This is not at all unrelated to passage of the health care reform bill, health care generally, diet or the environment. What could be so voraciously dynamic as to pertain to all of these areas at once? Oh, and fits the truest definition of ‘teh socialism’ more than anything currently on offer?

Why – it’s high-fructose corn syrup, of course:

While there has been extensive evidence thatfructose is harmful to human health and associated with metabolic diseases like diabetes and liver problems, the fact is that plain old table sugar is itself 50 percent fructose. HFCS does have a higher concentration of fructose at 55 percent but it’s close enough to table sugar that most experts continue to dismiss claims that HFCS is on its own more dangerous. And certainly the claim that the introduction of HFCS in the ’80s directly led to the current obesity epidemic continues to be a highly controversial view.

You would have to be at least quadruple major in one of our finest business schools to qualify as a proper apologist defender for HFCS by now. Nothing stands for competition like monopoly sweetener like a substance we can manufacture and put all those little sugar cane-growing country out of business, all in one fell swoop. We must protect our vulnerable little farmers from the predations of those foreign sugar conglomerates.

Rejection of something real, with an actual purpose, in favor of something manufactured, that twists that purpose into something not only grotesque but literally poisonous on several levels, fits our collective sociopathy to an uncomfortably elegant tee. Systematic rejection and defense of this rejection as patriotic and/or linked to our very destiny as a country is something else, something I am unwilling to quantify with words – or maybe just the words I know now. Maybe I should collect my books and get on back to skewl.

Some of this is so much like a reverse caption contest, I couldn’t resist.

“Canadian style bacon water.” Awesome.

Monsanto, alfalfa and the Supreme Court:

In Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms, No. 09-475, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case which could have an enormous effect on the future of the American food industry. This is Monsanto’s third appeal of the case, and if they win a favorable ruling from the high court, a deregulated Monsanto may find itself in position to corner the markets of numerous U.S. crops, and to litigate conventional farmers into oblivion.

Here’s where it gets a bit dicier. Two Supreme Court justices have what appear to be direct conflicts of interest.

Stephen Breyer
Charles Breyer, the judge who ruled in the original decision of 2007 which is being appealed, is Stephen Breyer’s brother, who apparently views this as a conflict of interest and has recused himself.

Clarence Thomas
From the years 1976 – 1979, Thomas worked as an attorney for Monsanto. Thomas apparently does not see this as a conflict of interest and has not recused himself.

Fox, meet henhouse.

You get into power, or office or on the bench, and you forget everything that your office stands for. I remember being a long road trip one weekend during the Thomas’ confirmation hearings and listening to a lot of it on the radio. Maybe Thomas never knew what the position of SCJ stands for – or maybe he knew all along. That was why he could accept being put on the court the way he was. Either way, this is another monstrous example of why he was and is unfit for the court.

And Roberts whines about being criticized.

May all your greens come true.

And don’t forget to give peas a chance.

Over the course of six months living in rural France some years ago, I mysteriously lost about twelve pounds – without trying. Not only was I not trying to lose weight but, being on our second tour in the Vaucluse, Mrs. Green and I were in the throes of all of the delicious meats, vegetables, cheeses, fruits and local Rhone wines that were such an important part of living there. It can’t be overstated, the importance of the food to that place. In fact, besides the inexplicable late afternoon light, there is really not much else going there at all. Which is one reason why it’s a great place to write, among other things. Exercise consisted of mowing the acre out front of the farmhouse twice a month and biking 2 km to the village most every day. Which, when you think about it, is plenty.

But the point is, with all the chipolatas, Camembert, rose’, apricots and creme fraiche, coupled with a largely sedentary lifestyle,  I was baffled about the weight loss until I shared this with a friend upon our return. Without skipping a beat, she pointed out the obvious – that I had largely stopped eating processed food.

All that is to lead-in to this thoughtful post on the same subject, with some sliced media criticism on the side, by Juan Cole. Just go read it. Highly relevant to the current health care debates and everything green you might need to consider. At least on a quiet Sunday.

Tom Philpot at Grist links to this quote from Virginia farmer, Joel Salatin:

Number one is that it[industrial agriculture] destroys soil. Absolutely and completely. The soil is the only thread upon which civilization can exist, and it’s such a narrow strip around the globe if a person could ever realize that our existence depends on literally inches of active aerobic microbial life on terra firma, we might begin to appreciate the ecological umbilical to which we are all still attached. The food industry, I’m convinced, actually believes we don’t need soil to live. That we are more clever than that.

At the advent of industrial agriculture, right after the Great Depression and really catching fire right after World War II, the only consideration for the natural world was as an abstraction of our national heritage. We didn’t have a large body of oil paintings or bronze sculpture – Americans had land, mountains, canyons and sky, which we assumed went on forever and we owned. Environment as a resource was only concerned with economic determinism. No ideas of preservation, only the concept of a bottomless well. This is not castigation – it’s genuinely difficult to appreciate the past in its own time. During and after the Dust Bowl we couldn’t eat, and we recognized the fact that we couldn’t produce enough food on our farms. So we reacted, and brilliant technicians solved the problem, based on what we knew at the time.

There was no ecology, no environmental science much less any larger systems view as to how these elements of plantary ebb and flow worked together. And so the shift to industrial agriculture worked; we grow food in copious volume. It’s hard to argue down successful ventures.

But that’s exactly what we must be able to do, in a sense, in order to transition to something other than a catastrophe based on the multiple negative externalities that have been produced as a result of our great success. And they have been great. But now in possession of a greater consciousness – we can perceive the problems our actions create. Plus, as it is easy to see, we know much, much more, about our planet, our problems and our solutions. We know the problems are far more complex than is navigable with conventional responses. The non-safety, non-economic externalities are the ones that have caught up with our grand abilities to provide and prosper, which is why these are should be the first things to be brought into question, upon honest appraisal. Instead of twitching at the notion of lower inputs, we’ll have to bore into it with all we have and then some.

As a colleague said to me on this very note, “the science that got us into this situation will not be able to get us out.”

What does Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations have to do with hypoxia zones in the Gulf of Mexico? As pointed out, if one out-sized work by a grand personage were seen as rather ordinary prescriptions for decent conduct and otherwise commonsensical, might other directives of a seemingly radical nature take their place among the more banal measures of merely astute management? So it may seem.

The United Nations recently approved the broad application of the first agricultural methodology, or biological approach, for Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The UN’s announcement coincides with the USDA’s analysis report that shows the economic benefits to agriculture from the U.S. cap-and-trade legislation.

The agricultural methodology, which will be used to design projects that eliminate the use of synthetic nitrogen on legumes like soybeans and cowpeas, was developed by Amson Technology LC, a greenhouse-gas-reduction and sustainability consulting firm, Becker Underwood Inc., a leading developer of bio-agronomic and specialty products and Perspectives GmbH, a Point Carbon company, a high-quality greenhouse gas reduction market solutions provider.

…

In the U.S., a sustainable agriculture survey conducted by Rabobank shows that nearly 70 percent of the U.S. farmers and ranchers have taken steps toward implementing sustainable agricultural practices, and dairy farmers are striving to cut 25 percent annual GHG emissions related to the production of fluid milk by 2020.

Whether via legislation, grass-roots activism or market economics, many of the more exotic-seeming solutions to the way we lay waste to the natural environment are nothing of the kind. Problems of excess can be managed with sensible long-term projections about production and the pollution horizons that will result; scaling one down until it bears a manageable relationship to the other (sustainable or better). In other words, what we need divided by what we know. In what other world would these types of reasonable management practices seem radical?

Marcus Aurelious was hailed, even at the time, as a philospher-emporer, as if that was an unusual combination. The mixed message of our age is the mythology of ‘economies of scale’, as if one can transcend the other. We’ve got no business in that business. Industrial agriculture should be seen as the grotesque distortion, not our attempts to correct it.

You know the feeling – I was reading the other night and made a note to remember to look up a word I came across. If you don’t look up strange words in books or read books with strange words, you’re probably not reading this. So I’ll never mind about that.

Anyway, anthropophagic. There, I said it. Gross, sure, but I didn’t know the term. It means, basically, cannibalistic, and I’m sure Kazantzakis what getting at something good when he used it. Sarcophagus is also kind of gross, when you realize what it means.

