powder, then they will present the same problem of accelerated digestion as the flour-based foods of today.

Recall the study in this post:
Eating Processed Food Makes It Easier To Gain Weight

Two groups of rats were fed either standard pellets or easily-chewed, soft pellets (made softer by increasing air content, as is done in breakfast cereals). The rats ate the same number of calories, with the same macronutrient content (carbs, fat, protein), but:

• After 18 weeks, "body weight in the soft-fed group was significantly greater."
  
• After 22 weeks, weight of abdominal fat in the soft-fed group was significantly greater, enough to designate the rats as obese.

As Gary Taubes rightfully argued, a calorie is not a calorie.

(Possible mechanism: Less energy needed for digestion/assimilation in the soft-fed group. Lower thermogenesis, both post-meal and overnight, was associated with easier-to-digest food.)
________
It's vital that we continue to cultivate older seeds. Their DNA code for proteins we may find beneficial, nutritionally and medicinally. As food, their macro- and micronutrient make-up is different than that of modern seeds. The medicinal potential being lost in the Amazon by extinction of older plants - because we raze the land for pasture or crops or cities - is heartbreaking and shortsighted. We may need to restore this DNA data from a backup if we discover our current agricultural hard drive has deteriorated.

My feeling - If you choose to eat grains it's best to eat a variety. It matters more that the grain, which is just a seed, is fresh, not bioengineered (which is distinct from normal hybridization or selective breeding), organic if you can get it (fewer pesticides), and not ground into flour ... than how old its DNA is. It's also a good idea to germinate the seed a little before you prepare it. Soak or sprout it. Among other things, germinating will reduce the amount of gluten, a protein many people have difficulty digesting.
________The photo is of my 100% sprouted wheat bread. I make it at least once a week. It's delicious! We're hooked on it, especially with a little peanut butter. Flourless, yeast-free, no sugar, just wheat and a little salt.

I'll get around to writing a recipe for it. It's so basic and easy. Take about 2 cups of whole wheat kernels, soak them overnight, sprout them for a day or 2, grind them, and bake in a covered pot. I let the loaf rest in a warm oven to set up, which is what you see in the photo.

Trash Can Potatoes

The Trash Can
The strong one sliced off the top of an old trash can, drilled holes in the bottom, and filled it with rocks (for drainage) and soil.



The Potatoes
The cook, who still isn't sure which side of a potato is up, pushed 2 wrinkled and sprouting potatoes, one Red Bliss, one Yukon Gold, into the soil and had this harvest about 4 weeks later.


________Photos: Bix

Leaking Gulf Well: Just 5 Days Worth Of Oil

The risks of drilling for oil offshore in deep water are becoming apparent. What are the benefits?

Bill McKibben, writing for The Huffington Post last week, said:

"BP has gone to all this trouble for a well that taps into what they now think may be 100 million barrels of oil. And that's... five days supply for the US?"
- Missing the Real Drama of the Deepwater Horizon Blowout, McKibben June 9

Five days? Our government let BP take this risk for 5 days worth of oil? Maybe that doesn't account for the gas, gas that is escaping and dissolving in the Gulf, being fed upon by bacteria, sucking huge amounts of oxygen in the process, oxygen fish and wildlife need for survival.

I guess the US is pretty strapped for homegrown sources of energy at the moment.

Here are some stats on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig I picked up on Transocean's site:

• It floats, rather, it used to float.
  
• Could operate in water depths up to 8000 feet. (BP was drilling an exploratory well at a water depth of about 5000 feet, 41 miles off the Louisiana coastline.)
  
• Could drill up to 30,000 feet.
  
• Used a riser pipe 21 inches OD (outer diameter).
  
• Was built by Hyundai in South Korea (Hyundai Heavy Industries Shipyard) in 2001.
  
• Was powered by 6 Wartsila engines, 9755 horsepower each. Those engines drove 6 AC generators, 11,000 volts each.
  
• VDL (variable deck load) of 8000 metric tons (17.6 million pounds). This is how much weight the rig could hold.

From Will Rodgers PowerStocks site:

• The rig cost about $350,000,000 to build in 2001. It would cost at least double that to replace today.
  
• BP was paying about $500,000/day to rent it (BP didn't own it, Transocean did), another $500,000 to operate.
  
• The rig didn't use anchors to stay in place. It instead used thrusters controlled by satellites to position it.
  
• According to Rodgers, the rig "was one of the most advanced engineering feats in the world, having drilled deeper than any other waterborne platform."

________

Highest Rate Of Child Poverty In 20 Years

A new report by the non-profit Foundation for Child Development:
2010 Child Well-Being Index

Projections:

"The percentage of children living below the poverty line is expected to peak at 21 percent in 2010, the highest rate of child poverty in 20 years. We estimate that approximately 15.6 million children will be living in poverty in 2010."

"We project the percent of children living in food-insecure households to climb from 16.9 percent in 2007 to 17.7 percent in 2010, which is an increase of 750,000 additional children at risk over this time period. (Food insecurity occurs when all family members do not at all times have access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to maintain an active and healthy life.)"

