Lift Up Your Hearts!

Endangered Eating: America's Vanishing Foods by Sarah Lohman (W. W. Norton & Company, 2023)

The first Sarah Lohman book I read was her excellent, if overly-political, Eight Flavors. After waiting nearly two more years for a good price on Endangered Eating, which is the book of hers that had first caught my eye, I gave up and bought it. It probably was not worth the $10 I spent because it is now available in our library; that's what I get for being impatient. But it's not a bad thing to support people who can write well.

The negatives that I saw in Eight Flavors are in Endangered Eating to an even greater extent, so let's get them over with first.

• No matter how many times Lohman emphasizes the point, native Americans and black Africans did not live in perfect, idyllic societies before meeting white people. And all the problems of the world cannot be attributed to white, European, heterosexual, Christian men. These points were pounded into my head in school starting in fourth grade, and reinforced in some of my favorite childhood books. I bought into the concept, even to the extent of determining that I would have to become a Catholic, that being the only way I could opt out of the hated WASP designation. (I didn't, having discovered other alternatives to Catholicism as I grew older, but that's how strongly I felt.) I'm done with that now, and have no patience with those who push that attitude. Foremost, it is patently false; secondarily I refuse to let my own history, heritage, and culture be the only one it's not acceptible to celebrate and be proud of.
• Nor does her ranting change the fact that capitalism is the economic system most likely to allow liberty and prosperity to thrive, and to be spread most fairly amongst the population.
• In Lohmans' writing, the inconsistency of racial/ethnic capitalization drives me crazy. A person is Black, or Indigenous -- but white, or brown. It makes no sense and happens too often to be an unintentional slur.
• As I've said repeatedly, there's no point in pushing people to accept language that for many of us has always been considered off-limits, offensive, and vile, while at the same time putting formerly-acceptible words on the naughty list. I would say that goes tenfold for formal writing, e.g. books. I find the language in this book unacceptable, even as spoken language, but especially in a book that wants me to take it seriously.
• And what's this new averson to the word "slave"? Everywhere she could use that simple and heretofore useful word, she replaces it with "enslaved," as if making the word into two syllables somehow makes the concept less horrible. (I can't read "enslaved" without thinking of Robert Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, and Thorby Baslim's frustrations trying to talk with those who don't understand the condition of slavery. When his grandfather insists on referring to Thorby's former condition by a more acceptible name, Thorby retorts, I was sold and I was a slave!)

I guess I should have been warned about the political sermonizing; not only from my experience with Eight Flavors but also from this description in the introduction.

He looked confused when he spotted me—a tattooed, blue-haired young woman—trudging up his driveway.

Politics I can generally ignore if the content is good, but I was also disappointed in that. Not that the stories weren't fascinating, but from reading the previews I had expected something different. I have for years been greatly concerned over the obvious fact that our crops, our livestock, and our food supply in general are being bred/engineered primarily for something other than nutrition and flavor. For convenience, for pest resistence, for super-production, for robustness during transport, for long shelf-life—but taste and healthfulness fall far down on the list. I had hoped that Endangered Eating would address this problem, and although it touches on it, that is not the focus. I was particularly disappointed in the section on apples, the promise of which alone encouraged me to buy the book. As it turns out, however, Lohman is not concerned with the great diminution of apple varieties and taste in general, but only for the production of apple cider—and only the production of alcoholic cider. There's not one mention of the violence that the act of pasteurization does to the flavor of regular cider, nor of the breeding of apples for sweetness, which has resulted in several new varieties all of which taste insipid to me. The wide variety of flavorful, tart apples has completely disappeared, not only from our grocery stores but even from the specialty stores like Whole Foods and Sprouts. At least that's true in Florida—when we travel north in the fall it is not so much for the colorful leaf displays as to be able to taste good apples again.

My own frustrations aside, Endangered Eating is well-written and engaging. You don't have to like Lohman's politics, nor her focus, to appreciate that.

Here is a handful of passages I made note of while enjoying the book:

I admired the efforts of the costumed performers but struggled with the idea of appropriating historical Islamic culture to celebrate the American date industry. 

I will comment no further here on the pressure not to "appropriate" other cultures other than to say that it is as ludicrous as telling a Chinese violinist that she can't play Bach because she isn't German.

As consumers, what we expect from food is consistency. We have an expectation that every package of dates (or craisins, or red seedless grapes, or whatever) we buy from the grocery store will taste the same.

Add that to the above list of what the industry values more than good nutrition and flavor in our food. Having once been privileged to have access to an orchard where the juice they sold varied by what variety of orange was in season (sadly, it was out and turned into a housing development), I can say with authority that the determination to make every glass of orange juice taste the same is an abomination.

In these early plantations, the cane grown was all native Hawaiian varieties. Laborers harvested cane by hand and cut it with a cane knife, a short machete with a hook on the end. Fresh-cut cane was carried to oxcarts and transported to the mill, which was a small machine, about a foot square, mounted outdoors on a pillar. Cane was fed into the side of the mill and passed back and forth through the rollers by two workers, while a third man led a mule or ox in a circle attached to a long wooden arm that powered the rollers’ movement. The juice flowed out a tap in the side and was collected for processing.

I noted this passage because it reminded me of our trip to Brazil in 1978. This process was very like the roadside stands where one could watch the sugar cane go from stalk to juice, and then drink the sweet liquid. The juice was more along the lines of maple sap than syrup: it tasted mostly like water that was somewhat sweet. But by looking at the teeth of the vendors, one could guess that drinking cane juice instead of water (which was common in the cane fields) was generally not a good idea.

By the mid-twentieth century, work at a Hawaiian sugar plantation meant a stable, well-paying job with union protection. But a workplace that respects its workers is too expensive for capitalism; sugar production was moved to countries without unions and worker protections, where the bottom line was as low as possible. Hawaii could not compete with growers in India, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. In those countries, land costs as well as labor costs are lower, and sugar production is often subsidized by the government. American consumers expect a low price on a bag of white cane sugar, and one of the results of this expectation was the end of sugar cultivation in Hawaii.

I won't argue with the evils of choosing cost as the primary value in any industry, but I will note that when a government subsidizes a product, that is hardly free-market capitalism.

Rum is a colonial by-product. While sugarcane is native to the Pacific, Western colonizers brought the technology to process sugar into molasses, and then to process molasses into rum. So, is it appropriate to take kupuna kō [Hawaiian legacy sugarcane] and use it to make a product that came from Hawaii’s colonizers?

...

Before I came to Hawaii, I had loved the idea of preserving a traditional crop through a craft spirit. But now, the idea wasn’t sitting as pleasantly. When white Americans came to Hawaii, they forced Hawaiians to reject their own culture. The missionaries replaced the Hawaiians’ religion, encouraged them to cover their bodies with Western clothes, and prevented them from dancing the hula. The plantation owners replaced diverse Hawaiian agriculture with monocrops and eventually replaced the Hawaiian queen with their own government. But colonizers will allow a part of a culture to exist as long as it is prettily packaged for white, Western consumption. Docile, smiling hula girls are acceptable; so is Hawaiian music when it’s sung by white Americans like Elvis Presley or Annette Funicello. The distilleries on Hawaii use the images and stories of Hawaiian culture in their branding. How long before single-varietal-pressed legacy sugarcane juice appears in organic markets next to the coconut water? And when it does, will it be a blessing that preserves kupuna kō, or cultural appropriation that steals identity—and profits—from native Hawaiians?

...

Hawaiian legacy sugarcane collections...mean that an endangered plant is being preserved. But many Hawaiians feel kupuna kō should never be commercialized. There are already Hawaiians out there individually preserving their traditions in a rapidly changing world, as their ancestors did before them. An outsider like me can’t know how many stands of kupuna kō grow in backyards and how many varieties have continued to grow for generations, passed down in the same family. There’s a part of me that feels that these backyard stands of kupuna kō, harvested and sliced into chunks for thirsty kids, are the best kind of preservation. Not everything is for everyone, and Hawaiians have had enough taken from them.

The destruction of the native plants left the marsh vulnerable to salt-tolerant invasive plants, in particular, the ecosystem-destroying trio of purple loosestrife, narrow-leaf cattail, and, worst of all, phragmites.

Invasive phragmites, a genus of reed grasses, arrived on the East Coast in the early nineteenth century, probably from Europe. Phragmites spread rapidly with the construction of the highway system in the 1950s, its seeds latching on to cars and semi trucks and spreading to susceptible areas like the depleted Mentor Marsh. If you’ve ever driven on a highway, you’ve seen phragmites; one of its favorite habitats is the polluted ditches alongside roadways. It’s very recognizable by its feather-duster-like seed heads. It’s often over 14 feet tall and grows in dense patches, choking out native vegetation, creating a monoculture and biological desert.

Lohman is talking here about the destruction of wild rice habitats in the northern Midwest, but the destructive power of phragmites, and the difficulty of eradicating it, is well known to those of us on the coast of Long Island Sound.

Today, there are fewer than 100 apple varieties grown commercially. ... By the 1920s, apple growers focused on only a few varieties of “culinary apples” designed to succeed in grocery stores.

Many of the earliest Southern cookbooks were written by white women but filled with recipes created by Black cooks. Today, we look at these cookbooks through the lens of stolen, usually uncredited, culture.

I asked David how his quest to locate lost Southern culinary plants began. He traced the movement back to chef Alice Waters in the 1970s. She had inspired chefs to seek out produce that tasted like something, often heirloom varieties. “Grains and vegetables created since the early twentieth century were not sensory tested,” David explained. “Taste was always a secondary consideration to productivity, early maturation, processability, disease resistance, pest resistance. There was this call, where are the ingredients?” He said Waters insisted on “asserting the primacy of taste over other qualities in a plant.”

The Carolina Runner peanut’s small size made it harder to harvest by hand than newer cultivars, and the new machinery was designed for larger nuts. The Carolina Runner may have been the best-tasting, but out of convenience it was rapidly replaced by other varieties. The last Carolina Runner went into the ground in the late 1920s, and by the 1950s, it was thought to be not just functionally extinct but extinct extinct. Gone.... Then, nearly a century later, when David Shields was able to acquire twenty of the rarest peanuts on the planet, he sent them to Clemson University’s Coastal Research and Education Center outside of Charleston.

A rare success in recovering lost foods! This reminds me of the people who saved much local and ethnic music by traveling from small community to small community and making a record of the people's music. Mass media and massive agriculture are doing their best to erase local cultures and foods, but backwater villages and the backyards of old houses may still have much to offer.

The Kindle version of The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran is currently on sale a for $1.99. If you care to understand more about what is going on in the Middle East at the moment, this is excellent background and too good to pass up. It's also a page-turning story.

I wrote the following back in 2017, after my first reading of the book. Nine years later, I stand by my first impressions.

• The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Jimmy Carter is undoubtedly an amazing, wonderful person; as my husband is fond of saying, the best ex-president we've ever had. But in the very moments he was winning his Nobel Peace Prize by brokering the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty at Camp David, he—or his administration—was consigning Iran to the hell that endures today. Thanks to a complete failure of American (and British) Intelligence and a massive disinformation campaign with just enough truth to keep it from being dismissed out of hand, President Carter was led to believe that the Shah of Iran was a monster; America's ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, likened the Shah to Adolf Eichmann, and called Ruhollah Khomeini a saint. Perhaps the Iranian Revolution and its concomitant bloodbath would have happened without American incompetence, disingenuousness, and backstabbing, but that there is much innocent blood on the hands of our kindly, Peace Prize-winning President, I have no doubt.
• There's a reason spycraft is called intelligence. Lack of good information leads to stupid decisions.
• Bad advisers will bring down a good leader, be he President or Shah, and good advisers can't save him if he won't listen.
• The Bible is 100% correct when it likens people to sheep. Whether by politicians, agitators, con men, charismatic religious leaders (note: small "c"), pop stars, advertisers, or our own peers, we are pathetically easy to manipulate.
• When the Shah imposed Western Culture on his people, it came with Western decadence and Hollywood immorality thrown in. Even salt-of-the-earth, ordinary people can only take so much of having their lives, their values, and their family integrity threatened. "It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations."
• The Shah's education programs sent students by droves to Europe and the United States for university educations. This was an unprecedented opportunity, but the timing could have been better. The 1960's and 70's were not sane years on college campuses, as I can personally testify. Instead of being grateful for their educations, the students came home radicalized against their government. In this case, "the Man," the enemy, was the Shah and all that he stood for. Anxious to identify with the masses and their deprivations, these sons and daughters of privilege exchanged one set of drag for another, donning austere Muslim garb as a way of distancing themselves from everything their parents held dear. Few had ever opened a Quran, and fewer still had an in-depth knowledge of Shia theology, but in their rebellious naïveté they rushed to embrace the latest opiate.
• "Suicide bomber" was not a household word 40 years ago, but the concept was there. "If you give the order we are prepared to attach bombs to ourselves and throw ourselves at the Shah's car to blow him up," one local merchant told the Ayatollah.
• People with greatly differing viewpoints can find much in The Fall of Heaven to support their own ideas and fears. Those who see sinister influences behind the senseless, deliberate destruction during natural disasters and protest demonstrations will find justification for their suspicions in the brutal, calculated provocations perpetrated by Iran's revolutionaries. Others will find striking parallels between the rise of Radical Islam in Iran and the rise of Donald Trump in the United States. Those who have no use for deeply-held religious beliefs will find confirmation of their own belief that the only acceptable religions are those that their followers don't take too seriously. Some will look at the Iranian Revolution and see a prime example of how conciliation and compromise with evil will only end in disaster.
• I've read the Qur'an and know more about Islam than many Americans (credit not my knowledge but general American ignorance), but in this book I discovered something that surprised me. Two practices that I assumed marked every serious Muslim are five-times-a-day prayer, and fasting during Ramadan. Yet the Shah, an obviously devout man who "ruled in the fear of God" and always carried a Qur'an with him, did neither. Is this a legitimate and common variation, or the Muslim equivalent of the Christian who displays a Bible prominently on his coffee table but rarely cracks it open and prefers to sleep in on Sundays? Clearly, I have more to learn.
• Many of Iran's problems in the years before the Revolution seem remarkably similar to those of someone who wins a million dollar lottery. Government largess fueled by massive oil revenues thrust people suddenly into a new and unfamiliar world of wealth, in the end leaving them, not grateful, but resentful when falling oil prices dried up the flow of money.
• I totally understand why one country would want to influence another country that it views as strategically important; that may even be considered its duty to its own citizens. But for goodness' sake, if you're going to interfere, wait until you have a good knowledge of the country, its history, its customs, and its people. Our ignorance of Iran in general and the political and social situation in particular was appalling. We bought the carefully-orchestrated public façade of Khomeini hook, line, and sinker; an English translation of his inflammatory writings and blueprint for the establishment of an Islamic republic in Iran came nine years too late, after it was all over. In our ignorance we conferred political legitimacy on the radical Khomeini while ignoring the true leaders of the majority of Iran's Shiite Muslims. The American ambassador and his counterpart from the United Kingdom, on whom the Shah relied heavily in the last days, confidently gave him ignorant and disastrous advice. Not to mention that it was our manipulation of the oil market (with the aid of Saudi Arabia) that brought on the fall in oil prices that precipitated Iran's economic crisis.
• The bumbling actions of the United States, however, look positively beatific compared with the works of men like Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, and Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization, who funded, trained, and armed the revolutionaries.
• The Fall of Heaven was recommended to me by two Iranian friends who personally suffered through, and escaped from, those terrible times.

The following excerpt from the Introduction to The Fall of Heaven matters much to me because at the time of the Revolution I had heard and absorbed the accusations against the Shah, and believed Khomeini was acting out of a legitimate complaint with regard to the immorality of some aspects of American culture. See the above comment about sheep....

The controversy and confusion that surrounded the Shah's human rights record overshadowed his many real accomplishments in the fields of women's rights, literacy, health care, education, and modernization. Help in sifting through the accusations and allegations came from a most unexpected quarter, however, when the Islamic Republic announced plans to identify and memorialize each victim of Pahlavi "oppression." But lead researcher Emad al-Din Baghi, a former seminary student, was shocked to discover that he could not match the victims' names to the official numbers: instead of 100,000 deaths Baghi could confirm only 3,164. Even that number was inflated because it included all 2,781 fatalities from the 1978-1979 revolution. The actual death toll was lowered to 383, of whom 197 were guerrilla fighters and terrorists killed in skirmishes with the security forces. That meant 183 political prisoners and dissidents were executed, committed suicide in detention, or died under torture. [No, I can't make those numbers add up right either, but it's close enough.] The number of political prisoners was also sharply reduced, from 100,000 to about 3,200. Baghi's revised numbers were troublesome for another reason: they matched the estimates already provided by the Shah to the International Committee of the Red Cross before the revolution. "The problem here was not only the realization that the Pahlavi state might have been telling the truth but the fact that the Islamic Republic had justified many of its excesses on the popular sacrifices already made," observed historian Ali Ansari. ... Baghi's report exposed Khomeini's hypocrisy and threatened to undermine the vey moral basis of the revolution. Similarly, the corruption charges against the Pahlavis collapsed when the Shah's fortune was revealed to be well under $100 million at the time of his departure [instead of the rumored $25-$50 billion], hardly insignificant but modest by the standards of other royal families and remarkably low by the estimates that appeared in the Western press.

