GMO: To Do or Not To Do

"The protestors, thinking they’re attacking some Monsanto-like evil corporation, are so consumed with their hatred of GMO that they are spreading misinformation, refusing to allow scientists to even engage in the research into GMO, and rather than engaging the scientists in dialogue are threatening to just destroy their experiment. This is the worst kind of bullying, extremist, anti-science garbage out there. At least the creationists don’t show up in our labs and start spitting in our test tubes. The climate denialists might make a lot of noise but they aren’t threatening to blow up James Hansen’s computer."

Mark, Denialism blog

I recently posted here about food, and included the link below to an article promoting laws that mandate that all GMO foods should be labeled. I still maintain that GMO foods should be labeled. People are entitled to know what they are eating, and to decide whether or not they will ingest GMO fruits and vegetables. It seems to me even ideological oppononents -  say, Newt Gingrich and Nancy Peolsi for example - would agree about this.

Then, there’s agreeing to disagree. I spent most of my professional career in administrative positions which supported basic and applied university research. I respect science, and like most Americans have directly benefitted from improved health care practices developed through medical research. I subscribe to the wisdom of distinguishing between  facts (which I loosely define here as empirically observable and repeatable results) and opinions (which, for purposes of this argument I define as conclusions based on often conflicting judgements and theories regarding the application facts). As the cliche says, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.

Which leads me to this. I distinguish between the right to know what’s in your food based on the label, and the right to choose what food you consume. To eat or not to eat GMO: that is the question.

There is still plenty of scientific wiggle room on the question of whether it is potentially harmful to humans to routinely ingest food that has been grown from genetically modified sources. My opinion is that I risk substantially more potential harm by gardening without a tetanus shot. But maybe that’s just me. Further research on GMO food is something both sides should support in order to arrive at any discoverable facts about long term effects on humans.

I subscribe to the whole local, organic credo and routinely shop at farmer’s markets. I can taste the difference between real food and processed foodstuffs. My heart wants to side with the farmers, the cooks, the people who still want their food to be fresh, delicious, nutritious and slow. But my head says that anti-science is more dangerous than good science. And facts should weigh more than opinions, no matter how appealingly old fashioned and “natural” those opinions. 

This article, with its appeal to science and reason, persuaded me to think twice about GMO food; and I recommend it: Environmentalism and anti-science, how GMOs prove any ideological extremity leads to anti-science.

Angry Birds

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."

---Revelation 18:2

I had to fix the tsukubai this morning because some nighttime visitor had knocked over the return pipe so the water poured into the ground instead of back into the sone basin that sits above an uderground reservoir with a pump. 

The entire time I was repairing the problem, the hummingbirds, those small annoying hyper nasty “yappy dogs” of the bird kingdom, nagged me to get out of their day spa. It took me longer to fix because I was yelling at them to get out of my yard. I sounded like that archetypical angry old man yelling at a cloud. Hummingbirds aren’t hateful, they’re just noisy neighbors.

In other news, I’ve had this recent e-mail conversation with my doc about drug side effects. In the course of this conversation, he asked how often do I take Vicoden? Here’s my draft reply: 

Subject: Vicoden Vs. Warfarin

Dear Doc,

How often I take a Vicoden depends entirely on my decision about how often I’d like to sleep through the night without waking in pain. Hypothetically, I prefer to sleep enough hours nightly to avoid having to suffer daily from sleep deprivation hallucinations. Notwithstanding the foregoing however, I also don’t want to take Vicoden more often than 3 nights a week because the more I take, the less it works. And I need it to work.

And now that we’re on the subject of how much you care about potential drug side effects, it may interest you to know that the warfarin I take to thin my blood (Fun fact: warfarin is rat poison. I shit you not.) is problematic wrt/ side effects.