"Chief among the findings is that, by 2010, the recession will wipe out virtually all progress made for children in the Family Economic Well-being Domain since 1975."

That's 21% of US children living below the poverty line and nearly 18% living without a secure source of food. Those are astounding numbers given that the US is the world's richest economy. Say what you may about adults living in poverty, but children have no control over the family into which they're born.

Consider the 1% of people in this country who clamor about raw milk against a backdrop of 18% of children whose access to food at all is uncertain, and who barely have a voice.
________The photo is of a section of Philadelphia called Strawberry Mansion, taken by the author of the blog Many Miles; I believe his name is Martin. The specific post was Urban Poverty and the Ugly Animal.

About a quarter of the people here in Philly live below the poverty line, in neighborhoods much like this. They don't have access to supermarkets, let alone farmers markets (or cow shares!). They don't have a South Lawn upon which to grow their own organic foodstuffs. As Martin describes, "Most shopping is done in so-called corner stores with limited (and often questionable) selections." The rest of his essay is spot-on and worth the read.

Oil Spill Explained

A concise explanation of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:



Excerpts:

"You're not going to have a problem before you start. It's starting that causes the problem."

"The first thing to do in an event like that is to underestimate the problem."
"What? Underestimate the problem?"
"Yes. We don't want people to panic. I mean you got to calm people down. A lot of people get very worried."
"Why do they get worried?"
"Well, cause the sea's filling with oil. A lot of people are very sentimental about the sea..."

This is untouchable.
________Thank you BL.

An Estimate Of The Size Of The US Raw Milk Community

How large is the raw milk community in the US? Below are some rough calculations. I estimated it comprises less than 2 tenths of one percent (0.17%) of the US population. That is, about 99% of milk sold in the US is probably pasteurized.
________
Below are the 2008 survey results from the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA). (You can click the chart excerpt to the right to see all 50 states.)

Press Release (doc)
Spreadsheet (xls)

According to NASDA, of the 50 states surveyed:

• 29 states authorize the legal sale of raw milk, in some specified manner.
  
• 21 states prohibit the sale of raw milk to consumers.

Below are the states that permit the sale of raw milk for human consumption. (First parentheses is the number of legal raw milk producers in that state in 2008. Second parentheses is my estimate for the number of raw milk animals. See Note below for substantiation.)

Arizona (2) (100)
Arkansas (Goat only, 21 goat dairies) (1050 goats)
California (2) (100)
Colorado (Shares only, 26 shares) (1300)
Connecticut (16) (800)
Idaho (0) (0)
Illinois (?) (189)
Kansas (?) (50)
Kentucky (0) (0)
Maine (18) (809)
Massachusetts (23) (70)
Minnesota (0) (0)
Mississippi (Goat only) (?) (50)
Missouri (0) (0)
Nebraska (15) (180)
Nevada (?) (50)
New Hampshire (8) (100)
New Mexico (1) (50)
New York (21) (1050)
Oklahoma (1) (50)
Oregon (0) (0)
Pennsylvania (87) (2322)
Rhode Island (0) (0)
South Carolina (14) (700)
South Dakota (0) (0)
Texas (20) (1000)
Utah (4) (16)
Vermont (?) (2452)
Washington (22) (1100)
Wisconsin (0) (0)

That worked out to 13,588 raw milk cows and goats in the US in 2008. (That compares to 9,266,574 total milk cows in 2007, mostly factory farmed.)

If you can milk 2000 gallons per cow (and I'll assume, conservatively, goat) per year, that works out to 2000 x 13,588 = 27,176,000 gallons raw milk in 2008.

If a person consumed the equivalent of 1 gallon of raw milk in milk/kefir/buttermilk/yogurt/cheese/cream/butter in a week, that's 52 gallons/person/year. About 522,615 people would have consumed the 27,176,000 gallons in the year 2008.

If the US population in 2008 was 301,621,157, that means that only 0.17% of the US population consumed raw milk in 2008.

These are very rough numbers. It's difficult to account for what people do with their own milk-producing animals. Even if I'm off by a factor of ten, 10 x 0.17% is still less than 2% of the entire US population. The raw milk community in this country is very small indeed.

* Note: My estimate for the number of raw milk animals: I assumed 50 animals per raw milk producer, but not more than 20% of organic milk cows for that state, assuming the rest goes to commercial pasteurized organic sales. The USDA lists organic milk cows per state.¹ If number of producers was unknown, I used 20% of organic milk cows for that state. If number of producers was unknown and number of organic milk cows was unknown, I used 50.
________¹USDA Economic Research Service, Organic Production, 2008 (Table 5.)

I used Google Docs' free spreadsheet application to run some of these numbers. I cut and paste from the linked Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and inserted my own formulas. It was all compatible. Have to say, Google impressed me again.

The Raw Milk Debate

A couple things heating up in the raw milk arena.

1. There's this article from last week's New York Times:
Crying Over Raw Milk

... that describes the passing of a bill in the Wisconsin Legislature in April, a bill that would permit sale of raw milk directly to consumers. (About 28 states currently permit raw milk sales.) The state's governor vetoed it in May. His arm may have been twisted by commercial dairy interests who don't sell raw milk and don't want the competition.

