d_rawk

And with Linn Cohen-Cole - The Death of Organic Farming and Fight For Farmers: The New Civil Rights Movement

That's exactly the thing though - it's not so much work as money. Like Jaybone said, HACCP, the insurance requirements of distributors, etc.., none of which are specific to only organic producers. This could quickly become a topic more fit for the politics forum In the US, the costs associated with the NAIS program alone are enough to drive smaller scale producers out of the market. The requirements and fees are designed for the lots and large scale agribusiness. It's a lovely bit of doublespeak for something to be both voluntary and mandatory. Check out my boy Sean's interview with Marti Oakley from April (The Future of our Food)

Oh, you cruel bastard! Yes, of course I do. But it is on the list of 'shit, he's in the hospital again' foods. You're right though, they do F&C well in the UK. The rest of the food blows. (Might help if I liked lamb, but I like it even less than lobster)

I find the idea of veggie gravy horrifying. If I was leaving Mexico, I think my last meal would be seafood. Not a big seafood person generally, but in Mexico it has always been so fresh and tasty. Oh! Breaded red snapper. (Not that I could eat that, because of the 'breaded' bit, but I envy anyone who can. First time I ever tasted fish and thought it was yummy was red snapper in Puerto Viarta. Yeah, yeah. Tourist trap. I know.) If I was leaving Canada, I don't know. If I was leaving Ottawa, yeah, Shwarmas like Dinghy said. If I was leaving Toronto, Falaffels for sure (they get them wrong here) If I was leaving the east coast, mussels and Donairs. Unless it was PEI - then probably Lobster, which I despise, but I'd do it anyways. If I was leaving England or Wales, I'd go hungry and be happy to be leaving.

Brilliant. Nothing against cops, but guys, you know it's true.

Yeah, I've never liked his stuff. I remember thinking about 'Open Mike' that the way that he interacted with his audience was more uncomfortable than entertaining. Bordering on the abusive in fact. I wasn't sure why I'd started thinking about him, but then realized it was because I'd watched a Trailer Park Boys rerun (Ricky: "What the fuck? Julian, it must be the fumes. I'm hallucinating, man! Looks like Bubbles has got wings on his back and he's strangling Mike Bullard!") I was sorta expecting that maybe there had been a scandal or something that explained how he went from being everywhere to not being visible at all. You know who could probably pull off a Canadian talk show? Brent Butt.

Pretty sure I'm the only person in the world wondering about such a thing. Actually, just checked his site and it says "Currently Mike is in development of a game show for divorced people called "Alimoney" and signed a co-production deal for the show with Just for Laughs in conjunction with Jack Ruby Productions." That doesn't sound very promising. Sorry dude.

I feel like an absolute ass asking for a 'recipe' for crockpot food ('umm, dude, you put the ribs in the crockpot and you turn it on'), but recipe please. And beef or pork?

Who, incidentally, I hear via the rumour mill got all wet and cracked up under the pressure. Damn shame that, if true. He was young, talented, and fucking hot to boot.

I'm super excited about Bryson coming to the Parkdale Market (just a stone's throw away from chez d_rawk). And any meat period would be a welcome sight at that market. I'm surprised that they haven't already been supplying beef to those that signed up! They've been on about it for a long while now, but I was disappointed that they could only source ground meat and no cuts

Kimchi, field greens, a mild herb-infused goat cheese, mustard, turkey breast on a 'Glutino' gluten-free cracker. The fucking bomb.

Yeah. It is very good.

I can smell the 2012 presidential thrust from here. No rest for the wicked.

If it exists, gimme c) gimme c) gimme c)!! (And give Dinghy d), 'cause he deserves it but also because it would be funny to see someone shit money)

Class.

Do we have heat? I can never tell when you are calling me out because you seem to dance around it. If we have heat, let's have it out.