• For instance, I bruise so easily that if someone speaks sharply to me they leave a bruise.
• For instance, large bruises - say =>3” in diameter - are painful. Who knew?
• For instance, increasingly, my bruised fingers and hands swell up and turn purple in a tight and painful generalized bruise that lasts two weeks, and that keeps me up nights looking at the dark side of the moon while my hands look like two balloons.
• For instance, if I get the least little scratch, I bleed so much that if CSI used one of those backlights in my house they’d think it was a Manson Family time-share.
• For instance, if I had invested in Band-Aid stock when I started on warfarin, I’d be rich enough to have a doctor who first did no harm.

Let’s call it a working draft reply and leave it at that.

Sheep Vs. Roses

"For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble produce thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers?... Suppose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my planet, one that a little sheep can wipe out in a single bite one morning, just like that, even without realizing what he's doing - that isn't important? If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself, 'My flower's up there somewhere...' But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important?'"

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

The war between the sheep and the flowers has been going on a while, and there is no clear winner so far. So far, nobody has eaten the last rose. Meanwhile, I’m slow roasting a rack of lamb today, but it’s not the last lamb.

Today, there is a rose in the backyard, and the house smells like rosemary. So for today, the roses are winning, and the stars are still shining. Life is good.

Remembering and Forgetting

“One of the saddest things in life, is the things one remembers.”

― Agatha Christie

"Learn to forget, learn to forget

Learn to forget, learn to forget"

― The Doors, Soul Kitchen

Ever wonder if you have a tapeworm in your brain? Me neither. But we should, apparently. At some point in every life, one has to start cleaning out the top hard-to-reach shelves of the old memory bank. Otherwise, all we’re likely to remember is the danger of tapeworms, the needless mnemonic for how to spell Arithmetic, and simple gardening information, like say, distinguishing a rose from a daisy. I probably won't remember the hard gardening stuff like whether it’s aloe or agave that dies after it blooms. Look it up, you’re more likely to remember it that way.

Apart from potential worms in my brain, I worry that if I don’t clean cobwebs from my memory store (like the names of the brothers on Bonanza, and don’t say Little Joe because everybody remembers him. And Hoss. It’s that other guy, what's his name...) that I won’t have room to store new knowledge like the names of the current Idol finalists (not!) or the difference between a daisy and a rose. 

When a loved one dies, I grieve about the one-of-a-kind memories they took with them. Sometime it may be merely delightful and within living memory: like a particular game of hide and seek on a childhood summer evening like this. Sometimes it is generations old: like that the tiny enamel pin in my jewelry box that says “AHS ’03” that is my maternal grandmother’s pin from her 1903 Ayersville (Ohio) High School graduation class that Mom gave me. Sometimes it’s more than recent or fond; it’s ancient and essential. To give you an idea, think about what would happen if the last guy that knows how to brew good beer dies. Ok, then think of something that actually might happen.

I’d like to remember happy things, and not sad ones. I know life includes both, but see no reason why this should require that the shelves in my personal memory must be stacked that way. But, not withstanding Jim Morrison, learning to forget is the easy part. The hard part is learning what to forget, because it turns out that the mere act of revisiting a particular memory tends to strengthen it. It’s, like, counterintuitive. And it's hard: like counting to ten without thinking of elephants. (Which reminds me of my all-time favorite riddle: why do elephants drink?)

So, here’s my trick for learning to forget. The first step is to identify the memory you want to forget - say tape worms, or that if you are a gardener who likes to eat what you grow you may be a murderer. 

Then spend twice as much time thinking of something good to remember.  And if you can’t tap into happy memories to wipe out bad memories like bleach on bloodstains, then you should create some. Happy memories, not bloodstains. Like today’s NASA Astronomy Picture of The Day. Today, it’s the Annular Solar Eclipse I will see tomorrow night from here in SoCal, even though I won’t be in the path for the full eclipse pictured, but will see a small bite out of one side (i.e. a partial annular solar eclipse.

Don't forget that last step for heaven’s sake. Learn how to remember it. The happy memory, not the brain worms.