Baghi's research was suppressed inside Iran but opened up new vistas of study for scholars elsewhere. As a former researcher at Human Rights Watch, the U.S. organization that monitors human rights around the world, I was curious to learn how the higher numbers became common currency in the first place. I interviewed Iranian revolutionaries and foreign correspondents whose reporting had helped cement the popular image of the Shah as a blood-soaked tyrant. I visited the Center for Documentation on the Revolution in Tehran, the state organization that compiles information on human rights during the Pahlavi era, and was assured by current and former staff that Baghi's reduced numbers were indeed credible. If anything, my own research suggested that Baghi's estimates might still be too high. For example, during the revolution the Shah was blamed for a cinema fire that killed 430 people in the southern city of Abadan; we now know that this heinous crime was carried out by a pro-Khomeini terror cell. Dozens of government officials and soldiers had been killed during the revolution, but their deaths were also attributed to the Shah and not to Khomeini. The lower numbers do not excuse or diminish the suffering of political prisoners jailed or tortured in Iran in the 1970s. They do, however, show the extent to which the historical record was manipulated by Khomeini and his partisans to criminalize the Shah and justify their own excesses and abuses.

In 1989, my father participated in an Elderhostel at the University of Wyoming. The course covered a number of topics, including the geology of the state. At the time, Wyoming was America's top coal-producing state—and a quick check shows me that is still true. The following excerpt from Dad's story of his trip illustrates one reason why our bicameral federal Legislative Branch represents the people both in proportion to population and as individual and equal states. Sometimes I think our Senators forget these days that they are not mini-presidents trying to rule the country as a whole, but are in power to represent the interests of their own states. This is why each state, of large or small population, has equal representation in the Senate.

It is also a stark example of how powerful special interest groups can rule and overrule reason and common sense when laws are made on the national level.

[University of Wyoming geology professor] Jim McClurg is a specialist on the subject of coal, and while I do not doubt that the interest is real, it is also politically expedient, I am sure. Wyoming is the leading state in the production of coal and this is very important to the state. From Professor McClurg's remarks, it would appear that most of the national coal legislation is written with the Eastern coal producers in mind. Western coal is low in heating value relative to the Eastern coal, but it contains about one tenth the sulfur. Clean air legislation requires that the sulfur content of coal be reduced by fifty percent before it is burned. This is easily accomplished for the Eastern coals but is very difficult for the Western coals which are much cleaner originally than the "cleaned-up" Eastern coals.

Even the laws specifying how the land is to be reclaimed are slanted toward Eastern mining. We saw some reclaimed land which had, in accordance with the laws, small piles of rocks over the area for the benefit of game. So here they were, even though the land originally had no rocks on it at all. In addition, the laws had originally specified that the reclaimed land had to be seeded with a specific type of grass that will not grow in Wyoming.

Today I think primarily of the stranglehold Big Agriculture has on our food regulations, and the devastation the laws impose on small farms. And of the way our covid-era regulations favored large chain stores while driving small businesses to bankruptcy. I'm happy that national attention is finally being directed to the problem, at least in agriculture—but the Behemoth is powerful. Will it be a case of too little, too late?

Nearly 10 years after I first read and reviewed The Fall of Heaven—a book recommended to me by two Iranian friends who suffered through, and escaped from, the Iranian Revolution of 1978/79—I think it may be time to read it again.

It's a page-turner of a book, and now much more personal, since in the interim our Persian friends have become family. If you want incentive to learn more about the complex history behind the headlines, I recommend acquiring Persian relatives.  Failing that, The Fall of Heaven is a good place to start.

My father did have a way with words.  If you're feeling a bit cynical about the state of the world, you might appreciate his thoughts on politics, from a September 1988 letter:

So far the presidential campaign speeches don't seem to have done much to answer what I consider to be some very important questions. They each keep telling me that to vote for their opponent would be a disaster. Perhaps they are both right.

I'm not feeling cynical at the moment, though I've been known to visit that territory on occasion.  I am, however, tired.  Tired of rudeness.  Tired of ignorance.  Tired of bitterness, hatred and violence.  Most of all, I'm tired of people and institutions who stoke the fires that destroy rather than provide warmth and light.

But Dad can still make me laugh!

I don't usually pay attention when Hollywood celebrities preach about issues unrelated to their own professions, and at my age, I've finally learned to take even the confident pronouncements of experts with a grain of salt. But as an old Star Trek fan, when I heard that Mr. Spock (aka Leonard Nimoy) was narrating a special on the climate crisis, I had to watch. It's 22 minutes long and worth seeing in its entirety.

If you're not frightened or angry, you may at least be amused.

