Newspeak, Newfood, Newproblems

We live in a time when "good" can mean "actually bad but we'll pretend" and "safe" can mean "actually toxic but safer than alternatives" and "aid" that's actually a burden and "positive action" that has negative consequences, you'd be excused for thinking we're in the plot of 1984 or some Kafka-esque plot... 

This is going to be a bit longer an article than I usually write. But this is a HUGE topic and really nees me to try and and condense 20-30 posts' worth of concepts and ideas into just one.

Was just listening to a podcast about agriculture and the use of factory manufactured meat products among other things. It struck me just how very little we actually know about the biology of eating and absorption yet, how we're pinning hopes on this new hope on the horizon.

And amid a push to make "unimal" meat (like what I did there? From "animal" to "unimal?" I have reasons...) are a few of us saying "Hold up. WHAT exactly is that that you're making? Is it REALLY safe? Are you sure it's just like real animal protein?" and watching the space carefully. 

Take chicken. We don't even know all the enzymes, endocrines, trace elements etc in a piece of chicken protein. Chicken meat comes from a whole chicken not just off a thigh or breast. There are other organs that pump nutrients into the bits we eat. So just cloning the cellular structure won't magically fill that protein with all those micronutrients. And unless you basically (and very macabrely!) grow and lay out all the other chicken organs as well and plumb them together with tubes you are NOT going to get a "real" piece of chicken.

Also - is that grown protein going to grow as fast as it does in a (factory) chicken? Even with the best nutrient system in the business, those cells will only grow as fast as chicken muscle cells grow. And with the factory chickens, we're already so impatient and greedy that we pump them with growth hormones to make them grow faster. Is a potential manufacturer of artificial meat really going to ignore the benefits to their bottom line of GH? Of course not. Hidden in the list of nutrient ingredients, it'll be there. Anything to make it bigger faster more. More bottom line, less time. 

Believe me - I HATE the killing of animals for the billions of us alive today. But I also hate the deaths of millions of us every year due to starvation, poor nutrition, malnutrition, and plain fraudulent food poisoning. 

I think our species developed tolerances for certain foods - we switched from fruits and grasses to meats and vegetables and cereals over millennia -  and then from raw food to cooked foods, which we're still in the process of adapting to. And we're changing the diet again, already. I keep mentioning how technology has seriously hit a vertical climb rate, and that's both a good thing and a bad thing. 

It's bad because we're changing our environment and diet and social structures all at the same time and are poorly equipped to adapt that quickly. But it's also good because the hope is that better knowledge will allow us to make changes that we'll be better adapted for, and fix some of the disasters we've created along the way.

I'll just mention some stuff off the "bad" end of the scale:

• We thought we'd made a good tranquiliser/anti-nausea drug. What we had was thalidomide.
• We thought we had a good cooking oil. We had soybean oil. 
• We thought we should avoid natural animal fats and made our own. We made hydrogenated trans fats.
• We thought fats were making us fat. It was sugars. 
• We decided sugar was too expensive so we found an alternative. We made HFCS and metabolic syndrome.
• We thought we'd found a way to make cooking containers non-stick, carpets cleaner, and flame retardants more flame-retarding. Instead we have PFAS, PFOA, and PTFE.
• We wanted to use cars with higher-octane fuels so we developed tetraethyl lead additive for fuel.
• Farmers wanted a broad spectrum herbicide, we made glyphosate.
• Farmers also wanted their stock to be healthy and grow fast so the animals get dosed with antibiotics and growth hormones.
• We wanted convenience and we made plastics. I don't think I need to put in any examples of how badly that's ending for us.

Are you getting a picture here? We muck up so much of what we try to do with the natural world. We still don't have any clear idea of how nutrition works at the micro level but we're going to make unimal meat.

Despite knowing how little we really know, we're forging ahead with unmeats. I can see the concerns of some of the researchers, who plainly want to end the suffering of animal slaughter. But I can also see the greed on the people higher up in the chain of command who can only see dollar signs and not the suffering of the people who have become ill and died, and will become ill and die, of the unknown unintended consequences of basically experimenting on the customers.

There are quite a few items on the "good" list too - I probably don't need to itemise them because we're quite good at trumpeting those, whereas the bad examples above are still not really being talked about all that much. We tend to gloss such things over so as not to harsh the mellow too much. When things like the global warming happen, it's as if, by consensus, we avoid discussing it until we can't any avoid it any more. And that point seems to only just being reached... 

The encouraging thing about that is that, once we get cracking, we usually manage to overcome whatever it is. The discouraging thing is that it's also been documented that people watched and discussed a tidal wave rolling in and stood their ground, only to have to run for their lives when it finally became obvious that the wall wasn't going to stop it. . . 

Food System Concerns:

Going back to that podcast. George Monbiot has done the food research. He mentions the global standard farm and the global standard diet, and then says that food miles and being a locavore are less important than getting food. But he and his family own shares in a local orchard. He says that only the rich will eat if the food system collapses but that's not true. Only the rich and those that grow their own food and have a local network will eat. He's made sure he has a local network but to hell with anyone else. 

He says the Michael Pollan truism about not eating anything your great-grand generation would recognise as food is bullshit and our diets have "changed enormously" in the last hundred years. And he's right. But he says it's also tastier and healthier than my great-grandmother's diet had been and in that he's wrong on both scores. 

Agriculturally, our soils have become so impoverished by the standard farm and the standard diet that there's a very distinct and very measurable difference in the nutritional values of foods grown now compared to fifty years ago. And medically, our foods from that "standard food system" are more toxic than food grown fifty years ago, and far FAR more toxic and bereft of nutrition than foods grown 100-200 years ago.

Our soils on farms has changed beyond recognition.

Monbiot mentions the microcosm in the soil as a bit of a miracle beneath his feet and how that's the way agriculture works. But it doesn't. Standard farm farmers drench that microcosm with pesticides and fertilisers and contaminated animal manure and remove all the local flora and fauna that nourished that soil. And he then touts the regenerative farmers as the way forward but - it's a proven fact that we can't sustain the kind of volume that standard farms produce by regenerative growing - because the standard food needs standard farms and in fact if anything's going to cause the collapse of the food system it'll be insistence on doing this.

The changes to the soil biome are deep, radical, and detrimental. Once upon a time the small farms would be pretty much still integrated with the local ecosystem. There were literally thousand (tens of thousands) of species occupying that land, animals, bacteria, fungi, worms, other plants. And as George also points out, the soil was derived from the microcosms around the root systems of all those plants, the biomes around them. 

But when you raze the ground and remove entire ecosystems, your soil become impoverished just by that one action. Then the microbiome around crop root systems is impoverished, and fertilisers is added. The natural predators of pest of the crop are not there, and the diseases and predation increase, and pesticides and herbicides have to be used. And now both the microbiomes around the roots of the crop - and by extension the microbiomes of our gut - are impoverished and out of balance and what we see in our digestive tracts today will be a pale shadow of what there was a scant few hundred years ago. 

I'd like to believe George has the answers but unfortunately he doesn't. I'd like to say I consider him wise but I can only consider him educated - but also very foolish. There's no easy answer despite he saying there is and it's artificial meat and more standard farming and standard food processing and - anyway... I mourn the person I once considered an example. 

What we actually need is for actual unsolicited research to be done. Not something generated at the behest of a food corporation that's only trying to prove that their particular brand of not very well researched, designed, and manufactured foodstuff is less toxic than "the stuff those other manufacturers pump out."

And we'll only start getting such unbiased and concentrated research happening as the crises accumulate and come up against the seawall and wash over it...  

Manufactured Meat Concerns:

We don't know yet how the different organs of the bodies of almost any animals work. We know in overview - blood takes oxygen from the lungs and expires CO2, takes energy from the gut, carries that oxygen and energy around to cells which absorb and use it to make more cells, do useful work, etc. 

But for instance - how is that cell controlled exactly? We know so much about these mechanisms and yet we know almost nothing about them yet. In the human body, for example, a lot's been said about the "mind-gut" connection. Alter your gut bacteria and what they get to eat, and you change how parts of your brain function, and thus how you function. Why and how this works we're going to learn eventually, but for now, let's go with this: "You are what you eat" is one of those truisms we shouldn't overlook. 

Sometimes when my gut bacteria are happy I feel energetic and in a good mood that nothing seems able to break. And when I have poor digestion and only been eating poor foods, I actually can't help feeling depressed and looking at the world through grey-coloured glasses. So for me a serve of meat is a boost. 

But why exactly is it? Is it the cells of the meat alone? Is it the trace elements that the meat absorbed from the blood, from the lymph? Is it some traces of a hormone that came from the animal's liver? Or endocrine gland? If I drained out everything that wasn't a structural meat cell and cooked with that, would it taste and smell the same? 

The Rabbit Disease Timebomb

Would it produce as much nourishment for me? Or would it be - lacking - something? For example: rabbit is a very easy to grow food source. It was also a very easy to obtain wild food a hundred years ago. But people who lived off the land and ate almost exclusively rabbit and berries would go to town after a year out in the wild, and shit themselves to death. They'd arrive spindly and ill and feverish, and leave feet first. 

Because yes, rabbit meat is very good, it's lean and tasty and plentiful. But it has no fats. Well, a negligible quantity. People who lived on this exact diet were said to have caught "rabbit disease." Had they kept some of those rabbits and fed them extremely well before slaughtering them, they'd have survived, because those rabbits would have developed quite a lot of fat. But because the Monbiot-like ignoring of a biological fact - that we need fats and preferably animal fats - those wilderness dwellers died in droves. 

And such are my main concerns. We can eat "vat rabbit" for a year or two and feel all right. But then what? Who wants to be the guinea pig for something like that? 

Those women who were prescribed thalidomide weren't aware of anything wrong - they felt better for months and months. It was only after the birth that the problems became obvious, and by then it was too late. Some of the people who relied on olestra in food to lower their fat levels developed lifelong digestive illnesses. After several years. 

People who were advised to avoid animal fats and consume hydrogenated fats instead for the sake of their health, developed metabolic sysndrome and got Type 2 diabetes and similar illnesses. People who without their knowledge were given foods containing soyabean oil now have genetic damage. Anyone who drinks any water that hasn't been microfiltered to remove PFAS are consuming levels of those substances way above recommended safe levels and at risk of reproductive dysfunction or already have it.

If you ate anything "white" a few decades and up to a few centuries ago it was treated with a bleach - white sugar and white flour chief among them. And the bleach caused oxidative inflammatory damage and made the consumers of those things more prone to arterial plaques, heart conditions, and possibly increased their risk of cancer by considerable margins. 

Sorry George...

Our ancestors were subject to food fraud. Bread was routinely adulterated in various ways, crops contaminated with other weeds or detritus sold as pure, any meat you could get was likely to be something else as what it purported to be. (My parents lived in Austria during WWII and they mentioned that if you could buy meat or fish at all, you just didn't ask what it was or where it came from. And really, all that's changed nowadays is that there isn't a WWIII going on. . .)

I can go to the supermarket right now and pick up a piece of "snapper" that more likely came off a species of shark, "Australian" prawns that were raised and farmed in Vietnam and somehow "slipped" into Aussie prawns so now you can't use any of that pack for fish bait because it might spread white spot to our local seafood. 

If the garlic isn't a little bit wilted and doesn't have an "Australian grown" label on it then I have no idea where it comes from. I'm going to pray it comes from Spain or somewhere other than China where it's routinely grown in human shit and then washed in what amounts to ditch water before being rolled around with feet into piles where people sit on the ground and fill it into boxes and bags. 

Same with olive oil - I know a few olive groves in Australia but I have no idea if ALL the oil they sell came off their trees or was imported from Italy to bulk their own oil out a bit. If the latter then it's over 90% certain that it isn't anything like olive oil they're adding because no other industry in the world can consistently produce twice as much oil as they harvest without there being some bullshit involved. 

I get our honey from local farm and that only because I'm fairly certain they don't adulterate their product with imported syrup purporting to be honey. Frozen berries that arrive here as "Produced in New Zealand" aren't, they're Chinese frozen berries sent here via NZ because of labelling laws. 

Orange juice is not made from oranges but orange juice concentrate (mostly squeezed from real oranges and then concentrated) and if the concentrate you bought was the crop of ten tons of oranges, you'd dilute it with fifteen tons' worth of water and add a chemical flavour pack. Why? "Because the customers want a consistent flavour" is the answer you'll get - but the truth is that the company just succesfully parlayed ten tons of oranges into fifteen tons' worth of orange juice for the cost of five extra tons of water and a bucket of orange Tang. 

Milk is similarly adulterated - farmers are paid by weight of milk solids, which are then diluted with water and somehow the milk solids that are extracted out of 1000 litres of milk become 1700 litres of milk on the shelf. 

What's The Answer?

Not George. Not Pollan, either. And definitely not any system that depends on capitalism and a "bottom line" rather than consideration, landcare, and stewardship. 

Not "bioreactors" and bacteria vats either. There's a reason behind the shapes and tastes and textures of vegetables. They are the way they are because relentless selection pressure has worked in both directions - we've sought them out for their health-giving nutrition, managed them, and finally farmed them. I can with 100% certainty say that nothing we're doing in factories, vats, and "reactors" will actually result in healthy human beings. 

George is very gung-ho about bacterial slurry, because he seems to not know or even deliberatley overlook some quite well-established nutritional research results. But as intelligent as he is about soil nutrition (and even draws parallels between the four major bacteria present in both plant and human nutrition systems) he seems to think that while the soil has definite nutrition requirements, human requirements can be safely ignored. 

He skirts the issues of manure/fertiliser/sewage that are really simple to break down into a few simple rules:

1. Every human ultimately consumes nutrition and energy from the soil and the sun.
2. Every human produces in their lifetime as many trace nutrients, fertiliser, and energy as they consumed over that lifetime.

And they are the two great rules. For the purposes of completeness you can substitute anything for the word "human" in each of those rules. We've been ignoring them for hundreds of years and that's the biggest problem with our food system right now.

Do you want to produce vegetables for cities? Do it IN the cities. It's easier to separate out food and human waste right there before it gets mixed in with the entire industrial waste stream. Because the reason for the food system failures we're getting is simple. We currently don't give a shit. Literally. Find the microbiomes around the city (and NOT in the lands spoiled by farms) and start your vertical farm by growing them. Start the way Nature does - start from the basics - trace elements, bacterial populations. 

Grow plants in a FULL ecosystem - if have to include insects and animals and supporting plant populations to grow the food crops - that's the price for attaining full nutritive value again. TANSTAAFL. There Ain't No Such Things As A Free Lunch. But we WILL get ourselves back in balance this way.

When families lived on the farm it was pretty easy to. You went and excreted in the field. Your waste food and poop went back out into the garden and the field. There wasn't usually much 'waste' food so mainly poop. And you peed in the field too. Or carried out the night pot and emptied it out there. The thing was that all that nutrient for the soil stayed in the soil. People poop and pee out roughly as many nutrients and trace elements as they consume. 

What they don't excrete is the energy that they burn up in moving and living, but luckily the plants that take up all that material add the energy back in with photosynthesis. See how clever it all is, and how simple it all was?

But eventually we had villages where people kept some gardens but their flour and bulk food might have come off local farms. Sort of - kind of - overall - the resources remained in the same general region though. But that's not the case now, is it? 

Our excrement goes into the same ponds as stormwater and so collects rubber residues, oils, and detergent compounds, and becomes toxic to the soil. We do sort of use some of the waste for fertilisers but it's mixed up with all the less desirable stuff. 

So some re-working of sewers is needed. And if you think that's a lot of hard work, remember that we put the not so great sewer systems in to take away diseases that were killing people in cities, and that was considered worthwhile enough that every city has a sewer system and far less disease. Once it becomes obvious to everyone that we now need TWO sewer systems, we'll do it. Hopefully we'll move before the tidal wave washes over the wall . . .

But once you have this separate system, and a decent food waste service, you'll be more than halfway to being able to farm the food for a city, in the city, using mostly the city's resources. Energy is becoming cheaper. Perhaps we'll be able to mechanise the partitioning of the sewer system, the processing of the fertiliser portions, the composting, and the delivery to local farms. 

So do you want to produce vegetables for cities? If you can do that, you can grow good crops in good soils in great enclosed vertical farms. If you can be bothered to use a heat still to distill waste water as well, you'll have clean water to grow the crops with. Cheaper energy, remember? There's one of the keys. 

There's a lot of interest in growing vegetable crops in such small, intensive, vertical, and very mechanised farms. A lot of progress has been made in the technology and (I'm going to get so tired of saying this but it's true) technology's pace itself is accelerating so that there are hundreds of times more researchers on each of the targets we'll need to reach, so it seems almost certain that we'll see some changes in farming practices. 