An Apple A Day?

"And then I thought, 'Wouldn't breakfast be healthier if my waffle were made of salad?'"
-Scott, on morning meal alternatives 

This article, “Gross Intredients in Processed Foods” in today’s Huffpo breathlessly breaks the “news” that some of the stuff in processed foods would gross us all out, if only we knew. So they tell us,  and the answers are "gross", which is a precise scientific term of art meaning Eight on a 1-10 scale from cringeworthy, to vomit inducing scrotum punch. Ok, I made that last part up. But in fairness to the author, she's an idiot.

Here’s what’s in an international orange bottle of Cheeze Whiz Squeeze: Whey, milk, milkfat, dried corn syrup, water, sodium phosphate, contains less than 2 percent of: Food starch-modified, salt, maltodextrin, lactic acid, mustard flour, Worcestershire sauce (vinegar, molasses, corn syrup, water, salt, caramel color, garlic powder, sugar, spices, tamarind, natural flavor), sorbic acid as a preservative, oleoresin paprika (color), cheese culture, annatto (color), enzymes. Yikes, right?

But not only is the science in this story rather squishy, they bury the lead. Turns out foodie bloggers are right: not only does real slow food taste better than fast food; it’s better for you! This scientific fact was cleverly deduced by Dr. David Katz, who knows what's best. “An overhaul of food labeling is most likely still a while off. In the meantime, consumers' increased curiosity into food production could result in a return to cleaner eating. 'What I know best is that the foods best for health are generally not prone to any such adulterations,' writes Katz, who suggests eating foods made from ingredients you have heard of, recognize as either a plant or animal and can pronounce.”

Seriously? Whether I can pronounce ingredients? Then again... Digest pantothenic acid, pyridoxine, phytosterols, alanine. Consider the lowly monosaccharide and it’s greasy cousin oligosaccharide. To me, these sound like pretty gross and unpronounceable ingredients. Hence, I conclude they are clearly not better for my health.  I mean, Dr. Katz might point out that monosaccharides totally sounds like a social disease; or it might if I could pronounce it. In case your curiosity has been aroused, these are the ingredients in apples. Moreover, even if consumers’ curiosity into apple production remains unaroused, these are still the ingredients in apples. 

The Huffpo article is to science as Cheese Whiz Squeeze (“Now with more Trademarks!”) is to cheese. But thanks, Sara Klein, Associate Editor, Healthy Living, for this amazing factoid stuffed taste of the science of healthy living.

In the event that you’re interested in an important issue to all who prefer their apples from trees and not GMO test tubes, check this out: GM Food: Don't Ask, Don't Tell? in the Utne Reader. There will be an initiative on labeling GMO foods on the upcoming CA ballot and this article gives a good, if biased*, background on the topic, along with a number of references. 

* Of course the GMO article and all of it's references have a bias. That is, if you want to consider facts capable of being biased. To paraphrase Respectful Insolence, facts can neither be biased, nor insolent. OBTW, evolution is true.

Fools and Liars

“As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.”

Jonathan Swift

If modesty makes a fool seem like a man of sense, does immodesty make a fool seem even more foolish? Or does he merely remain a shameless whore who also seems a fool?

I'lll take a lot of credit for giving Swift the inspiration for the above quote. I spun him over in his grave a few times by playing Mitt Romney’s recent radio interview taking credit for the bailout that insured General Motors’ survival.

Responsible Vegetable Gardening - Brussels Sprouts

"You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of."

Jim Rohn

Vegetable gardeners who cultivate year-round vegetable gardens - as we can here in Zone 9 - must learn to embrace the mysteries; and by that I don’t mean mysteries like why someone would want to grow Brussels sprouts in the first place. I don’t judge. For the purpose of classifying the vegetables we cultivate at any given moment, I refer to the mysteries of seasonal transitions: when can I stop growing cool season veggies like cole crops (cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts); and when can I put the tender tomato starts in? Especially, when do I get to give up on the languishing Brussels sprouts and sew the watermelon seed?

