Later On

From the Ethicurean:

Tom Philpott wonders why, after two studies released last month showed detectable levels of mercury in products containing high fructose corn syrup, the FDA by its own admission has no plans to look into the issue. How nice that the agency would rather trust the claims of an industry hack scientist straight out of “Thank You for Smoking” than the member of its own research staff who blew the whistle. (Grist)

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Bill Niman built a $65 million empire on a simple idea that revolutionized the food world – that meat could be more than just what’s for dinner. It could be raised naturally, humanely and sustainably, better for people and the planet. Niman knew success would take time, but believed his methods would prove profitable.

But in nearly 30 years of existence, despite becoming the darling of high-end chefs and turning the brand into a household name, Niman Ranch never did turn a profit. In fact, it was broke. To save it from Bankruptcy Court, the East Bay company merged last month with its chief investor, Chicago’s Natural Food Holdings LLC, and Niman was officially out.

The 64-year-old Bolinas man said he can live with losing the business he built from scratch. But he can’t stand quietly by, he says, while the new owners fundamentally change the brand that influenced an entire food movement. He refuses to eat their products.

Officials from the company argue that the integrity of Niman Ranch’s meat program has never been better.

"We believe that our protocols are stronger, the auditing of the protocols more rigorous, and the current business model is more financially viable," said Niman Ranch CEO Jeff Swain.

Still, it prompts the question: Can idealism ever pay?

Many say Niman is the epitome of an idealist, whose mission was to change the way people eat and encourage them to think ethically about their food.

"He showed you can raise farm animals with commercial success, without resorting to exceedingly cruel practices," said Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States. "There are some people in the humane movement who don’t think there is any such thing as happy meat. But in the larger vision, Bill Niman led the pathway."

Commercially, Niman’s methods were unorthodox, the ideals of a hippie who had moved out West during the Vietnam War to avoid the draft by teaching school in the heart of farm country. Unlike mainstream producers, Niman forbid growth hormones, used antibiotics only when an animal became sick, and demanded that the livestock be raised on the open range and readied for slaughter in an uncrowded, Niman-owned feedlot…

Continue reading. It occurs to me that Niman couldn’t turn a profit because our food is underpriced, thus the race to the bottom in terms of food quality. To get truly nutritious food, it may be necessary to pay a bit more—as for organic food.

Always good to know:

Appetizer:

Chesapeake Crab Agnolottis with Roasted Sunchokes
Wine pairing: Spottswoode Sauvignon Blanc 2007 (California)

Entree:

Wagyu Beef and Nantucket Scallops

Sides:

Glazed Red Carrots, Portobello Mushroom and Creamed Spinach
Wine pairing: Archery Summit Pinot Noir "Estate" 2004 (Oregon)

Salad:

Winter Citrus Salad with Pistachios and Lemon Honey Vinaigrette

Dessert:

Huckleberry Cobbler with Caramel Ice Cream
Wine pairing: Black Star Farms "A Capella" Riesling Ice Wine 2007 (Michigan)

Very good post in Ethicurean. It begins:

Part 1 of this post found me sitting awkwardly at an FDA meeting on produce safety. Agency reps wanted to know how they could streamline their process for dealing with outbreaks of illness linked to produce like the one in 2006, when nearly 300 poor souls got body-rocked by E. coli 0157:H7 from bagged spinach. By far the most popular proposal at the meeting (the opinion of yours truly notwithstanding): Create a state-of-the-art system that can trace our nation’s produce from field to plate and back. Preferably one that involves lots of bar-code scanners.

A common criticism of this type of system (besides the fact that it’s absurdly expensive) is that it doesn’t actually fix the contamination problem. It merely ensures that if hundreds of people get horribly ill, we can figure out more quickly where the offending product came from. The produce industry likes this approach, because it would help avoid disasters like the Great Tomato Mistake last summer, when the CDC and FDA wrongly publicized tomatoes as the cause of a nationwide Salmonella outbreak. (It ended up being traced to jalapeno and serrano chilies, but only after consumers had stopped buying tomatoes. The tomato sector has still not recovered.)

But the industry also claims to realize the limitations of traceability systems. In California, the leafy greens industry — a category that includes growers and buyers of spinach, lettuce, mixed greens, kale, chard, etc. — has moved forward with an on-farm food safety program that claims to reduce the chance that those crops will become contaminated in the first place. These types of industry-led programs are becoming more and more popular across the country. And while they may sound good, I’m here to report that if they continue to proliferate, things are going to start looking quite dire for small, organic, and diversified farmers, for farm-to-institution arrangements, and for the rural environment.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sounds tasty and easy:

Chicken With Rice, the Easy Way

Yield 4 to 6 servings

Time 30 minutes

When buying saffron, steer clear of the tiny vials that contain a few threads; go to a reputable specialty store and buy either a gram or a quarter of an ounce.

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 medium onions, about 8 ounces, peeled and sliced
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 1 chicken, cut up into serving pieces
• 1 1/2 cups white rice
• Pinch saffron, optional
• Freshly minced parsley or cilantro for garnish
• Lemon or lime wedges

1. Set 3 cups of water to boil. Place olive oil in a large skillet that can be covered, and turn heat to medium-high. Add onions and a sprinkling of salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onions soften and become translucent, 5 to 10 minutes. Remove skin from chicken.

2. Add rice to onions; stir until each grain glistens; sprinkle with saffron, and stir. Nestle chicken in rice, add a little more salt and pepper and pour in the boiling water. Turn heat to medium-low, and cover.

3. Cook 20 minutes, until all water is absorbed and chicken is cooked through. (You can keep this warm over a very low flame for another 15 minutes; it will retain its heat for 15 minutes beyond that.) Garnish and serve with lemon or lime.

Variations: You can easily vary this dish by using any stock instead of water; by substituting another grain, like pearled barley, for the rice; by sautéing or roasting the chicken separately and combining it with the rice at the last minute; by adding sausage or shellfish, like shrimp, along with the chicken, or, most excitingly, by adding strips of red pepper, pitted olives, capers, chopped tomatoes or shelled peas to the initial onion mix.

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

President Obama plans to announce today that Interior Department inspector general Earl Devaney is his pick to oversee the recently passed economic recovery plan. Devaney, who is a former Secret Service agent, will become the chairman of the newly created Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board. Obama has pledged that the Board will be "an at-large body to oversee how the government spends billions allocated to help the flailing U.S. economy."  Even though there will be a number of groups meant to monitor how the stimulus money will be spent, "Obama wanted a central group to independently monitor where those funds are going." The oversight reports are expected to be posted on the administration website devoted to the bill, Recovery.gov.  Devaney’s oversight credentials are strong. As inspector general, he "led investigations into a series of scandals" at the Interior Department, leading to such findings as Departmental dealings with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and worker abuses at the Minerals Management Service. Devaney’s investigation led to Steven Griles pleading guilty for lying to Congress in the Jack Abramoff scandal. 

Too bad Bush didn’t do something like this for the money wasted in the Iraq reconstruction.

A major weakness:

John Le Carre’s George Smiley had it easy when he finally bagged Karla, his KGB nemesis in Moscow Center.

Today there’s a hutch full of Karlas, not just in Moscow, but Beijing, Tehran, Pyongyang, and, yes, Jerusalem, dedicated to penetrating the CIA, the FBI, U.S. military services and, probably more important, stealing American technology.

And although whole forests have been chopped down for books, studies and articles about it, we don’t have a cohesive federal strategy to stop them, says Michelle Van Cleave, who headed something called the National Counterintelligence Executive for four years until quitting in 2006. She’s been on the warpath about it, writing articles and studies, talking to anyone who will listen.

Congress, it seems, couldn’t care less.

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting:

To begin, please point your elbow to the ceiling.

Then imagine yourself naked.

Then look at the patch of skin on the inside of your upper arm, the part of you that almost never sees the sun.

Whatever color you see there is what experts call your basic skin color, according to professor Nina Jablonski, head of the Penn State Department of Anthropology.

And that color, the one you have now, says Jablonski, is very probably not the color your ancient ancestors had — even if you think your family has been the same color for a long, long time.

Different Place, Different Color

Skin has changed color in human lineages much faster than scientists had previously supposed, even without intermarriage, Jablonski says. Recent developments in comparative genomics allow scientists to sample the DNA in modern humans.

By creating genetic "clocks," scientists can make fairly careful guesses about when particular groups became the color they are today. And with the help of paleontologists and anthropologists, scientists can go further: They can wind the clock back and see what colors these populations were going back tens of thousands of years, says Jablonski.

She says that for many families on the planet, if we look back only 100 or 200 generations (that’s as few as 2,500 years), "almost all of us were in a different place and we had a different color."