2. There's Marion Nestle's recent blog:
The raw milk fights: economics, ideology, or both?

... that also discusses the legislative tug-of-war over raw milk sales. Her take?

"... my personal choice favors pasteurization."

3. There's food safety attorney Bill Marler's new raw milk resource:
Real Raw Milk Facts

... which he describes as "a clearinghouse for evidence-based studies, presentations, commentaries, regulations, and position statements on raw milk." Marler does an incredible service to public health, although he's not held in high esteem by the raw milk community.

4. And there's this comment by Michele Simon from Nestle's blog that sums up my thoughts:

"It saddens me to see my fellow food activists taking this on. We have many more health problems related to people consuming too much dairy, of any sort, not to mention the environmental destruction and animal abuse caused by factory dairy farms all over the nation.

Instead of ensuring the “right to raw milk” for a privileged few we should be focused on outing Big Dairy’s massive brainwashing campaign that cow’s milk is an essential part of the human diet and the industry’s ongoing influence over the US dietary guidelines and food assistance programs."

________
Raw milk cannot be produced in quantities that make it accessible for more than a handful of people (my estimate of the size of the US raw milk community). Scaling it up would involve producing it in larger quantities, holding it, packaging it, transporting it, and shelving it. All of that increases risk for bacterial growth. You can rewash a lettuce leaf; you can't wash milk. This is why pasteurization was introduced in the first place.

As more people consume raw dairy products the risk for illness increases. There's a burden to society in the form of healthcare costs when more people get sick. My and everyone else's insurance premiums rise to cover those costs.

EB Nine from Nestle's blog put it well:

"As far as the political, “freedom of choice” argument, raw milk should be treated like any other product on the market with which there are known risks associated; it should be age restricted and should be taxed. I agree, if an adult is aware of the risks and still wants to consume the product, then let them. However, there should be a penalty (i.e. tax) if they choose to consume a product with which there are known hazards because it’s my medical premiums that are going to suffer when they end up in the hospital."

Raw milk is and will only ever be a privileged niche market.
________Photo from RealRawMilkFacts.

We Have The Food Supply We Requested

My posts about contaminants in food and supplements are not so much a guide for individual behavior as they are an impetus for change - change that can give our children a cleaner environment and more health-promoting food.

For ourselves, for most adults living in the US now, we have the food supply we requested ... through our vote, through our sanctioning of Congressional activity (subsidies, trade), through our purchases, and through companies we support and invest in. We have the food supply we, as a nation, wanted, "cheap and abundant" as USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack describes it.

It's time to change our request. If enough people harangued their Senators and Representatives about pesticides, pollution, GMOs, hazardous fertilizers and soil amendments, water mismanagement, commodity supports, lack of conservation, monopolies, etc., then, in theory at least, Congress would be put on notice. Notes could be compared in the Senate dining room. Legislators could ring up Cabinet officials.

As to the Cabinet, Secretary Vilsack has been traveling the country collecting ideas "to get rural America growing again." (See Rural Tour 2010.)

In an essay he wrote for the Huffington Post last week, he said:¹

"At each stop on the [22-state] tour I met with hundreds of Americans to hear their stories, thoughts, and concerns. And I got a sense about each community's vision for its future."

His sense manifested in 5 "pillars which combine the successful strategies of today and the compelling opportunities of tomorrow." Come again? This is political gobbledygook, feel-good phrases that fill a page, happy buzzwords.

It was nice that he canvassed the rank and file for their input. Let me draw your attention however to a particular bit of policyspeak. When he says we have to build new rural economies "to compliment production agriculture," a phrase he used twice (I think he meant "complement," unless he really meant that regional economies must be created to praise industrial agriculture. I'm being stingy. I knew what he meant.) he was making a veiled, or perhaps not so veiled promise, not to rural America, but to multinational food corporations that their ways of doing business, including incentives, will be protected.

Maybe he's right. Maybe the way to change how we produce food is to "overlay" new food economies over established ones. Whether we overlay, overhaul, or chip away at food production's most egregious qualities, I hope it results in better choices for future generations. In the end, we'll get the food supply we, as a nation, request.
________¹ Rebuilding and Revitalizing America's Rural Communities, Tom Vilsack, Huffington Post

The Oil Companies Don't Care

"The quest for oil is, by its nature, colossally destructive. And the giant oil companies, when left to their own devices, will treat even the most magnificent of nature’s wonders like a sewer. But the riches to be made are so vastly corrupting that governments refuse to impose the kinds of rigid oversight and safeguards that would mitigate the damage to the environment and its human and animal inhabitants."

"The oil companies don’t care."

- Bob Herbert, Disaster in the Amazon, New York Times, June 4, 2010
________

Bicycle Rush Hour

In the Netherlands (you can get the gist of these after a few seconds):



In rain:


In snow:


I wonder what the original impetus was. To save fuel? To get exercise? To reduce traffic?

I bet it would be a great job being a bicycle mechanic there.
________