Melamine – the gift that keeps on giving

And the melamine contamination problem spreads to more parts of the American food chain: More animals got tainted food.

What irks me is that the only thing the politicians seem to be responding to is that “OMG terrorists might put something in our food”. Which is true, but it’s not the immediate threat. How about the fact that potentially lethal industrial-grade chemicals are being dumped into our food supply RIGHT NOW? Shouldn’t that be enough of a reason to take action?

This is a start:

[Congressional] Democrats say they will introduce legislation that would permit the FDA to force mandatory food recalls — a power it now lacks — and increase funding to hire more inspectors.

Hopefully this President will actually sign such legislation.

One thing we did this weekend was to head over to Whole Foods and attempt to do all our weekly grocery shopping there. We’ve gone there before for specialty items, but never tried to do our ‘normal’ grocery shopping. And with the exception of one item (some Aquafina flavored water that Scott really likes) we were able to do so, and we came home with several bags full of organic, non-big-brand food for the house. A few items matched the prices we would pay at a conventional grocery store (like pasta and tomato paste), but most items were a little more. Some few were double the price of their ‘conventional’ alternatives. For example, we skipped buying and meat or chicken — with boneless chicken breasts going for more than $6 a pound in the “sale” bin, the price was too high.

Although we have a bunch of nice, “safe” food in the house, I don’t feel particularly good about our shopping trip. It’s no secret that the food shopping options for poor people are worse than the ones for more well-off ones, but Whole Foods and their higher prices seems to raise the bar even further. As amazing as Whole Foods is, the people who really need the added benefits of a healthy diet are the people least able to afford their prices.

You shouldn’t have to be well-off to be able to have access to safe food. And you shouldn’t have to scare the government with the terrorism bogeyman in order to get them to do something about the safety of the nation’s food supply.

Another NY Loss

On a purely personal note, this sucks:

This weekend will be the last time riders can rent horses from Claremont Riding Academy to take on Central Park’s bridal path.

The academy is the oldest continuously operated stable in the country but decreasing ridership and increasing development on the Upper West Side is forcing it to close.

That business has been in my mother’s family for many decades. It’s sad, sad news that the end has come.

UPDATE 4/24 The news that Claremont is closing is mostly a NY story, but Pravda, of all places, has picked it up too.

I’m still pretty bummed about the news. I know everything comes to an end eventually, and that 100+ years is a really great run, but that’s cold comfort.

A Commuting Life

I’ve been meaning to blog about my commute for a long time. I drive 33 miles each way to my current gig, and frankly that’s too far. About the only times I really enjoy my commute are sunny mornings like today, because when the weather is nice, the ride along the upper part of Highway 280 is really lovely. (Highway 280, if you’re not familiar with the SF Bay Area, is an interstate that connects San Francisco and San Jose. It’s more or less the neglected step-child of Highway 101, a north-south artery that runs all the way down to Los Angeles.)

At any rate, if you must commute, Highway 280 is a good commute to have, especially the part before you hit the more urbanized South Bay. Lots of green rolling hills, fields, even some cows as you pass near Stanford. This wiki link helps show what I mean but that’s far from the prettiest scenery you pass on the stretch from San Mateo down to Cupertino. Still, it’s a long commute, and even on a good, no-traffic day I’m in the car for 45 minutes each way. On a Friday night, it can take well over an hour to get home. And for a minimum of 4 months each the year (more if I work late a lot), I’m driving home after sundown, which means all I see is tail lights, not hills and trees.

What finally got me to write about the commute was this piece on commuting in the New Yorker. This is me:

Roughly one out of every six American workers commutes more than forty-five minutes, each way. People travel between counties the way they used to travel between neighborhoods.

And here’s the corollary:

“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is,” Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told [the author of the article]. (Putnam wrote the best-seller “Bowling Alone,” about the disintegration of American civic life.) “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”

…

The source of the unhappiness is not so much the commute itself as what it deprives you of. When you are commuting by car, you are not hanging out with the kids, sleeping with your spouse (or anyone else), playing soccer, watching soccer, coaching soccer, arguing about politics, praying in a church, or drinking in a bar. In short, you are not spending time with other people. The two hours or more of leisure time granted by the introduction, in the early twentieth century, of the eight-hour workday are now passed in solitude. You have cup holders for company.

Not that I’m all that into soccer, churches, or bar-hopping (anymore) but those are just examples to illustrate the point. True, you can chat on your cellphone while you’re in the car, but that is not very safe, and not much of a substitute for real social activities anyway. For example, I can’t count the number of events I’ve passed on because they start in San Francisco at 6PM, which would mean having to leave work by 4:30 at the latest in order to get there on time.

If you’d told me 10 years ago what my daily commute would be like today, I would have laughed at you and called you a fool. Funny how things change. Many of the changes in my life since then have been for the better, but this one …. well, not so much.

Happy Earth Day

Here’s some of the most sane writing I’ve seen on the subject:

It is not possible to for an average person to live a reasonably prosperous North American (or even European) lifestyle and reduce their footprint to one planet by themselves.

This point is worth pausing on, because so much of the green marketing BS around us tells us that the planetary crises we face are our fault, that it is our responsibility to fix them and that buying products which are marketed as “green” will fix that problem. The myth of individual lifestyle responsibility is so strong, most of us don’t even comment on it anymore. But in many ways, it’s a lie. What most needs to be changed in the world are the systems in which we are all enmeshed, and we ourselves, acting alone, are almost powerless to change those systems. To do that, we need better information, stronger connections and new ways of thinking.

Oh so true. Replacing your lightbulbs or recycling your cans is great, truly, but what’s really going to turn this planet around is not what individual people do in their own homes, it’s what happens in the factories and the oil refineries and in the boardrooms of companies across the world. You want to see real change? That’s where it needs to happen. Organizations like Forest Ethics get that. Some others don’t.

Go, buy some new CF lightbulbs today if it makes you feel better. Just don’t mistake that for an action that’s really helping the planet.

Only a Matter of Time

Only yesterday, I was saying maybe it is time to start rethinking how much “industrial” food we buy for the household humans, as well.

Well, what a difference a day makes. By way of Litbrit @ Shakes’ place:

It was only a matter of time before this happened: melamine has been detected in the feed and body fluids of pigs meant for human consumption, and California authorities have issued both a quarantine and an advisory to not consume pork from at least one farm; others may follow, since the tainted feed was also shipped to New York.

Yes, it’s only one farm, and one that does not resell pork, so maybe this is Not That Big A Deal. But how much more of this stuff might be out there, unreported?

This issue of where our food comes from is not going to go away soon.