Just a Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Poison Go Down

“There's one white powder which is by far the most lethal known. It's called sugar. If you look at the history of imperialism, a lot of it has to do with that. A lot of the imperial conquest, say in the Caribbean, set up a kind of a network... The Caribbean back in the 18th century was a soft drug producer: sugar, rum, tobacco, chocolate. And in order to do it, they had to enslave Africans, and it was done largely to pacify working people in England who were being driven into awful circumstances by the early industrial revolution. That's why so many wars took place around the Caribbean.”
--  Noam Chomsky, 2002 lecture at The University of Houston

We have watched with admiration and horror as the giants of industrial agriculture have attempted to sway public opinion with their “corn sugar” campaign, designed to convince us that corn syrup is “just like any other sugar”.  This is patently false in most respects, of course, as corn syrup is addictive and without nutritional merit of any sort, while some sugars are more reasonably amenable as a part of a balanced diet, but it is true in one sense:  we eat far too much corn syrup, and we eat far too much refined sugar of other kinds, too.

There was a time, not too terribly long ago as human history is told, when table sugar was a luxury item.  Olde tyme recipes and nostalgic literature such as the Little House on the Prairie books make it clear that having sugar on the table was not something folk took for granted.

The advent of huge agricultural concerns and rapid transportation have changed all of that.  These days, having sugar on the table is still rare, but only because all the sugar a body could ever want is already in whatever premanufactured food item most of us are putting on our plates – from chocolate frosted sugar bomb cereals, to sports beverages, to bacon, to peanut butter, to loaves of bread.  Sugar, sugar, everywhere.  It’s enough to drive one to drink!

According to the USDA, the typical American consumes one hundred and fifty six pounds of added sugar every year, of which only 29% is in the form of traditional sugar.  Just eliminating the table sugar would mean, therefore, that the typical American diet would still comprise approximately one hundred and eleven pounds of added sugar, all other things being equal.

If you eat prepackaged foods, or eat in restaurants, you have no choice.  You will eat too much sugar, whether made from corn, or made from beets or sugarcane, and like it or not, you will get fat, bloated, unhealthy, pre-diabetic and probably pre-cancerous.  It is really as simple as that.

“But Myrtle, we hardly ever eat dessert, surely there’s not sugar in everything else!”

Sorry to burst your bubble, but practically everything in the typical American diet has added sugar.  Seriously.  From bacon to salad dressing, from ketchup to crackers, from flavored yogurt to spaghetti sauce, big agribusiness knows how to keep the hooks in their clientele.  Drug pushers are rank amateurs compared to Monsanto and Archer-Daniels Midland.

If sugar is so ubiquitous, then what are our alternatives?  Fortunately, escaping from this dangerous drug is really not all that complicated.  Eating fresh fruits and vegetables instead of prepackaged varieties accomplishes a great deal in the battle against added sugar.  For starters, getting away from the sugars involved in the canning of these foods reduces the added sugar total a tremendous amount right from the get-go.  In addition, fresh fruits and vegetables are filling foods, and the more of them you eat, the less desire or ability you have to eat sugar-heavy foods like cake and cookies.

Then, too, the sugars found in nature (is there anything sweeter than a peach fresh from the tree, or a watermelon straight off the vine?) are much easier for your body to deal with than the refined sugars processed in industrial vats.  In contrast to industrial sucrose and related sugars, fructose in its natural form is so easy to digest it is frequently absorbed too quickly to be registered as fermented detritus in the lower portions of the alimentary canal (graphic descriptions avoided intentionally; some of us like to snack while browsing the web, after all…)  That rotten something in Denmark?  It all comes down to how you frost your danish.

Finally, there are natural alternatives to refined sugars for those moments when you simply have to give in to your sweet tooth.  Honey and other natural sugars such as maple, sorghum, etc. are all more or less as dangerous as industrial cane and corn sugars in terms of their caloric content, and if one were to consume as much honey as one had been consuming corn sugar, this would be a real problem.  But it doesn’t happen that way.  A little honey or homegrown molasses now and then is better tasting and more satisfying than a much larger amount of industrial sugar.  A little bit goes a lot further.

That is, it goes a lot further if you get off of the industrial white powder altogether.  Cane and corn sugar are addictive; unless you quit them cold turkey, you will find yourself continuing to crave them, and you will continue to be in the clutches of the worst drug dealers the world has ever known.

We are anxiously awaiting the day when we harvest the first honey from our top bar hive; we are also looking around for a local retailer with stevia cuttings so we may grow our own table sweetener.  Until such time as we are able to finally become self-sufficient in our fight against sugar, however, we urge you to join us in supporting alternatives – buy local honey, and use natural sweeteners in place of sugar.  And above all else, eat lots of fruits and veggies!

Happy farming!

God's House Doesn't Have a Roof

"Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person."
-- Robert Heinlein, Glory Road 

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently made waves with comments about the “false theology” of those concerned with environmental degradation. One hardly knows where to start with so patently absurd a series of claims as can be heard coming from Mr. Santorum on a regular basis, but the subject does dovetail nicely with something we have been thinking about – a lot – at Myrtle’s place for a while now, which is the relationship between being a good neighbor and being a good person.

Now, living in the buckle of the bible belt, we are routinely regaled with chapter and verse on the subject of faith versus works, and we are surrounded by folk who sincerely believe that it is “not enough” to be a good person, one must recite the magical incantations from the New Testament (and make sure it is the correct translation!) or the pearly gates will remain shut to you, you gnasher of teeth and wailer of wails.

So our musings are somewhat out of place geographically, even if we believe them to be of paramount importance ethically, spiritually, and communitarianily (if you will allow us a neologism or three, we’d be most appreciative).

In short, those whose theology answers questions like “What must I do to be saved?” (presumably from damnation for the crime of having been born human), or even the more benign “What must I do to go to Heaven?” (though how any theoretical divine realm could be any better than the dinner table set by Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance is beyond our comprehension) are already on the wrong path vis-à-vis real wisdom. Punishment and reward are not the proper sphere for a discussion of God and morality. Punishment and reward are the proper sphere of the kindergarten teacher and the local constabulary.

Any religion worthy of the name has as its basis two senses which ought to be engaged: a sense of awe, and a sense of obligation. Anything else is gafla – the great “noise” or “distraction” – a concept, by the way, which is clearly delineated in ancient Hindu, Buddhist, Judaic and Muslim texts, but which is only hinted at by Jesus in a few parenthetical asides in the Gospels, and absent altogether in the legalistic screeds of the epistolary apostles. We have always suspected Jesus spent a great deal of time talking about the subject, but his more metaphorical-minded Jewish audience was too busy being flogged and starved by colonial Rome at the time to take proper notes, so we are left only with the more literal-minded renderings of whatever it is he may actually have said. But we digress…

The original point for which we were attempting to provide elucidation is just this: no matter what God you may worship – or even if you worship no God at all – the point of theological musing ought not be “What’s in it for me?” but rather “How do I make sense of all this wonderful stuff of which life, the universe and everything is made?” and “How can I best serve those around me, so they can appreciate all this wonderful stuff, too?”

This, of course, is as abundantly rife with what Rick Santorum calls “false theology” as it can be, particularly since it does not even require the existence of God. But we retort that the God described by Mr. Santorum and his like is so small it is blasphemous. If God really were so petty as to judge so arbitrarily and cruelly as does the character described by authoritarian fundamentalism, it would be a moral imperative to rebel against Him. If God exists, then surely [S]He is more mature and emotionally secure than we are.

Otherwise, what purpose does this creature serve?

Praise of God is fine, so far as it goes, but without defining the term in a meaningful way, we find it offensive. If your God is an abusive father who abandons the people of Darfur to genocidal rampages, what good is he? If his only purpose is to allow your team to score more points than their opponents, again we ask, who cares?

If, though, your God only makes an appearance when someone, anyone, notices the pain and suffering of others (be they human or otherwise) and decides to do something about it, then we at Myrtle’s place say “Now you’re talkin’!”

It seems to us, simple backyard chicken raisers that we are, that we are in an interdependent web, and just as we require much from our surroundings for nourishment and comfort, there is every likelihood that our surroundings, in turn, need to be nourished and comforted. At least, it seems that way every time we feed the chickens, or better still as an example, when we feed the cat. Ungrateful though she may seem most of the time, she expresses great degrees of warmth and feeling when her dinner bowl is filled.

Whether gardening, volunteering at a food bank or homeless shelter, reading to a child, paying the toll for the car behind you in line, picking up litter in a state or national park, riding your bike instead of driving your car, or just smiling at a stranger, everything you do which makes life a little more pleasant for those around you is fundamentally moral. By contrast, anything we do which detracts from the lives of others, and makes their very existence a little more difficult is immoral.

God, if there is a God, must needs function on much the same plane. We submit further that any activity which tends towards the care and feeding of others is by default the only kind of prayerful or worshipful activity worth condoning, regardless of what any particular texts may or may not say about the subject. You want to know what is “holy”? It’s a lot like the judicial wisdom on pornography: “I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it.”

To that end, we find it truly shocking that a candidate for President of the United States of America would call any endeavor to clean up our national parks – let alone any attempt to prevent calamitous increases in greenhouse gas emissions, or a whole host of other environmental damages done by our rogue materialistic culture – “false theology”; there is more spiritual wisdom in an Ansel Adams photograph than in a dozen papal decrees.  And there is more piety in handing out blankets, or peanut butter sandwiches, than there would ever be in a million pompous speeches about "pure" Christianity and the dangers of letting women decide what to do with their own bodies.

But what do we know, right? We’re just a bunch of heathens. Sigh.

If Rick calls, let him know we’ll get back to him; we’re out back, praying. Or, as some might call it, gardening.

Happy farming!

"Wise Food" (or.. "Vegetarian Without Vegetables")

"Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness."
--Michael Pollan, The New York Times Magazine, Unhappy Meals, 01/28/07

The health benefits of gardening are legion, including but not limited to an increase in exercise and a decrease in stress, but the chief and foremost thing we think of when the subject is vegetable gardening is vegetables.

Even without our mothers’ voices in the back of our heads telling us to eat all our vegetables, we know instinctively they are good for us. And gardening is, quite frankly, all about growing as many of them as we can, and subsisting off of them as much

as possible.

Yet most people do not eat vegetables in sufficient quantities, often by orders of magnitude.  This fact was brought home in a scandalously obvious way recently when Mr. Myrtle Maintenance skipped his lunchtime jog due to soreness in his knees (getting old is a bad idea –we recommend not doing it), and ate lunch with several co-workers.

The lunchtime topic of conversation? Vegetarianism. Mr. Myrtle Maintenance and one of his coworkers are vegetarians; the vast majority of the table, as is true of the vast majority of the population of Texas, comprised not just omnivores, but practical carnivores, whose only nonmeat intake consists of potatoes and processed white flour products, with heavy doses of dairy fat and processed sugars. Throw in a few pickles and onions, maybe a slice or two of tomato, and some ketchup.

You know the kind of meal we are talking about.

“I could never be a vegetarian,” one person said. “It’s not so much that I have to eat meat. It’s just that I don’t like vegetables.”

The kicker? Mr. Myrtle Maintenance’s vegetarian co-worker replied: “I don’t like vegetables either. I don’t really eat that many of them.”

Now, we are hardly fundamentalists on this question. Obviously, as prominently as chickens feature in our homescape, you can reckon right off the top of your head that we are, at a minimum, oviverous. And we really, really like cheese. So, call us lacto-ovo vegetarians, just as a starting point. Throw in the fact that we will eat fish on occasion, and we are already all the way out to the realm of pescetarian, so we are a long way from your dyed-in-the-wool raw food vegan purist. We are only “vegetarian” in the sense that, unlike your typical denizen of Texas, we don’t actually have raw, bloody red meat dripping from our slack-jawed maws at the present time.

That having been said… we find it incomprehensible that you can be a “vegetarian” without eating vegetables.

How in the world is that supposed to work?

When you stop to think about it, though, this bizarre concept is more than possible. Not healthy, sure, but perfectly plausible. The amount of prepackaged food out there comprised almost entirely of processed flours and sugars is almost limitless. Throw in a few soy-based meat substitutes, some tomato paste, and some high-fructose corn syrup, and you’ve got yourself a McVegetarian feast.

You also haven’t solved much in the way of health problems, which brings us back to the garden….

We have not invested a lot of time in research on the “Slow Food” movement, but that is not for a lack of sympathy. The idea that a revolt against fast food – started almost as a joke in an Italian community fed up with McDonald’s attempt to ‘feed them up’ – should be named “Slow Food” is too delicious for a couple of English majors to pass up. It’s just that the time spent reading about it would tend to detract from the time involved in actually living it. We don’t do the whole scrapbooking thing for similar reasons.

Still, a brief perusal of slow food articles turned up the Michael Pollan quote we started with, and since he is one of our favorite food and garden writers, we’re running with the idea he has so ably expressed: healthy eating is not about marketing or packaging. Healthy eating is about healthy food, and healthy food is best harvested from healthy plants, which are found in healthy gardens.

This idea is not limited to vegetarian food, of course. Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma describes the difficulties involved in choosing to eat meat – and led to harsh and, we believe unwarranted, criticism of Pollan from vegetarian purists – but those difficulties are not excessively onerous, if you are so inclined to overcome them. The bottom line, though, is that whether animal, vegetable or mineral (well, maybe not mineral…), the good stuff is produced at home. Barring that, it is produced close to home.

Our 2012 New Year's resolutions, like many folks’, deal in great measure with personal health. We are looking into all sorts of unexplored corners of our personal dietary habits to ferret out the improvements we know we need to make. Among those things Myrtle Maintenance Personnel will be doing more of this year:

• Getting off of sugar. As much as possible, we aim to use stevia and honey instead. To that end, we will be planting stevia in the herb garden a little over a month from now, and the minute our tax refund was deposited, we built a top bar beehive.
• Maximizing veggies-shot-in-the-yard in our diets. We currently have spinach, arrugula and chard in harvest, but this is as barren as we plan on being for… oh, the rest of our lives. We had tomatoes ripening on the vine as recently as the week before Christmas, and this next fall we intend to start making use of a low tunnel to keep right on going straight through the moderate freezes which are the worst we can expect in our garden.
• We will be harvesting broccoli, carrots and kohlrabi in few weeks, with fava beans coming maybe a week or two after that, and then pretty much a full menu of produce for the foreseeable future.
• Eating as much fruit as we can lift. We have not yet solved our winter needs, though some potted citrus that we can move in and out when we have sub-freezing temperatures are on the “to do” list; otherwise, we have various berries or fruit coming in from late April through October. Blackberries, peaches, plums, pomegranates, and several varieties of melon all fit into any dietician’s list of “yes, you can have as much of that as you want” and, apart from the labor involved in planting and harvesting, they are all free.

There are a ton of other items on our respective health checklists, but none strike us as being quite so easy – and enjoyable – as those related to food we raise ourselves. As a caveat, that food which we cannot grow on our own, we plan to purchase in increasing quantities from local sources. Where local varieties of food are not available, local distributors will be our vendors of choice (ex. The Farm Patch on College Ave. in Bryan carries items which are not always local – like pineapple, for instance – but is a preferable source of produce when compared to the large chain grocery stores).

Whatever your food preferences, we urge you to be as deliberate as possible in the new year in making them as good for you as you can envision. Happy eating, and…

Happy farming!