Over the last 50,000 years, populations have gone from dark pigmented to lighter skin, and people have also gone the other way, from light skin back to darker skin, she says.

"People living now in southern parts of India [and Sri Lanka] are extremely darkly pigmented," Jablonski says. But their great, great ancestors lived much farther north, and when they migrated south, their pigmentation redarkened.

"There has probably been a redarkening of several groups of humans."

Why We Change Color

The repigmenting process is increasingly well understood…

Continue reading.

Interesting:

It’s not often that the terms "prefabricated home" and "modern architecture" are heard together. But a young architect in Missouri has spent a decade figuring out how to bring low prices to the realm of high design.

And Rocio Romero’s homes — with their corrugated metal walls, huge windows and strong horizontal lines — are selling despite a dismal housing market.

One of her sleek designs about an hour’s drive from St. Louis sits in sharp contrast to the neighboring hog barn. Step inside, though, and the grassy rural landscape rolls into a bright, uncluttered interior. All the open space makes the home feel much larger than its 1,200 square feet.

The two-bedroom, two-bath model, called the LV, is the standard house by Romero’s company. But what’s not immediately obvious is that much of the house was flat-packed, like so much IKEA furniture, and trucked here.

Romero says that building her way puts the architect in full control.

"Fabricating my components enables me to ensure that every customer is going to get the home the way that I had envisioned it," she said.

In home design, "modern" usually means expensive. But Romero says constructing the wall panels and other big pieces offsite saves money without sacrificing quality. Her LV house costs about the same or even less per square foot than a normal stick-built home.

New York Times design columnist Allison Arieff says it’s still plenty stylish.

"It’s really simple. It’s really clean," Arieff noted. "And so I think what Rocio’s done is create a design that’s sophisticated, but it’s certainly not overdone." …

Continue reading.

I mentioned that I watched and enjoyed Dog Park, particularly the pet psychologist’s monologue about what pets do for us and also the counseling session (for the dog) with the two owners, who have split up.

I also watched and enjoyed Pieces of April, a black comedy with Katie Holmes, Oliver Platt, and Patricia Clarkson, and the differences between the two movies is intriguing.

Dog Park had about five things that I really enjoyed. The rest was filler—for example, scenes whose only purpose was to set up a later scene.

Pieces of April had no filler at all: every scene not only sets up later scenes but also delivers its own payoff—a laugh, an insight, a revelatory look or comment, whatever. And Pieces of April is interesting technically as well: at the end, we view what’s happening as though the events were already memory. And when we do, we realize that the movie is about memory—how our memories shape our lives and also shave how we relate to others, who of course work with their own load of memories.

I enjoyed both movies, but Pieces of April is really worthwhile and fully satisfying, which Dog Park is a pleasant distraction.

Yesterday was Megs’s 7th birthday. No big celebration, but quiet amazement at how long she’s lived here. Lately she has taken to demanding a squishing each evening. I’ll be reading or watching a movie, and she will come over and climb up on the right arm of the chair, staring at my chest. I’ll put down the book if I’m reading, recline back, and then she climbs onto my chest, just under my chin: front paws first, testing whether I can take the weight, then back paws and a turn so that she’s sideways, crouched. As soon as I start the squishing, she lies down fully and starts to purr. Much, much squishing, head rubbing, neck scratching, and so on. I find that if I keep it up steadily for six or seven minutes, she’ll stand up, and get down via the left chair arm.

Sometimes—like last night—I’m too interested in what I’m reading, so I don’t lean back. "Not tonight," I say, but Megs has a mind of her own, and she comes on with an implacable expression on her face: front paws, the back paws as well, and the book might as well go. That expression on her face is quite distinctive—it’s as though she’s already in the squishing trance.

This, I think, is what having a pet is all about: you learn their ways, and they learn your ways—and moreover, their ways affect yours, and your ways affect theirs. From the point of view of each—owner and pet—the other is responsive to them. The result is that the home environment with a pet becomes a living environment, in which you respond. The same is true regarding other people that live in the apartment, but other people can talk: request, explain, and in general use words to define the relationship. Having no words, a pet and its ways must be learned by observation. We probably don’t observe other people so closely as we might, being distracted by the fence of words.

