Container gardening

• Container gardening on a deck

• Dwarf fig fruit trees

Problems with agri-business

• Michael Pollan:  Unhappy meals (LB:  or basically, the Reader's Digest version of An Omnivore's Dilemma + In Defense of Food)  <---- READ THIS!
  • Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health.
  • Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
  • Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians (''flexitarians'') are as healthy as vegetarians.
  • Further, we know that simply by moving to America, people from nations with low rates of these ''diseases of affluence'' will quickly acquire them.
  • The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing.
  • Chemical fertilizers simplify the chemistry of the soil, which in turn appears to simplify the chemistry of the food grown in that soil. Since the widespread adoption of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in the 1950s, the nutritional quality of produce in America has, according to U.S.D.A. figures, declined significantly.
  • Nutritionism history
    • Naively putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee's recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food -- the committee had advised Americans to actually ''reduce consumption of meat'' -- was replaced by artful compromise: ''Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.''
    • First, the stark message to ''eat less'' of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don't look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless -- and politically unconnected -- substance that may or may not lurk in them called ''saturated fat.''
    • Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington.
    • By framing dietary advice in terms of good and bad nutrients, and by burying the recommendation that we should eat less of any particular food, it was easy for the take-home message of the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines to be simplified as follows: Eat more low-fat foods. (LB - read:  carbs)
  • Nutritionism results
    • But after several decades of nutrient-based health advice, rates of cancer and heart disease in the U.S. have declined only slightly (mortality from heart disease is down since the '50s, but this is mainly because of improved treatment), and rates of obesity and diabetes have soared.
    • In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us.
    • Yet as soon as you remove these useful molecules from the context of the whole foods they're found in, as we've done in creating antioxidant supplements, they don't work at all. Indeed, in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers. Oops.
    • So depending on the reigning nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might be either a high-fat food to be avoided (Old Think) or a food high in monounsaturated fat to be embraced (New Think). The fate of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather, while the processed foods are simply reformulated.
    • Of course thanks to the low-fat fad, it is entirely possible to reduce your intake of saturated fat without significantly reducing your consumption of animal protein: just drink the low-fat milk and order the skinless chicken breast or the turkey bacon. So maybe the culprit nutrient in meat and dairy is the animal protein itself, as some researchers now hypothesize.
  • Capitalism
    • Humans deciding what to eat without expert help -- something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees -- is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, distinctly risky if you're a nutritionist and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or journalist.
    • The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat.
    • Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery.

• Michael Pollan:  You are what you grow
  • [Adam Drewnowski] wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person's wealth.
  • This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market.
  • A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.
  • The farm bill essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to overproduce.
• Michael Pollan:  Weed it and reap
  • And the government would not need to pay feedlots to clean up the water or upgrade their manure pits if subsidized grain didn't make rearing animals on feedlots more economical than keeping them on farms. Why does the farm bill pay feedlots to install waste treatment systems rather than simply pay ranchers to keep their animals on grass, where the soil would be only too happy to treat their waste at no cost?
• Michael Pollan:  Our decrepit food factories
  • But a new and even more virulent strain [of Staph bacteria] is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.
  • The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases.
  • Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. [...] As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can't study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry, which, not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming.
  • California's almond orchards have become "one big brothel" -- a place where each February bees swap microbes and parasites from all over the country and the world before returning home bearing whatever pathogens they may have picked up.
  • Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience.

Lawns = DO NOT WANT

• Michael Pollan:  Why mow?  The case against lawns
  • With our open-faced front lawns we declare our like-mindedness to our neighbors and our distance from the English, who surround their yards with ”inhospitable brick wall, topped with broken bottles,” to thwart the envious gaze of the lower orders. The American lawn is an egalitarian conceit, implying that there is no reason to hide behind fence or hedge since we all occupy the same middle class.
  • For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one’s neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor waxing, or road paving.
  • Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.
• Turf War
  • Pretty much by definition, a lawn is unnatural. Still, there are degrees of unnaturalness. Even as the American lawn was being democratized, it was also becoming more artificial.
  • The greener, purer lawns that the chemical treatments made possible were, as monocultures, more vulnerable to pests, and when grubs attacked the resulting brown spot showed up like lipstick on a collar. The answer to this chemically induced problem was to apply more chemicals.
  • In “American Green” (2006), Ted Steinberg, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, compares the lawn to “a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs.