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20 January, 2023

More Worms!

(and rain gauges and electronics.)

I've added this post on PTEC3D Blog to the post on here a few months back. 

YW.

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What The ^$*#@*% Are You Eating!?!

News like this is everywhere. You'd think the message was getting across to the public. And you'd also think that if the message was getting across, people would boycott some of the perpetrators, one by one. What are you actually eating when you buy processed / "supermarket fresh" foods? Do you know? 

Because if the message was getting out, you'd know.  How can these sorts of things happen and people not know about them, again and again? Here are seven just pulled at random off a search results page:

Note the dates, all over the place. And I've sounded off about these for over a decade:

Those links are to articles where I wrote about the state of food fraud. There are others where I wrote about straight-up fraud of other items than food, but people who produce adultered/fraudulently-altered food and the mountains of food and "nutrition" misinformation deserve a special place in a quite special Hell of drowning in a hot stew their own products, over and over and over.

So What Is This? 

Artificially reddening meat to make it look appealing was A Thing last century, a thing that probably caused quite a few stomach ulcers, digestive issues, and even cancers. We'll never know. Because no-one commissioned those sorts of studies. That would be informing the buying public, and we don't do that, only mis-inform... 

Initially this was done with a compound that's an irritant and inflammatory chemical. Why? Because the food corporations spent billions in their advertising to show lovely unnaturally red meat. They did it because people thought brown meat was rotten. (It isn't. Meat oxidises on the outside and turns brown and that's a natural process. We age meat to brown it, by cooking it. The browning indicates a piece of meat that's at a perfect stage for cooking.)

So - stupid people are at the heart of this, but stupid people only get that way if they're not educated. So education is to blame, or in this case, lack of the correct knowledge and so butchers and supermarkets started to add inflammatory chemicals to their meat to make it red, their sales went up, and people started developing more bowel issues...

There are now some methods used that don't involve those irritants, but I'm still a bit pissed off when I get this sort of thing:

This piece of meat shows the marks of "prettifying."

The brown parts of that are the type of meat I'd actually prefer in my shopping basket and they indicate almost perfect ageing. (Of course I know the entire cut is the same age, but the pink parts have been treated to look like something they're not, the chemical originally used has been quite emphatically outlawed for decades, and now I wonder what fresh bastardry the producers of this cut have found to pump up their bottom line...)

This is a supermarket that has vowed to reduce their use of known harmful chemicals in the foods they sell, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't develop new harmful chemicals. And it's still fraud as defined in that video I first linked to.

BTW: That meat was great, despite the pink stuff. We enjoyed the meal I cooked with it and some vegetables and herbs from our garden and other unprocessed ingredients. 

Coda.

As some of you know I grow vegetables in our tiny front yard which is also our outdoor area so we've done, I think, a great job of integrating both. I'm doing this to remind us both - to remind you, reading this - of where our food actually comes from. I'm not some organic/hand-everything wonk but I like it if I can eat food that has only been watered, fed with compost and minimal dry granular fertiliser, and a combination of pesticides that I know are minimally harmful and home remedies known to work, and I've designed garden beds that farm their own worms and put timed reticulation on that. I don't like the daily grind of watering and weeding and de-pesting. It comes down to the Spoons thing. I'm one of the lucky(?) small group for whom spoons are a bit limited. 

But supermarkets and large food corporations would really like you to forget how easy it is to grow your own. Those worthy organisations (yeah, it's sarcasm) would prefer it if they could just put walls around their customers and populate that with cement, asphalt, and grass. Because then you'd be entirely dependent on their foods and they could charge exactly enough to keep you on the point of slavery, where your entire income is used to just survive and work. 

Don't believe me? Re-read this (https://tedamenu.blogspot.com/2022/07/no-hope-for-food-knowledge.html) that was my first link to my blogs above. I've had one person tell me that processing removes the "stuff" that's in naturally-grown food and my cooking from scratch was putting my health at risk because I could process that out. I'm still not sure to this day if they were a troll or a genuine fwit.

Corporations spend huge sums on what I can only call propaganda. They've contributed much the entire curriculum for some educational systems of the USA and wherever else they could get their shoes under the bed, material they approved and even wrote in some cases. They put their corporate logos  and presence right into schools. If you can find the book "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss, do read it. It's enlightening.

In Australia where denial of our history was important, don't forget that the governments that wanted most to hide that history 'revised' the curriculum. And most of those predominantly LNP politicians that initiated the changes had documented and large involvements in major corporations. 

In such cases it's easy to slip in half-truths about corporations and food. Most school systems are wrong for the prevailing environment, still made to churn out mediocrity rather than excellence. Slaves, in other words.

Even in professional circles (and remembering that these people also came through that same educational system) such as medicine there's deliberately manufactured ignorance. A diabetes website - a government-operated diabetes website - still recommends losing weight by using margarine and denounces the use of butter to this day, despite a) the whole fats causing weight gain thing being a deliberate ploy by the sugar industry to divert the blame from sugar and b) the now accepted fact that margarine and butter offer about the same health benefits and risks. 

I could go on. Dept of Agriculture offices well stocked with Syngenta paraphenalia sent to them as lobbying gifts, the GP twiddling their Merck pen that the rep left behind. These things all DO influence us, silently, imperceptibly. If I said the words of a TV ad for cigarettes now, most people wouldn't (thank sanity for that small mercy) have a clue which brand was referred to. But last century, that ad and thousands like it sold tobacco while the tobacco companies quietly took down papers that clearly showed the harm tobacco caused, flooded the rest out under a tsunami of paid studies that understandably wouldn't have gotten paid if they actual intimated that tobacco was harmful.

Here, I'll give you that jingle: "BrandX BrandX you're a star, beat the other smokes by far." Remember that British American Tobacco paid handsomely to put that jingle on TV and radio, hundreds of thousands of dollars, the equivalent of several million dollars today, and still made lots of money from their cigarettes. 

This is what we need to fight, something that's had a hundred years to get ahead of us all. Sorry - such a long way round to get to this point. But all those parts of the article are really needed to drive home the unfair use of wealth by corporations to extract all our wealth from us and harm us in the process. 

Revolution!

Today, the best ways to revolt against the machine that's doing its best to swallow us up is to DO THINGS. Grow some of your own food. Cook your own meals. Make your own music. Write your own stories.

Write to your local MPs and ministers and the newspapers and the CEOs of these huge corporations and tell them. Find petitions online and sign them, on street corners and sign them. Speak to your friends and family and work colleagues, send them to articles like I've linked above - send them to this article, even. 

Go for a walk or a drive and find small market gardens and farm gate stalls, farmers' markets - and buy some fresh food. Learn how to use that fresh food in preference to processed food. Grow your own parsley or basil and use it in your meals. Make fast food a once-in-a-blue-moon thing, not your daily routine. READ EVERYTHING. Every label, every ingredient list. Read cookbooks and online recipes that deal with whole fresh foods.

Play a guitar (or just the spoons, or make music tapping some chopsticks against plates and pots and pans) or sing. Make the words up as you go, make the words about what a rotten bunch of bastards big corporations are and how we need to keep them honest. Tell stories, about how we're being cheated and assaulted by toxic foods, about how you cooked the best dish of just pasta, olive oil, cream, fresh garlic and fresh basil that you grew in an old takeaway tub on the window ledge in the kitchen.

THAT'S the real revolution that'll win. 

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If this has struck a chord in you, if this kind of thing makes you angry, then I can only say this: Stay angry! Stand up! Get activated! Let others know! Write to government figures, write to newspapers, to CEOs and managers at companies. Start petitions, sign petitions. Share this article and my others like it, go to my News Stand to see all my other posts and share links to the News Stand and any articles you found interesting. And if you can, donate here or here. Or subscribe to my once a week newsletter and stay in the loop. Just don't sit there and do nothing!

And if none of this has resonated, if none of this has made you angry enough to act, then they've already won, and perhaps you deserve it. 

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07 January, 2023

TTMMGH #00006

Mandurah. And crabs. 

Intrigued? This one could also go in the "Old Pharte Memoires" really. They're memories I have, I'm old. (And yeah - of course I do.) Do I mention Belle of the Belltower Times often enough? The BT reminds me of the Western Australia in the 80s and 90s, with a healthy tang of RIGHT NOW. 

I went "prawn dabbing" under the old traffic bridge in Mandurah. When prawns were running, a hundred people with long tube nets on long poles would go there every night, crowding the landings underneath, watching for the luminous eyes drifting on the outgoing tide and guiding them into the long sock, and on a good day you could dab up several kilos of them.

By 2AM - 3AM everyone would drift home, and usually put a pot of salted water on to boil, and enjoy a handful of the catch fresh, with bread and butter.

But that's not Belle's story in this case. No, this is the Crabbing Hero, the one that putt-puttered around on their dinghy pulling up crab pots and filling their esky with blue manna crabs. 

It's a very funny Blue Manna crab. Cos it's a very funny story.

Now Mandurah's Inlet had a fertile crab breeding ground before the authorities changed the whole flow of the place so new developments wouldn't have to be assailed by "seaweed stench." But my story took place not long before that happened. 

People were dropping crab pots off the walkway, then lifting them, throwing back the soft-shell young and egg-festooned females, measuring the remaining crabs, and putting the legal-sized ones in their esky, mindful to only get their legal limit. 

All except this one family. Crab pots would come up, be tipped straight into their bucket without checking, and be rebaited and dropped. We watched as they caught 20, 30, then up to 50 little softshells that should have been going back to breed up and be the legal size in a year or two, and finally someone had obviously had enough. I'll call him Ahab.

Ahab was a regular fisher and we all knew him. More importantly, he knew all the "Fishies," the Fisheries inspectors that patrolled the bridges, beaches, jetties, and boat ramps, and most of us knew that they often went plainclothes during peak times like this. When Ahab spotted a pair of them he walked over to the family, said hello, and then looked into their esky and raised his voice a bit.

"Geez that's a lot of crabs!" he said. "WHAT'RE YA GONNA USE 'EM FOR, SHIRT BUTTONS?"

Two Fishies in mufti snapped their heads around like they were on springs, and we all happily watched fifty or more softshells and undersized crabs getting tipped back into the estuary along with every other crab these bastards had caught, followed by a very serious-looking ticket being written as the family was escorted off the walkway and their fishing gear confiscated.

Sometimes Hmmm... just becomes Mm-Hhmm! 

We need more Ahabs, especially these days with seemingly every person or corporation out to profit from not respecting the ecosystems, the land, and other people. If this has struck a chord in you, if this makes you angry, then I can only say this: Stay angry! Get activated! Let others know, write to government figures, write to newspapers, to CEOs and managers at companies. Start petitions, sign petitions. Share this article and my others like it, go to my News Stand to see all my other posts and share links to the News Stand and any articles you found interesting, and if you can, donate here or here. Or subscribe to my once-a-week newsletter and stay in the loop. Just don't sit there and do nothing, be an Ahab!

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03 January, 2023

Self-watering Seed Raisers

I first started making these about fifteen years ago, because everywhere I've lived has been warm to hot, and the ground just didn't hold enough water for seeds to get a start, no matter how much I soaked it. 

Sound familiar? Or are you, like myself, not too happy to have to be watering seed trays up to four times a day? And I'm not even kidding. Fifteen years ago the problem was temperatures in the mid to high 30s and low 40s, (yes degrees Celsius) sand only soil, hot breezes, and never enough cool space, never enough time to be home several times a day to keep the sand damp. 

Also, it was hot. Did I mention it was hot? I occasionally bought a soft drink or soda to make the weather more bearable, and generally got it in 2, 2.5, or 3 litre bottles - because I couldn't see the point of buying nine 325ml bottles just for convenience's sake. (And producing that much waste!!!) But whenever I finished a bottle, I couldn't bring myself to put it in the waste stream just yet. . .

So I made self-watering planters out of them. (It also gave me a good excuse to buy a few more bottles that first summer. . .) And just recently, I've noticed that soda water helps my now fifteen years older body stay better hydrated than plain water, and so I've once again collected a few 2l bottles. 

I've also just had some specialty seeds shipped to me by an online friends in Queensland, and their business is all manner of native, specialty, and herbal seeds. Check their page at FairDinkum Seeds or on Facebook because I assure you that Leigh and Manami are always great value. I've been using their seed farm for years now, and have never once had inviable seeds.

Anything smaller than a 2l bottle is probably not going to be too successful. But feel free to experiment. Bottles seem stable when first filled with soil and water, but the water does evaporate / transpire and when it does, the whole thing becomes top-heavy and easy to tip over. Have it in a secure spot, or, like I did for these six, put them in a seedling tray or similar. We have cats so I've also used plastic clothes pegs to clip all six together. You could also (if using duct tape like I have this time) do a run of tape around all your bottles and that should keep them upright and safe.

Six finished planters, and the raw stock, a 2litre soda bottle.

From the above pics you can probably already work out what's what, but I'll see if I can't make and add a video too. Oh and here it is! On Peertube, Youtube, or Odysee.

Basically you cut the bottle in half in such a way that when you turn the top half upside down and put it back into the bottom half, there's between 10 and 30mm space between the neck and the bottom of the bottle, and then you fix it in place. I've used glue, superglue, and in this case, plastic duct tape. As long as it's waterproof and holds the two halves together in their new configuration. 

Then cut a 150mm long and ~20-30mm wide strip of material, old tee shirt cotton's ideal, and push that most of the way through the neck of the bottle and down into the base of the bottle. You can slightly adjust how damp the soil will be - if you leave the last 50mm just laying in the neck, then only a small amount of soil will get water and so the soil will be drier, if you hold 50mm - 70mm upright while dropping soil in, there's greater contact between the soil and the material and more water will wick up and the soil will be wetter. (Corollary: If more water wicks up, you'll be filling this setup more often, and stand a chance of damping off your seeds with too much water.))

In this case I used an old terry-towelling tea
towel and the strips were around 250mm long.

One other important thing to do is to put a hole (not a slit as they block up or self seal) at the highest point that you want the water to go to. I usually pick a point that'll be level with where the neck starts to flare out, that way water won't flood and damp off the seeds/seedlings. I've used a drill and a hot soldering iron but if you've got the utility knife out just push a triangular hole about 2mm - 5mm on a side, and maybe even make two, on opposite sides, just to be sure. 

Fill with layers of potting mix and seed raising mix, or mix your own. I generally use half potting mix and garden soil that's been collected during bed restoration and reclaiming potting soil, then add seeds and cover them with fine peat moss. (I have large-ish drums where I put old 'spent' soil and add clippings and compost and leftover fine mulch and peat and manure and can leave it to rebuild for a year, sort of like in-soil composting. You probably already have a favourite seed raising mix, or will find your favourite as you go.)

Now carefully keep adding water to the seed raiser (which is what this technically is, I guess - although I've also used these to grow herbs on the kitchen window sill) until you get some weeping out of an overflow hole, and let it sit overnight to check how moist the soil gets, if necessary remove some soil and adjust the strip of material up or down. Once you have it behaving right, plant some seeds, and enjoy not having to water it all the time. 

One other thing I love about this system is that because you can leave it a while (sometimes almost two weeks) before needing to top up, this means you won't risk dislodging seeds with watering, so they get a great start. And when you do refill it, do so gently, near an edge away from seeds and seedlings so as not to dislodge them, or very slowly with a very small and fine rose on your watering can.

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As always, please share this article and my others like it, go to my News Stand to see all my other posts and share links to the News Stand and any articles you found interesting, and if you can, donate here or here and find out here why it's important. Or subscribe to my once a week newsletter and stay in the loop.

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