As I’ve written before, both the Vision and the Futur have great acoustics that magnify the sound of the stubble being cut. I decided this morning that the sound would be even better with a two-day stubble, so I picked the Vision. The Arko is a terrific little shave stick, and the Plisson HMW 12 quickly generated a fine thick lather. Three passes to total smoothness, a splash of Sierra, and I’m done. Off for coffee.

The recommendations in this article are clearly very good. But can Congress do anything?

If we had it to do all over again, would we appoint Supreme Court justices for life? Allow the chief justice to keep his job forever? Let the court have the final word on which cases it hears and those it declines?

A group of prominent law professors and jurists thinks not, and the group says in a letter to congressional leaders that there is no reason Congress should consider the operation of the high court sacrosanct.

"We do not suggest, and would oppose, any interference with the substance of the court’s work," says the letter, which was organized by Duke University law professor Paul D. Carrington and signed by 33 others from different stations in the political spectrum.

But the group said Congress has every right to address how the court operates, "a subject it appears not to have seriously considered for at least seventy years."

Carrington said the four proposals in the letter — sent to the chairmen and ranking members of the congressional judiciary committees, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Vice President Biden — are drawn from various studies, commissions and reform efforts that have foundered in the past.

He’s not particularly optimistic they will fare any better now and notes that even this group was not unanimous on any of the proposals. "The politics of this are very difficult," he said. "Nothing on this is really going to happen until someone invests his or her career on the issue."

He’s confident of one other thing: "I’m sure the justices would hate it."

For starters, the group proposes a form of term limits, moving justices to senior status after 18 years on the court. The proposal says that justices now linger so long that it diminishes the likelihood that the court’s decisions "will reflect the moral and political values of the contemporary citizens they govern."

To get around the Constitution’s prescription that justices serve for life, the group would let justices stay on the court in a senior role — filling in on a case, perhaps, or dispatched to lower courts — or lure them into retirement with promises of hefty bonuses.

It would set up a regular rotation on the court by …

Continue reading.

Matt Yglesias has a very interesting post (with interesting comments at the link):

Speaking of marijuana legalization polls, the question of course arises as to whether we should legalize pot. On this, I’ve come to stand with Mark Kleiman who conveniently repeated his gospel yesterday:

Substantively, I’m not a big fan of legalization on the alcohol model; a legal pot industry, like the legal booze and gambling industries, would depend for the bulk of its sales on excessive use, which would provide a strong incentive for the marketing effort to aim at creating and maintaining addiction. (Cannabis abuse is somewhat less common, and tends to be somewhat less long-lasting, than alcohol abuse, and the physiological and behavioral effects tend to be less dramatic, but about 11% of those who smoke a fifth lifetime joint go on to a period of heavy daily use measured in months.) So I’d expect outright legalization to lead to a substantial increase in the prevalence of cannabis-related drug abuse disorder: I’d regard an increase of only 50% as a pleasant surprise, and if I had to guess I’d guess at something like a doubling.

So I continue to favor a “grow your own” policy, under which it would be legal to grow, possess, and use cannabis and to give it away, but illegal to sell it. Of course there would be sales, and law enforcement agencies would properly mostly ignore those sales. But there wouldn’t be billboards.

That beautifully-crafted policy has only two major defects that I’m aware of: it wouldn’t create tax revenue, and no one but me supports it. On the drug-warrior side of the argument, even those who can read the handwriting on the wall won’t dare to deviate from the orthodoxy. As we did with alcohol, the country will lurch from one bad policy (prohibition) to another (commercial legalization). I just hope the sellers are required to measure the cannabinoid profiles of their products and put those measurements on the label.

I support it too! But if it is true that we need to choose between the current regime and an alcohol-style regime, I would certainly prefer commercial legalization. The public health harms would be real, but they’d be more than offset by the benefits—gains to non-abusive users, increased tax revenues that could fund worthwhile endeavors, resources currently devoted to a senseless criminalization scheme could be repurposed. This would also be an area in which America’s tradition of federalism and localism could be put to good use. In many parts of the country, people probably wouldn’t want to see any pot stores or “coffee shops” and they could, presumably, decline to license any even if federal law permitted such licenses in general.

Also, see this post, in which Yglesias compares the relative popularity of legalizing marijuana and various conservative leaders.

Or, as the Archdruid calls it, unnoticed technology. Interesting post, which begins:

When people talk about the role of technology in the future, most of the time the technologies they have in mind are the flashy ones – that is, those that haven’t been around long enough to slip into the background texture of everyday existence. Especially in periods of decline, though, it’s far more likely to be the technologies so common they’re hardly noticed that determine, by their survival or disappearance, the fate of societies.