The year was 1978. We had recently graduated from college, gotten married, and begun our careers. The year before, we had moved into our first house; the following year we would welcome our firstborn child. Life was good.

Little did we know that doom was on our doorstep.

As I wrote in Let the Worms Decide, I decided to do my own experiment on what our composting worms think of junk food.

I began the experiment with the worms "hungry"; I had let the available food dwindle 'way down in hopes of increasing their willingness to accept my offerings. I placed a clean paper towel on top of the moisture mat for greater visibility for the camera; normally their food goes under the mat, but I knew the clever little creatures would find it. From left to right, top to bottom: chocolate chips (60% cacao), a Starburst candy, two gummy bears, two Hallowe'en-sized Twizzlers (strawberry), an Airheads candy, brown rice, a piece of paper towel soaked with local, raw honey, some arugula, and a banana skin.

Four days later, the chocolate chips had apparently begun to mold, and the Starburst was completely covered in it. The other candy had softened and faded, but was untouched. The rice was very popular, but it's hard to tell what they thought of the honey. The arugula showed a small amount of interest, and there was some activity at one end of the banana skin.

After seven days I took pity on the worms and ended the experiment so I could give them a larger quantity of food I know they like. As you can see, there was a lot more worm activity. The rice was completely gone, and there had obviously been a lot of action around the arugula and the end of the banana (note all the worm castings). The chocolate showed a reasonable amount of interest and there were a number of worms around the candy—but they may have been munching on the paper towel. The Airhead seems to have been totally ignored.

It's hard to draw any firm conclusions. The worms can't really eat many items until the bugs and microfauna have done their pre-processing work, and some foods may take longer than others. I don't know why the arugula went so slowly; usually greens go quickly, but perhaps arugula is too "spicy" for the worms—I know they don't like the strong-flavored lemon balm.

I would have thought that the candy, being mostly sugar, should have been easy for them to handle. But I was wrong. According to my Brave browser's AI,

Red wiggler worms should not eat candy. Candy is high in sugar and often contains oils, artificial ingredients, and other additives that can harm the worms or disrupt the balance of the composting environment. While red wigglers can consume a variety of organic matter, including fruits and vegetables, they should not be fed processed foods like candy, cookies, or cake, as these can lead to poor bin conditions and attract pests.

So there you go. Ultra-processed foods are bad for worms, and probably for people, too. Then again, chocolate is bad for dogs, they say, and good for people (in limited quantities), so make your own decisions.

"Let the Worms Decide" is an Epoch Times article that caught my eye first because of the author, Joel Salatin, and secondly because I knew what kind of worms he was talking about. We've been vermicomposting since 2009, and I know a little bit about what our worms will and will not eat.

Salatin begins with a story from a middle school program he visited in California, where students worked on a small farm half a day each week.

They had a worm box about 8 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet. Imagine an oversized coffin. If you want to see children get excited, show them a worm box. It’s mesmerizing with all the slithering, slimy worm activity....

One week, the farmers assigned homework: “Bring food on Monday.” The students dutifully brought some food: Twizzlers, Gummy Bears, Froot Loops—you get the idea. They placed their “food” in one end of the worm box. The farm ladies put different items in the other end: an apple, a pork chop, and a glob of yogurt, among other things. The following week, the students, eager to see what had transpired, ran to the box and opened it.

They pulled out their Gummy Bears, Twizzlers, and Froot Loops—untouched. When they tried to find the food items that the farmers had placed at the other end, all that food was gone. The day’s lesson was obvious: “Why would you want to eat something worms won’t even eat?” I'll bet a lot of young people made some different eating decisions that day.

Tongue not totally in cheek, Salatin proposes turning our expensive—and too-easily corrupted—food safety testing over to composting worms.

I’ve known and worked with many worm farmers over the years who explain how sensitive their “livestock” is to unacceptable items placed in their boxes. If they like the substance, they devour it readily. If they don’t, they move away and give it a wide berth.

If worms are that decisive and timely to determine healthy versus unhealthy things in their environment, why not ask them to share their preferences with all of us?

Worms don’t vote, don’t listen to lobbyists, don’t invest in Wall Street, or watch ads. They are about as objective a researcher as you could ever want. Goodness, they aren’t even swayed by money.

Here’s my idea: why not get a small plot of land—perhaps 5 acres—and set up 100 worm boxes? Everything Americans apply to the soil or put in our mouths would undergo the worm test for a week. What the worms ate would get a green light. What the worms didn’t eat would get a red light.

We could hire a couple of college students to run the program. If glyphosate is really innocuous, let’s see if the worms like it. If Coca-Cola is really nutritious, let’s see if the worms like it. Pour it in and see if they want to come to that area, or if they avoid it like the plague. If Red Dye 29 is a wonderful food additive, or monosodium glutamate (MSG), put them in the worm bed and let the worms vote.

Based on my experience, I see a few problems with this scenario, as I'm sure Salatin himself does. Worms will eat (and detoxify) some really nasty things, given enough time for their cohabiting microorganisms to break them down. The farmers who sold us our system have huge vermiculture setups in which they say the worms will devour battery acid in small quantities. Just because you can convince a worm to eat something, that doesn't mean I want it in my food. But the one-week test would probably take care of that problem. Maybe the worms will eventually eat something, if they get hungry enough, but they definitely have their favorites and, like a small child at the dinner table, will go for the good stuff first.

That same small child may reject his beets despite their certified goodness, and my worms will reject things I find great. Like homegrown, organic lemon balm. Or citrus peels. (Granted, I never tried them on the chocolate-covered variety.) Some worms don't like broccoli; fortunately, ours eat it right up. So it's not a foolproof system.

That said, Salatin makes an important point: If something we're doing causes natural systems to thrive, that could be a clue that we may be going in the right direction. On the other hand, a failing system is a red warning light that should give us pause.

Stay tuned for the results of my own experiment.  We have leftover Hallowe'en candy, including the above-mentioned Twizzlers.  I plan to make an offering to the worms and see what they have to say.

After spotting this image on Facebook, I tracked it down to (I think) the creator:  "Catturd" on X, made using Grok.  The caption reads,

Just spotted on I-95 headed to Florida.

As a Floridian who is grieving for the people of New York City, even the ones who voted for Mamdani, and now more than ever worried for our friend the NYC detective, I can't pass this up.

I do, however, agree with the X poster who pointed out that it would have been a much shorter trip to go to the state that has been named the #1 freest state in America.  (Florida was ranked #2.)  Maybe Lady Liberty is also tired of cold weather.

Ahhhhh.  My mind and body are once again aligned with Nature.

When was the last time you were threatened by a gang of thugs wielding spiralizers? Apparently that is a danger in the United Kingdom. Either that, or the chefs' union is lobbying hard to keep teens from trying to break into their business. Or possibly Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber have more power than I thought.

This story, posted by a woman in the UK, popped up on Facebook, and I quickly copied the text. I regret not catching the image, too, as that would have shown how small, unpowered, and insignificant the device in question is. But you'll get the idea.

I know many things are going nuts in the UK, though I don't know anyone personally who can vouch for them. But the following story, if it is true—and at least it has the ring of truth and not clickbait—shows that at least in one area they are even crazier than America, which is saying a lot.

What I want to know is… When did the world go completely mad? Did I miss it?

Let me explain…

Yesterday, I was shopping in a well-known store with a red and white logo With my 10-year-old son.

Among the impulse purchases were a red nose day Tshirt for my son, a gift for the teacher and this lovely spiralizer/vegetable grater for me.

My helpful son unloaded the items onto the checkout desk while I removed my purse from my handbag, at which point the young lady on the desk said “I’m sorry, I can’t sell you that.”

She proceeded to explain that as the spiralizer was not to be sold to anyone under 18 and my son was the one who placed it on the counter, it was deemed that the vegetable cutting device was for him.

Bewildered, I said ”but it’s a spiralizer, and quite obviously it’s for me.”

She refused the sale.

I asked if I could purchase it separately.

She refused the sale.

I asked if I could speak to the manager and they could make allowances for such an obvious fault with the rules.

The manager refused the sale.

I told the manager it would probably be a good idea to put some sort of signage up to let customers know that minors should not be unloading shopping to help their parents.

She obviously misunderstood as she pointed out the signage on the packaging that clearly says “Do not sell to under 18s”.

I left the store confused and a little perturbed and resigned myself to a lifetime of chunky vegetables in my recipes.

You can however all rest safe in the knowledge you will never be faced with a vegetable shredding 10-year-old wearing a Feathers McGraw T-shirt roaming the streets of Cumbria… all thanks to the vigilant staff of the West Cumbrian store.

You can't sell a spiralizer to a 17-year-old in the UK?

I'm assuming a much-more-potentially-dangerous kitchen knife would meet with similar restrictions. At what age are people allowed to cook on that side of the Atlantic? How about to wash dishes, which would undoubtedly include knives.

I don't remember when I started helping in the kitchen, nor when our own children did, but I know that most of our grandchildren started learning how to use kitchen knives at the age of two (well supervised, of course), and by four were reliable helpers in cutting up vegetables for a salad. I know that's early, even for America, but if David Farragut could command a ship as a pre-teen (there is some difference of opinion as to whether he was 11 or 12), surely it is a bit excessive to restrict the use of sharp objects to those 18 and older.

Here are the top people in line to succeed to the office if the President is unable to perform his duties. The list goes on for quite a while, but I'm only listing the top six.

1. Vice President (JD Vance)
2. Speaker of the House (Mike Johnson)
3. President Pro Tempore of the Senate (Chuck Grassley)
4. Secretary of State (Marco Rubio)
5. Secretary of the Treasury (Scott Bessent)
6. Secretary of Defense (Pete Hegseth) (I know it's "Secretary of War," but hey, I'm a Conservative now. I still think of the body of water west of us as the Gulf of Mexico, and sing all the old words to hymns instead of the modern, bowlderized ones.)

Why is this interesting? It makes it obvious what a nightmare Charlie Kirk's memorial service must have been for the Secret Service and others responsible for safety concerns, and why security to get into the stadium was so incredibly strict. Trump, Vance, Johnson, Rubio, and Hegseth were all there. The president, and four of the top six in line of succession. Not to mention a fair number of other political figures, and many others who now know they are at risk of assassination for speaking their opinions out loud.

For some reason this makes me think of a couple who both worked where Porter did when we lived in Boston, back in 2001. They had a standing policy that whenever they flew out of town, they took separate airplanes. That may seem excessive, or make you ask if they never rode in the same automobile—but it is the reason why in September of that year their children were bereaved, but not orphaned.

The full list can be found here. If, like me, you wonder about the order of the Cabinet officers—for example, why the Secretary of Education is considered more likely to be a good president than the Secretary of Homeland Security—it's because the order is determined by when the agencies were created. Or maybe because educators are more experienced with herding cats; I don't know.

I don't know who David Bahnsen is, nor at the moment do I feel the urge to find out. I judge him by his words alone, which through some combination of randomness and algorithm showed up on my Facebook feed. It was when I read the last line that I knew I had to repost them.

Many are writing me to point out the things Charlie [Kirk] said or did that are worthy of critique (sometimes that I actually did critique in real time). And while I can’t really understand why the first 4 days after someone’s assassination are the days in which people feel the need to “set the record straight,” I get that it is not the case that Charlie was perfect or above reproach.

But the more I think about the stuff that drove me bonkers about Charlie, the more I wonder how much was youthful immaturity that was in the process of being worked through. Just in the last 24 months anyone paying attention to Charlie’s public life saw extraordinary maturity and growth. It is so hard for me as a 51-year old to critique the 26-year old version of Charlie without wondering what the 36-year old or 41-year old might have been like. I certainly understand we can’t know that he would evolved into a patron saint of maturity, but I believe the 31-year old was exponentially more mature than the 26-year old, and I believe that trajectory was continuing.

I also believe if my life had ended at 31, basically every single thing I’m proud of or that is worthy of mention would have NEVER HAPPENED. All of my attempts at growth, sanctification, improvement, productivity have come out in the last 20 years, not the 15 years that preceded age 31. It’s sort of humbling.

You don’t have to deify someone or pretend you agree with everything to recognize that:

A - his murder is a reprehensible tragedy,

B - he was a special talent in his work ethic, discipline, and cultural instincts, and

C - he was a work in progress, and thank God none of us peaked at 31.

Before you post about something Charlie said or did at age 27, think about your own life at 27. When I do that, it makes me want to really keep my mouth shut.

Porter had the idea for this image, and I had fun with Copilot on this. It steadfastly refused to make an image of an ostrich with a noose around its neck and a Canadian flag in the background. But it then asked what I was trying to express, and had a number of suggestions for making the point without violating its guidelines. After about 15 minutes of back and forth I was quite pleased with this. Not with the circumstances of course, but with the picture.

Although I read all of the original Harry Potter books when they first came out, I saw only a few of the films. Thanks to a friend's gift, however, we've recently been watching the early ones, and I was able to enjoy them thoroughly because it's been so long since I read the books that I can't whine about the differences.

A few days ago we viewed Goblet of Fire for the first time. You can imagine the powerful impact of the following scene. I knew I had to find it online and share it here.