Whether folks with adult ADD are going to find their reprieve with medication is a whole can of worms itself, I guess. Cutting out the additives (*all* of them), getting rid of the PUFAs (poly-unsaturated fatty acids .. except maybe fish oil), getting to the bottom of food sensitives and/or allergies, dealing with mineral deficiencies, etc.. seem a better strategy with more payoff. But that said, know the messenger - it's a bit rich for me to be giving health advice I remember sitting and listening to a seminar with a doctor who had spent his practice dealing with addiction issues. He insisted that while certainly not all, many of the 'intractable' addiction cases were yearning for God. I found this very unpalatable. I despise the warm, fuzzy, ambiguous, fluffiness of the 'higher power' bit of 12 step programs, and figured he was just on about that. It works to a degree (although the success of AA and other 12 steps are overstated, in my opinion) but it offends me. But he was talking about something a little different - about going toe to toe, about kicking God's ass and letting your ass get kicked back. My own mind tends towards the more mechanical: Alcohol? Check yeast and fungus and other reasons for carbohydrate dependency. Lithium and other trace minerals. Nutritional analysis, both blood and hair. Alcoholics are almost all hypoglycemic - how's the chromium? What's the fasting blood sugar? Ok, and what's the level after meals? Niacin, niacin, niacin. Inflammation. Knock it back, that's a killer that most people are self-medicating. Where the hell does God factor into such a mechanical universe? But I get stuck in these practical, mechanical, 'plumbing' sorts of things unless I very consciously redirect my attention. If I really look for it, that majestic expansiveness is right there between the spaces. Between the details. Maybe ahead of his time. Ahead of mine, anyways. I'm only half kidding when I suggest that the reason I got so skinny was because I couldn't shut off my brain. It burns a lot of glucose to churn and churn and churn like that on every detail about everything all of the time. This got much better when I figured out the physiological underpinnings and finally got some sleep, but you're absolutely right - smoking helps in that it gives you a regular reminder to just. stop. for a second. It also gives you a nice little blood sugar boost. But there are better ways to manage both. Around these parts, I think I've developed a reputation as a know-it-all asshole who has an opinion on everything. Really, I'm just a guy who couldn't sleep for days because he couldn't stop thinking about some topic that he read on some message board.

Saslove's is good stuff! And they have a big bin of bones which, while probably meant to bring home to the dogs, make for good beef stock fodder. The organic farmer's market is a great resource too.

Thanks for the (re-uploaded) link timouse. The problem I have always had with that book is that I do find it very motivating, and it is doing the trick, I'm convinced -- then the chapter on the health effects of smoking comes. And then I start smoking again. This goes back to what Velvet was talking about regarding health warnings on cigarette packs probably making people smoke more. My personal psychodrama involves being very unwell for a very long time and finding solace in the illusion (and it is that) of control over my own life extended to me via vices, instead of just being batted around by forces outside of my influence. I am quite happy to not smoke until I feel sick, or until someone reminds me that I should be sick. There's a certain amount of "I'll show you, you miserable fucking universe" to it. Of course, the better way to give the finger to the universe is to actually be well despite the odds. Maybe I'll just skip those chapters this time.

For sure, for sure! I think that we are going to get there and the people growing food deserve all sorts of respect. Lord knows that most of us have no idea how to feed ourselves anymore. I'd love to talk to you about what it is that you produce, where you suspect the process could be improved, etc.. Maybe P/Ms?

Fuck that. Fuck corn. I want my chickens eating bugs. Commercial chicken tastes like nothing. Talk to someone 50+ in age .. they'll tell you, chicken used to have an actual flavour. But I'm being playful and I think we are on the same page here. This is bullshit, all of it. We need to withdraw our dollars from the health depleting barbarity of the feed-lot system, those of us who haven't already. This isn't the old Soviet Union. They can't say 'Eat Salmon' and you eat the Salmon. They can't say 'Eat Chicken' and you eat the chicken. Dollars are votes. Stop voting.

While I'm running my mouth, let me say this: It is possible to produce beef on a commercial scale that isn't dangerous. But pasture demands a certain type of restriction of scale just by virtue of land mass being the finite resource that it is. The big players want a way out of this, but their way out is our cost. There are many small to medium scale ranches that produce high quality beef from pasture-fed, grazing, healthy heads. And yeah, it's more expensive then what you get at the closest grocery store. It should be. Lives - healthy, happy, non-infected lives - aren't cheap. Taking one life to sustain another is huge. That is a big deal. I'm not making a moral argument. I've long made peace with the fact that I will take another life to sustain my own. And unless you are Meggo, yes, yours too. I am saying that the process of that is awe inspiring. And I am saying that I don't suspect that I can disease something, consume it, and expect to be well by eating diseased flesh. What it takes to run a commercially viable beef supply is a shift from the mental model of increasing profit by increasing scale to increasing profit by maintaining scale and reducing cost. And that is just step one. But the latter, while tried and true, is not in vogue. And it won't be in vogue until we are tripping all over each other's puke and dead bodies.the top> Deep breath. Thanks for indulging me.

Not as a rule, no. While most US beef has opportunity to eat some grass somewhere along the way, feed lot cattle do not graze (logistically they can not) and are primarily on corn and other grains to the exclusion of grasses during the fattening period (the 3 - 4 months prior to slaughter). You can't really keep a cow on grains much longer than that as they will simply up and die on you. But you can get away with a few months. How we thought we could continually do this to a ruminate animal without consequence to ourselves, or why we'd want to consume something we'd made terminally ill is one of those peculiar bits of human lunacy that only make sense through the lens of tunnel visioned private economics. The relative cheapness and abundance of subsidized corn strikes again. IMO.

I saw a fetus, but now that you've said that, I see Bob Hope. It's like staring at clouds, I guess.

Whoa. Welcome back.