For the Polynesian inhabitants of Easter Island, for example, deepwater canoes had been part of daily life for thousands of years. This, I suspect, is among the core reasons that nobody on Easter Island seems to have anticipated the consequences of cutting down too many trees. The resulting deforestation eliminated an essential resource – large tree trunks – without which deepwater canoes could not be made, cutting off the majority of the island’s food supply and, at the same time, the only way out of the trap the Easter Islanders set for themselves. The canoe had been so omnipresent a part of life for so long that the possibility of its absence very likely never entered into the islanders’ darkest dreams.

A similar sort of inattention, according to the medieval Arab historian ibn Khaldûn, played a catastrophic role in the collapse and abandonment of cities across the Middle East and North Africa in the centuries prior to his own time…

Continue reading.

I really like Eviatar’s reportage. Here are two recent articles in the Washington Independent that illustrate why:

Obama Justice Department Backs Bush on Bagram

Leahy Would Investigate Democrats, Too

Both are well worth reading.

Very good talk.

Or, as one of my bosses used to say, the "liberry." The library should be an important source of information for anyone: books, movies, magazines, CDs, whatever. The library is supported by your taxes, and your patronage makes them happy and saves you money: win-win.

I keep in ReminderFox the next due-date for the books I’ve checked out. With the pop-up reminder to renew or return, I’ve not had any fines for quite a while.

So how to get the most out of your library.

Wowbrary will send you email alerts on new acquisitions at your local library.

Book Burro is a Firefox (and Flock) add-on that, when you look at a book online, will tell you which nearby libraries have the book and whether it’s available through Abebooks.com and the like.

13 Book Hacks for the Library Crowd is a good post that provides several links that provide information and/or tools on improving your book-finding and –using experience.

Sort of a slow start today—partly because I put off that first cup of caffeine (today: coffee).

Books: Finished John Grisham’s The Associate, which was remarkably weak. More or a less a book treatment, which should have been returned with the note, "Payoff too weak. Rework. Make characters more real, while you’re at it."

I’m now reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, which I had recommended to the library as a purchase. They did indeed get it, and I’m the first reader. So far, fascinating. People who enjoy this blog will enjoy this book.

I updated the earlier post on the AA-12 to include a recommendation to read National Defense, by James Fallows. It’s old, but fascinating, and every American should know the grim story of how the Army ruined the AR-15 and sacrificed the lives of hundreds if not thousands of American soldiers just to protect some internal turf. At the link, you can find copies for $1.

Movies: Last night I watched City of Ember, a science-fiction movie for kids. It was pretty good, especially the baroque machines. Very Terry Gilliam-ish, I thought. Also I saw Dog Park, which, though not completely successful, had several things I liked. Among the high points: a moving speech on what pets do for us, and a laugh-out-loud session with the dog psychiatrist with the dog’s owners, who are now separated. I tried watching Heroes, but couldn’t really make it through the pilot: too slow-moving. I did think that Sendhil Ramamurthy has to be one of the more handsome men on the planet. The Wife knew a guy who looked very like that, and he said that he looks pretty much like everyone in his village. I think I’ve met a couple of Indian women from the same village: absolutely stunning.

Tasks: Today I’m going to do our taxes. I always hate this task, which is never so bad as I imagine once I get started, and I hate even more having it hanging over my head. I want to get rid of it now. Also, the kitchen once again desperately needs cleaning and I need to do all the usual Sunday chores. First, though, I’ll blog a little and read a little and make my lunch.

My post on how to spatchcock a chicken still gets a lot of hits. But that takes the process only so far: removing the backbone and, optionally, cutting the chicken into two halves. (The backbone is great for chicken stock.) Here’s a video on how to break down a chicken into individual pieces. He uses a different method than I, and the pieces come out somewhat different: he gets two boneless breast pieces, for example, while my own method leaves the breast attached to the bone. Still, variety is good, and the explanation is clear.

He does seem to have some grudge against chicken fat. I generally like to render the chicken fat and then use the schmaltz for sautéing vegetables—especially, of course, if I’m sautéing the vegetables to be used in chicken soup.

He also has a video on making chicken stock, and the carcasses he produces are undoubtedly good for stock.

And here’s how to break down a chicken using kitchen shears: