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FOOD 101
Excuse me, but aren’t Blue Staters meant to be the clever people? Farm Aid is currently performing in New Jersey, where special education is apparently required:
The emphasis at this year’s event — the farthest Farm Aid has gone into the heavily populated Northeast — was on teaching urbanites about where food comes from.
Part of that teaching involves consuming $9 organic hamburgers. Via J.F. Beck, who has further organic news.
Sorry, Grimmy, I only ever make reservations for dinner.
Posted by andycanuck on 2006 10 01 at 02:33 PM • permalinkJohn and Ken (KABC Los Angeles) suggested Convenience Store Aid rather than Farm Aid http://rhhardin.home.mindspring.com/johnkencut.farmaid.ram (October 3 1999)
What do those taste like?
Wonderful—when you’re not paying.
Posted by andycanuck on 2006 10 01 at 03:38 PM • permalinkOver the years, Farm Aid has raised some $29 million…
Yeah, that’ll make a big difference in a quarter-trillion-dollar-a-year sector of the economy.
Posted by Bruce Rheinstein on 2006 10 01 at 03:51 PM • permalinkOrganic food - just one symptom of the rampant technophobia that has spread through Western society (I can’t speak for Eastern countries). I see the manifest anxiety everyday. Just last week, a woman too scared to even take panadol, had never tried it! One of the most difficult parts of my job is trying to tell anxiety-related somatic complaints from the real thing, and this whole organic natural food/medicine/vitamin industry ain’t helping.
Never understood the point of picking one particular job description and acting like it’s some sacred thing that celebrities have to have huge charity events to support. It’s MUCH harder to make a living as a car salesman or a financial advisor than as a farmer, I don’t see John Couger Mellencamp doing any concerts for them.
Posted by Shaky Barnes on 2006 10 01 at 05:10 PM • permalinkAh Joisey, my very own Great Garden State and Criminal Enterprise.
For those of you not familiar with this blight between New York City and Pennsylvania, you only need to know one thing.
In New Jersey the wind doesn’t blow…it sucks!
Senate Candidate (and prime RINO) Tom Kane Jr. says that there is a net loss of 50,000 families a year…(probably red staters), and the average age in my county is 86. As soon as the house is sold we’re off to Free America.
Frankenfood blitzes are often funded by ultimate financial beneficiaries of this scam and supermarkets arn’t stoopid. Organic food is 3-times pricier than frankenfood so cash flow to the supermart chain surges (they dont drop their margins). Food Aid concerts are both brilliant deep marketing as well as an immediate scam, with the poor suckers in this farce thinking they are saving the planet while buying a $9 hambuger.
Posted by The Young Contrarian on 2006 10 01 at 06:09 PM • permalinkIn a a word, like joisey, shite dont smell, it sucks.
Posted by The Young Contrarian on 2006 10 01 at 06:11 PM • permalinkI was in a tourist town on the Olympic Peninsula, where I noticed a cafe sporting the sign “ORGANIC EXPRESSO”.
I turned to my brother and asked him, “Just how the f**k do they make organic expresso? Haul the coffee beans from South America on mules?” He commented that they also probably grind the coffee between two flat stones, and make the expresso on a fire burning dried dung.
Oddly enough, this cafe also had a “FOR SALE” sign on it. Maybe the margin on organic expresso wasn’t all that great, eh?
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 10 01 at 06:42 PM • permalinkaccording to Beck, the recent food poisoning scare across america was caused by organic farming practices. Organic farmers can’t use manufactured fertiliser so they use cow manure instead, which has a much greater chance of infecting food with E Coli.
This seems rather obvious in hindsight, cow manure being shit and all.Posted by daddy dave on 2006 10 01 at 06:47 PM • permalinkOf course, on the whole, organic food production is less efficient because various bugs get to eat the fruits of the farmer’s labours. This means that more acres are taken up producing less food.
Mind you, trying to explain this to people in the third world is a waste of time as a lot of ‘em can’t understand a word of English.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2006 10 01 at 06:57 PM • permalinkI have no problems with organic produce. Just think of it as a non-compulsory tax on the stupid.
Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2006 10 01 at 08:02 PM • permalinkIn England, the Soil Association’s own statistics show that organgic farming in the UK uses three times as much land as conventional farming to produce the same amount of food.
Thud when the organic crowd finally succeed in getter UK converted to organic farming, they’ll make 1/3 the amount of food, which means that the food imports will rise, it good for Poland and Hungary.
Hmmmm.
Wait a minute the organic food people talk about food miles. Ah, so , 1/ 3 the amount food means the obesity problem is solved.
Does anyone remember the start of the joke that ends “The horse man knew her” as a punch line BTW?
Posted by The Young Contrarian on 2006 10 01 at 09:34 PM • permalink1. John Melonhead Menstrualcramp is about as useful as teats on a boar.
2. I am currently wearing, fulltime, an Adam Smith Society wristband that says, “I buy goods from cheaper countries.”
3. I grew up on a real farm (and in a very poor rural area).
4. No family with a reasonable sized farm in the US would be dumb enough today not to incorporate so they wouldn’t lose it to the Death Tax. So, most ‘corporate farms’ are family farms.
5. Organic basically means ‘covered in shit much of the time while being attacked by insects’.
6. LOTS of Third Worlders speak at least some English, because as V.S. Naipul notes they have ‘a burning desire for a green card.’
Posted by JorgXMcKie on 2006 10 01 at 09:40 PM • permalinkIt’s MUCH harder to make a living as a car salesman or a financial advisor than as a farmer, I don’t see John Couger Mellencamp doing any concerts for them.
Yeah, but did you ever try to eat a car salesman, or financial advisor?
#13 Well, food could come from many different undeveloped African and Asian countries that could grow it and sell it much cheaper, if it wasn’t for jackoff hypocrites like this crowd always pushing for agricultural subsidies.
What the? Hell does that mean.
Yeah, but did you ever try to eat a car salesman, or financial advisor?
Uh, no, but I’ve never tried to eat a farmer either….
Posted by Shaky Barnes on 2006 10 01 at 10:16 PM • permalinkHmm
Mum’s visiting. I have today discovered Krispy Kreme donuts. mmmmmm. I’m not a donut fan (except caramel frosted yeast donut from Donut King, and fresh, hot fall-apart donuts with sugar and cinnamon mmmm).Reading the Sunday Telegraph an article reviewing a movie, in the vein of Spurlock’s, about food additives - mum read out a bit about girls maturing faster because of added hormones in meat, etc.
Arrgh. I told her it was crap here in Aus, I found this, from the Australian Chicken Meat Federation.
I also read some time ago a printout of facts debunking the animal cruelty allegations of some animal rights nutjobs - I have just quickly searched for a piece I read discrediting farm animal cruelty claims, but can’t find it.
Uh, no, but I’ve never tried to eat a farmer either…. , just the food produced by a farmer.
Point is, you can live without a car salesman, or financial advisor (well, most can:), but not without food. So, a good, cheap, reliable food supply is more important than a good, cheap, reliable car salesman, or financial advisor(again, for most people).
I’d bet you could come nearer making a living selling cars, or telling people what to do with their money, than you could farming. Unless you’re a agricultural savant.
For many years, one of the ugliest bits of public art here in Melbourne (and there’s a lot of competition for that title) was a publicly-funded ‘community’ (i.e., painted by talentless incompetents) mural decrying the horrors of food irradiation. Whatever happened to the anti-irradiation hysteria? For that matter, whatever happened to 1980s lefty hysteria about ‘lethal’ microwave ovens?
kae,
nice find about the myths on chickens. e.g., there are no hormones in chicken (in Australia, anyway). There is no antibiotic residue in chicken. To think I believed that nonsense.Posted by daddy dave on 2006 10 02 at 12:01 AM • permalinkPoint is, you can live without a car salesman, or financial advisor (well, most can:), but not without food.
I’ve never once bought food directly from a farm. For me and nearly everyone else, the people at grocery stores and restaurants are 100% as important in the food chain as the farmers. So does the bag-boy have a sacred job? Should we be having benefit concerts for waitresses?
Of course, the farmer can’t farm without diesel fuel for his tractor. That makes oil companies every bit as critical to survival as the farmer. Does Willie Nelson raise money for them? (Well he does own a bio-diesel company…)
The big chem companies that make the fertilizer ... the guys that pave the road that trucks use to drive from farm to market ... And where would farm implements be without steel? So steel-makers in my book are every bit as holy as any farmer. (And who supplies THEM?) You see where I’m going with this? Farming is literally just a job, another neuron in the economic brain to satisfy our needs—respectable for that, but nothing sacred.
Posted by Shaky Barnes on 2006 10 02 at 12:10 AM • permalinkThe best GM plant is a soybean engineered to produce the potion in chocolate that causes you the feel like your “in love”.
The business plan is in already. Marketing easy.
Baci mi.
Posted by The Young Contrarian on 2006 10 02 at 01:22 AM • permalink#38
Meaning that agricultural subsidies to save “family farms” make it possible for domestic farmers to sell their goods cheaper. Which means that agricultural exporters from less developed countries, countries that are pre-industrial, have a harder time selling their naturally cheaper farm goods in western markets.
#41- there’s still a sizeable number of dingbats in this area who’ve still got their hemp knickers (imagine the amount of aloe vera required by them in summer) in a celtic loop over the irradiation plant built at Narangba- it’s been operational for years, and I’ve yet to see any increase in two-headed locals (it’s a bogan area, so deformities are pretty much de rigeur anyway- perhaps it was a cunning plan by the operators, so the venting of cesium would go un-noticed among the population of mutants in the area; Rivian in its cleverness).
Anyway, they still get on community radio and have hissy fits, and occasionally a half-dozen or so dozy unemployed activists with terrible haircuts and worse dispositions sullenly stand around the front of the facility, then get bored and wander off to score some foils of ditchweed from the local VK Commodore-bound entrepreneurs.
We send stull up there to be nuked all the time, and abount all it does is crak bugs and fungus- not even the slightest hint of gigantism, more’s the pity; I’m thinking a voracious form of giant assassin bug would be just peachy for land reclamation in Byron Shire.
But it all sounds good. Of course, in reality the war on technology is like their war on DDT—murderous in effect. Rather than feeding the world, ending blindness in children with GM rice (for example), developing the underdeveloped countries with advanced farming techniques, etc., they stand on their moral high-ground, made high by all the corpses they stand on.
I’ve given up thinking these people are concerned about human life. If they were, they would embrace Capitalism, and science, and technology.
These people understand nothing and fear everything.
#31. Young Contrarian: She was only the jockey’s daughter, but all the horse men knew’er.
Posted by Nilknarf Arbed on 2006 10 02 at 05:10 AM • permalink#25 And just what do you think that meat was?
Posted by JDFlanagan on 2006 10 02 at 09:51 AM • permalink
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...where food comes from…
Restaurants, of course. Bloody hayseeds.