Food, water, agriculture

A juxtaposition of things.

First, the highly irksome. Two news articles about terrible trends in eating and drinking among the privileged European-centric upper classes:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/11/why-we-fell-for-clean-eating
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/dining/raw-water-unfiltered.html

The first story does a much better job of talking about the challenges when a movement contains small grains of truth. (ack, I mentioned grains, oh noes, puns; I love grains, ha ha) In the second story - I am a bit disappointed to see a home water acquisition system lumped in with some of the other loony water-acquisition methods. While the home water system would be overkill in most of the US, I could see it being invaluable in other places where clean water is much, much harder to come by. There are, again, small grains of truth to some of the issues with municipal water (NOT fluoride, I would note). But I am a longtime believer in supporting the municipal water supply, as a social justice issue and an environmental issue. The vast majority of us don't have the privilege of sneaking around at night to go get water illegally from primo sources - the privilege of time, the privilege of white maleness and money to avoid getting caught and punished. The water might be clean or whatever, but in my mind it is deeply sullied by the resources that must be used to obtain it.

Next, two stories about agriculture and climate change:
http://www.biographic.com/posts/sto/better-beef
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-agriculture-climatechange-anal/can-agriculture-and-the-climate-fix-their-unhappy-marriage-in-2018-idUSKBN1EM0UA

For the first link: I am pleased to see the BioGraphic article highlighting shifts in beef production in Brazil. We need more stories from outside the United States, because government policy and enforcement play roles in what happens. So does local culture. Can anything be learned from the situation in Brazil and applied to what's still happening in Indonesia for palm oil production? I hope something can be done, before Indonesian forests and their diversity disappear.

For the second: I hope there's recognition that this isn't a situation that can be fixed via technological means alone, yeesh. Maybe that angle is just a product of where the article is published.

Pack All the Things

Every time I get ready to move, I'm reminded of this list I made, about the stages of packing (towards the end of the post).

I'm somewhere between stages 1, 2, and 5 right now.

Edit: fixed hyperlink (*foreheadslap* and thanks to shalpacafarm for pointing out the mistake!)

Posty Mc-What? [lemons, more moving miscellanea]

When my brother and family stopped by, shortly before Christmas, my sister-in-law gave us a pile of Meyer lemons off their tree. The tree is only about shoulder-height, but she said it was completely bent over under the weight of all the lemons. The day before they visited, I had caved and bought 8 tiny, lime-sized organic Meyer lemons from the grocery store, so I used the storebought ones for curd right away.

That curd was gone as of yesterday's breakfast *licks spatula*. So this morning, I got up and zested and juiced all of the real ones, made another double batch of curd, and froze a bunch of small jars of juice+zest. Half of the curd also went into the freezer, and the other half is likely to disappear in short order. Ahem. I also made a lemon pound cake this afternoon. I have this feeling the pound cake isn't going to last long enough for the full lemon flavor to develop. Oops. It also isn't quite what I wanted in a lemon cake, as it turns out. I want something with good, tender crumb to it. I guess I will just have to keep trying. Housemates are sad about this.

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Aside from the cooking, I continued to work on packing, as noted in the previous post. My main goal for the day was taking apart the futon bed, so I spent a bunch of time organizing and boxing up everything in my drawer under the bed (mostly craft supplies). Over the course of things, I went to box up my collection of seeds, and discovered that the saffron bulbs had disagreed with my decision to store them for the year:



When I went to stick them in a pot, I couldn't find quite what I was looking for, rummaging through the plant pots. So then I learned the hard way that the closest gardening shop was closed for New Year's Eve. Whoops. Back home again, I decided to go ahead and try using my Dremel to add drainage holes to two small plant pots that were around the correct size but completely lacking in drainage. A diamond-tipped Dremel bit and plenty of water to lubricate things made for a surprisingly quick bit of work. The hopeful saffron bulbs went into one pot, and an orchid that tried to escape its previous home got transplanted into the other.

But by the way - if there are any gardeners in your life, you should realize that it's highly unusual for a gardener to have a surplus of nice plant pots, especially larger ones. They're more expensive than you might think, and they tend to break or get given away. So you can very reliably get away with giving that gardener big, beautiful plant pots for holidays and birthdays. I think it was my mom who first made me aware of this, and again that's part of why it's unfortunate that I won't be doing ceramics in the near future. Ah well.

After that diversion, I got back to work on the bed, which, all told, involved a whole lot of vacuuming. We don't have any carpeting on the floor here, so the dust and dander sure accumulate. The disassembly itself wasn't too bad, once I found an allen wrench of the correct size. Most of the bed is held together through some beautiful joinery; the only bolts were to hold a center beam in place.

Now it feels like there won't be quite so much last-minute panic when the time comes to load up the moving truck. Even as the pile has grown in the workshop (staging area for packed boxes), there are still a lot of things left. So, just mild panic instead of frantic.



I also decided to re-aggregate all the spices, which lived in four different places in this house (shelf in the bedroom, pantry shelf, spice shelf, and baking shelf). That might give you an idea of what it is like to fit a whole lot of busy lives into a snug space.