The changes that we'll need socially and societally will be a bit harder to achieve though. We'll have to get used to some things like - farmers who operated Standard Farms will need to be recompensed for switching to regenerative agriculture. That's just a given, you can't just shut down existing farmland and tell the farmer "that's it, pack up, piss off, go to town." but what will have to be done is to enforce no more fertiliser and pesticicde use and instead use crop and animal diversity to manage those just as they once were. 

We need to lower people's food expectations. Flawless apples and perfect carrots are a Standard Farm product and not compatible. If you want those, the City Vertical Farms will have to manage such produce. 

And we need to make sure that the whole economy of farming becomes a bit more distributed and equally shared. Basically, capitalism will have to be dismantled for this to happen. And before you think it can't happen, remember that our modern economy based on that neoliberal free-market-adjusted capitalism only came about in the last few hundred years and isn't a particularly stable edifice itself. 

Things Really Boil Down To

We need to become better stewards of our spacecraft. We need to eliminate non-core goals. And capitalism is as non-core as it can get. Really. Just re-read the first sentence of this paragraph. We humans aren't good at seeing big overview pictures, nor at seeing longer-term patterns. But we need to learn, whether that's with or without AI, Gods, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, or "financial objectives." 

We've become somewhat less than human because we've been less than Earthlings in our handling of the planet. What it takes is intensive study of natural microbiomes, and learning to apply those to our foods again. The link between gut biome health and body/mental health is now established beyond reasonable doubt, but we have work to do. 

BONUS: We'll learn how to set up our food systems on other planets. Assuming we still want to colonise those once we understand how unique and delicately-balanced our existence here is and how worthwhile.

This planet is a way for us to move through space. It is in every sense of the word a spacecraft. Without it and the paper-thin shell of atmosphere, we all die horrible deaths. Without the "electronics" inside the planet of rotating magnetic cores generating a shield from cosmic radiation, we'd burn slowly, painfully, over the course of a few hours. Without the life support system, this would be a parched lump of rock and sand, without so much as a lichen growing for food. 

That's not some bullshit doomsday scenario. That's the grim truth of it. Look at the other planets, each missing some crucial factor - too close t the Sun, too distant. Scorched or icy. Some rotate too slowly, some too fast. Or have no molten metal core to form magnetic fields to put shields up against the merciless solar and space radiations. 

We can't just build a huge cylinder in space and set it rotating. It would take decades to centuries for us to get as far as it would take to find just the material. To shield against the radiation the walls would have to be specialised and thicker than current spacecraft skins. To be able to generate gravity, it would need to be massive. Then it would take decades or more to establish an ecosystem that balanced as well as Earth's. 

To be clear - gravity is not optional, if we want to remain human in form. Also if we wanted to make an Ark of it and allow us to take the entire ecosystem (that we depend on in ways we're still not sure of) with us. In short, nothing except a copy of Earth will ever prevent us from turning into a new species - or going extinct. We are truly all that dependent on this exact habitat. 

And it sucks to be an astronaut, even within the protective shield of the magnetosphere they lose bone density and critical muscles if they stay in space for more than a few weeks, and recovery and rehabilitation to the planet is strenuous and difficult. In order to become adapted to space in physiology and genetics, we'll have to become something other than homo sapiens in order to do so. Also, in order to live on another planet, it would either have to be within a micropercentage of identical to Earth, or else we'd have to become a different species.

So for US, right here and right now, it's important that the planet can support our lives. 

Farming in the right way is one things we need to do right away. Another is to stop using dirty fossil fuels. Remember our magnetosphere, that depends on a core that rotates in a certain way? Well, how much longer is it going to rotate if we've actually shifted the Earth's axial tilt?  And remember that while we're reasonably versatile, we're also facing a declining birthrate. Could it be because we've domesticated ourselves? 

For the people that don't like to follow the links and read for themselves, the first article is about a growing tension between farmers who recognise that we need to reduce our footprint on the planet and are starting to use regenerative agriculture, and the farmers that are embedded in a capitalistic contract system and want to just make money, make money, and make more money.

The second link is to an article which quotes a study that has found that our pumping of groundwater has caused a tiny shift in the Earth's tilt. And of course our magnetic field depends on the rotation of the core of molten metal inside, which is dragged along with the Earth's rotation - along the equator of its axial tilt... 

And the last article discusses how farmed fish are less able to survive and breed in the wild (for reasons still not clear, but I have a few clues a few paragraphs further down) despite being genetically identical. 

We really REALLY need to stop capitalism and greed, and start realising that we really are "all in the same boat" and that it's a lifeboat and our lives really do depend on that lifeboat being in good working order and that everything else is so far down the hierarchy of importance as to be risible. 

I can offer you one piece of Down Under philosophy 101 to explain a bit about why genetically identical living creatures can lose their natural fitness to survive in just one generation of domestication. It's because we've taken them out of their "natural culture" and now they've lost the other important survival mechanism, their culture. 

Those salmon didn't just "magically know" where their spawning grounds are. No matter how much we humans want to deny it, each species has only a certain number of "instincts" built into their genome. The rest is learned from their community. 

There's an interesting side concept I'm finding developing here, and that's the idea that culture, language, communication, and myth are all necessary for life to get past a certain stage. In other words, we're more than our genetics, we're also formed by our culture and our conversations and our knowledge. This is worth a whole series of longer posts and I've now started a research and outline on it. Stay tuned. 

Anyway - this explains why we're in the situation we're currently in. By not exploring all these linkages before exploiting things, we've disrupted a large part of a larger narrative, if you like, and will need to repair that in order for things to return to a more liveable state. 

We need to acknowledge that we're only one group of things called Earthlings, and Earthlings are parts of Earth. No I'm not promoting some kumbaya religious nuttery, I'm saying that every living creature on the planet, every drop of water, and every particle of geological and atmospheric material on the planet.

We can't ever become a part of another ecosystem, we're stuck on this ship. And greed and capitalism almost destroyed it. We are now in the situation where we DON'T HAVE TO be greedy. We DON'T HAVE TO exploit any more of the planet's resources. We DON'T HAVE TO do the hard work any more to survive, because we can mechanise and automate almost everything. And we DON'T HAVE TO dig up new resources or burn resources for energy because we can give the task of  recycling, building new renewable energy sources, building more recycling facilities, making more machines to do that and then look after our needs.

And DON'T HAVE TO take food out of another's mouth or the roof from over their heads. 

We can do this right now if we eliminate the need to create "profits" and "value" from everything, and just settle for "fixing what we have already."

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Keep The Bastards Honest!

Eggs, Lies, And Eggy BS

The makings of a classical "supply shortage" are here in this article.

If you read it and think "oh those poor supermarkets, those poor egg farmers" then you're the exact customer that they want. Here's a quick recap of the article:

Oh dear, we don't know how it happened but the demand for eggs is outstripping supply, it'd be a pity if we started people hoarding eggs the way they did with pasta and toilet paper! And it's all due to eggs being one of the cheaper sources of protein available now that all prices are rising and so we'd better justify raising prices on eggs, too. Oh why oh why do our customers want so much protein anyway? 

UPDATE: I noticed that commercials exhorting customers to use eggs and more eggs and more eggs,  which leads me to wonder if they're serious about any "consistent customer experience" other than the distinct sensation of being conned, bent over, and shafted soundly...

Well, that's a paraphrase but anyway - have a read and then my incisive take on the situation... 😺😹

The Panic Button

Here's a section from the article, interspersed with observations:

Australian Eggs managing director . . . said there was “clearly a gap between egg supply and demand at present, but this seems to be mainly demand driven”.

If the same number or more are being produced and people aren't buying more then this demand MUST be manufactured. (Cue warehouse with eggs. Like they do with meat and fruit and vegetables.)

“Australia’s population is growing, and . . .  people are looking to more affordable proteins to get food on the table,” he said.

So - the MD is complicit. He wants you to believe that the entire egg production industry suddenly forgot to take population growth into account, after decades of it being a common factor they've always considered. They want to make the "more affordable proteins," less affordable. - For you and me, not them. 

“This is contributing to stronger demand for eggs than anticipated and the industry will have to play catch up to fill the gap.”

"Catch up?" As I just said, if population increase demand had been properly taken care of (and I believe - despite voicing a suspicion in my last paragraph - that in all likelihood it + WAS) then either supermarkets have figured out a way to drive customers into and egg-hoarding toilet-paper-storing frenzy - or - the more simple answer - they've been stockpiling eggs to create demand. (Cue warehouse with eggs. Like they do with meat and fruit and vegetables.)

According to Australian Eggs, a member-owned non-profit that provides marketing and research and development for Australian egg farmers, supply hasn’t faltered, with an average of 18.5 million eggs produced each day and 6.5 billion a year.