Mother Nature doesn’t simply flip a switch at the spring equinox and declare that those languishing cabbages won’t ever get around to making heads, or that the world is now safe to grow eggplants. Around here, she tends to tease the gardener with a week or two of lovely warm weather and then circle back around and ambush us with a whack of winter weather. (And, what the hell do those anorexic, inappropriately dressed weather “gals” mean when they say well, we’re in for some unseasonable weather? Before weather can become unseasonable, you have to have discernable seasonal transitions, or at least discernable seasons, i.e. seasonable seasons. We don’t.)

Which gets me to my real subject here: those deadbeat losers of the vegetable kingdom - Brussels sprouts. We have only left the malingering Brussels sprouts in our vegetable garden for the upcoming Spring Garden Festival. It’s not just that we don’t want a patch of bare ground, or that we’re reluctant to expose tender vegetable to “unseasonable” weather. It’s certainly not that we expect to actually see a respectable ROI on our Brussels sprouts venture.

Speaking only for myself and not my fellow veggie gardeners, my reason for permitting the Brussels sprouts to remain in the garden is that they are a harsh lesson in responsible vegetable cultivation. If not damning evidence of their worthlessness, their unproductively is surely the harbinger of doom for our Brussels sprouts. These pretentious celebrities of the vegetable kingdom that spell their first name with a capital letter are as worthless as any Hollywood celebrity. 

When we were kids, we used to call them Mighty Mouse Cabbage, but that didn’t mean we liked eating them. I have met exactly one adult in my entire life that claims to like eating Brussels sprouts. Cooking the fruit of the Brussels sprouts makes your house smell like the unventilated hallway of a cheap boarding house at dinnertime, even down to the finishing notes of unwashed sweat socks lingering in the kitchen the next morning.

I conclude my case against Brussels sprouts by somewhat redundantly concluding that any annual vegetable that takes more than 90 days to ripen (or not to even bother to ripen) isn’t going to work in the microclimate of our garden. I should admit here that I have seen a vegetable garden about 5 miles away grow these plants taller than I, and so thickly productive that their stalks look like cylindrical cobblestone roads. In fairness to me, a professional master gardener who lavishly feeds them her homemade compost tends that garden. That said, I maintain that it is not a responsible use our sparse water and precious compost, not to mention my meager unpaid amateur gardening talents, for some stupid vegetable that ends up being an open invitation to several generations of short-lived white flies to enjoy themselves at leisure.

But wait until next week, after the Festival. Then, look out.

Imagine mama whitefly, who today gathers her fledgling babies around their whitefly hearth and tells them about the rich feeding grounds in plot #10. There, my darlings, you will find yummy, leggy Brussels sprouts, with lush leaves and anemic fruit that have nurtured generations of our ancestor flies, making us the mightiest whitefly kingdom on the block. Now imagine how, come next week, the kids will find a figurative scorched bare ground. Hah! It will be like global warming for our whitefly population; or 100-year drought, right? This leads me to admit that another reason to leave the sprouts in is to lull the whiteflies into complacency and indulge my vengeful fantasy. Surely, one of the perks of being a vegetable gardener is the totally godlike power to change the environment of pests. Apocalypse next Tuesday! Citizens of entire whitefly nations will rise up and turn upon their failed leaders as their world descends into the chaos, and as whitefly civilization breaks down, and as entire whitefly cultures are lost in nightmares of starvation and deprivation. (Disclaimer: I could be less than accurate about whitefly biology and ethnography here, but I’m probably not. I’m not a botanist or a fortuneteller. Based on this post, one might even say that I’m not much of a gardener either.) 

It is a challenge to garden responsibly, particularly as our seasonal circumstances are so mercurial. One of the changes we can control is what we plant and don’t plant. As god is my witness, I’ll never plant Brussels sprouts again.