By the time I remembered to look it up (just now) I was on to something else, so I’m fitting it in a bit oddly, I’m afraid. The goal of eating is not cheap food. That won’t come as a shock, I hope, but it’s instructive in its way when we relate it to other activities we engage in. We have approached eating and food acquisition as activities that should be completed as quickly and cheaply as possible, with minimum effort, price and enjoyment. In doing so we have done great harm to ourselves physically but also we’ve lost many more delicious aspects of eating that has nothing to do with taste – though we’ve greatly mucked that up, too. No, here of course I mean that we have eliminated discussions and arguments about other cultural artifacts that occur during meals. This is a crucial loss, equaled only by the quality of the cheap food that we ingest, that must be farmed on a mammoth scale in order to be cheap, that require prodigious amounts of petroleum fertilizer, again, in order to be cheap. All because we no longer like to talk over dinner.

Travel is much the same. The goal of moving around seems to be cheap trips. Wrong. The goal of traveling is much more pernicious to our sense of place, pride and perfection that that. It enhances one and inhibits the others, or changes them into something more problematic and in need of further investigation and more traveling. And it can get expensive. But what moving about on the cheap does to us is the key, and especially when travel is prioritized only on the basis of its cheapness, its harmful effects are most on display. When you can move around on a whim and eat for nothing, you become impatient with all other complexities – of palate, of locale, of politics, of… sutras. You name it. When we turn to whimsical, cheap entertainments to pasturize our neglected imaginations, we greatly succeed.

And it’s hard to turn back, to break the habits of ease. We construct all-or-nothing scenarios where the choice is between McDo and hunting/gathering, and do our selves no favors by it. Put a little more consideration into where you go, how you get there, what you put into your body… pretty soon the monstrous implications of life on the cheap go away. There can be no hand-made global climate change. You just can’t do it, my friends.

You can look it up.

The government is playing a game of hangman with the auto industry, which, only using the two words ‘cars’ and ‘economy’, is missing a couple of important letters.

It’s not a game really. But the word they come up with is the key. Because what’s happening is that the auto industry will not return to what it was, and I can’t say whether this is objectively good or bad – the livelihoods of millions of people are at stake and will change because of it. I can say that the industry and its products were objectively unsustainable, never geared toward lasting, if you will. The term Rustbelt was earned, obviously.

What will it all change to? Many, smaller ventures, likely, but when you expand the word list to include fortune and manufacturing, the people at stake might be able to actually avoid completing the figure on the gallows.

The situation should make us (we seem to only respond to force) begin to think about post-industrialization in a different way perhaps, and not just in terms of a service industry where we make money from money but no longer make any thing. We will continue to need many things, primarily food and but also jobs, for people. How do you create jobs for people? How do you make food? Where did all the people who made the cars come from?

On a very related point, conservatives scream socialism! so often and so loudly that they don’t even see when something really is socialism, like the president firing the CEO of a major corporation and ordering another to sell itself. Another pitfall of a discourse littered with chickenlittle-type hyperbole.  The timing couldn’t be better for this short-term policy solution. When they might reasonably object to something, the moral authority has been used up in petty political slander. A self-neutralizing opposition is good for President Obama, but I trust they wisen up. There will be need to be smart, effective opposition, eventually.

So… I’m flipping through Corn & Soybean Digest the other day and… this image sort of jumped out at me.

Actually it was the cover story, so I flipped over to the article.

Depending on field conditions, the DB120 should plant 90-100 acres/hour at the recommended 5-5½ mph, according to Rippchen.

Near the end, the reporter gets to the essential question:

So, is this the limit for planter size? At least for a while, according to Rippchen and Bauer. “At this point, 120 ft. is a practical limit. You need to go in 30- or 40-ft. increments and I have a hard time getting my head around a 150-ft. planter,” he says. “The issue isn’t the weight in the field, but transporting the unit down the road. That puts the most load on the drawbar at the highest speed. We won’t introduce anything that our tractors can’t handle.”

I have a hard time getting my head around taking this seriously, even though I know it’s a real piece of machinery, written up in an honest-to-goodness, real live magazine with a masthead and a sub-title (’Maximizing Production and Marketing for Profit’). Aren’t we all, buddy.

I also know that we’re about as interested in what takes place behind the grocery store shelves and where the food comes from as we are what happens on the other end of the line when we flip on a light switch. The orange juice commercial comes to mind, where the lady reaches her hand through the empty shelving all the way back to the tree in the orchard just on the other side of the wall. We’ve got other things to communicate in truncated language about, after all.

Like how we’ve got to feed the world, and that to do so, we’ll need, among other things, the world’s largest planter. Also, a gigantic reset button for the nitrogen cycle would be nice, while we’re at it.