And while I hate to cast aspersions on these Stewards of Scrambled, Soft-boiled, Scotched, Sandwich, and Sunny-side-up spheroids, it's also been known for these Stalwarts to Sometimes Sneakily Stash in order to drive up prices. (Cue warehouse with eggs. Like they do with meat and fruit and vegetables.)

“There might be a bit of competition for eggs, but we are a long way from the COVID scenario,” Mr McMonnies said.

“Even patchy shelves have eggs on them, and consumers that need eggs will be able to get them.”

Okay that sounds like a cue to start stampedes. Ignore them, just buy what you need when you need. And if you so desperately need that protein - cook with dried chickpeas and beans occasionally, they're not bad, and add a lot of other nutrients to your diet as well. Meanwhile back to The BS Castle: 

Supermarkets point to increased costs in production and poor weather as a reason for recent egg shortages, despite an increase in supply in recent months after a difficult 18 months for the industry.

"Despite an increase in supply" ???????? How many question marks do I have to put after that to make it stand out like dog doings in an egg carton? If there's "increased supply" then what? - they're blaming greedy shoppers? ("Oh not you, Sir or Madam. YOU are our valued customer. But you know those other ones, the ones in poverty and hunger. Their cheapness and greed know no bounds.")

A Coles spokesperson said the supermarket was continuing to monitor supply and was working hard with suppliers to improve availability for customers.

No. No they're not. The previous paragraph from the article makes it clear that it's time to "Cue warehouse with eggs. Like they do with meat and fruit and vegetables." Not ALL the shrinkage of egg stocks is down to those greedy hungry slimebags that are just trying to cheap out on their protein supplies. (In fact, the supermarkets' shameless price gouging has put those people into the bracket where they can't afford meat protein any more.) Nope - but expect to be buying shitty eggs that have been carefully managed from room temperature to the PRECISE temperature at which eggs can be stored for years, and then stored for years to be sold when a new price shift happens. 

What reasons could they have to do all that? 

I'm talking about things like this: The supermarket giants' spokespersons have said in the past that they have enough frozen meat in their warehouses to allow them to supply demand for up to thirty years. Yep, you heard that right, meat can be safely stored for decades if your food scientists have done their research and know the PRECISE temperature at which meat will store forever, know the PRECISE length of time to spend in gradually reducing the temperature of that meat until it hits optimum temperature, and if you can keep the variations of temperature to less than a degree or two, then Farmer Brown's old Bessie can become practically immortal.

The same goes for a LOT MORE produce than you may think. And now you might remember a story that came up around a decade ago about a few tons of mystery meat in China that had been moved between coolrooms and freezers - for over thirty years!!! - and that was still being added to many food products before the authorities finally destroyed it when they discovered it. And you might think "Why the hell does my supermarket want to do something so seemingly shonky?"

And so I can tell you why they do it. For instance, in 1900, prime rump steak was around sixpence a pound. I can't recall where I spotted that little factoid but it seems about right, and would mean that a kilo at the time would have cost you around about a shilling. A shilling from 1900 would be the equivalent of $4.50 - $5.00 today. But a kilo of of prime rump is now about $22/kg. 

In 1901 terms, it's as if that kilo of meat had gone up by a factor of almost five times. And I'm being a bit conservative with estimating inflation, which has accelerated much faster in the latter half of the last hundred years. So now it can be explained:

Supermarket buys 100 tons of rump steak in 1990 at $350 a ton, and can sell it at about $700 a ton at 1990 prices. But if they "permafreeze" half of it back then and were to sell it now, they'll get $1,200 a ton for it. And if they can also create an artificial stampede for it, $2,000 a ton. Those are attractive margins. 

How do I know they'd actually do this?

Because we're talking about supermarkets that will sell you an apple that's been meticulously coolroom warehoused for several years without mentioning how long it's been in storage. That buy just the milk solids of ten kilolitres of milk from the dairy farmer, then store five kilolitres and water the rest down to ten kilolitres of "fresh milk." 

Nope - No eggs anywhere!

And yes - they make no secret of this, saying they do things like that to provide a "consistent quality of product for the consumer" - without mentioning that they're also magically doubling their income along the way AND keeping stocks of freeze-dried milk solids as a backup so that when the dairy farmers get too uppity on price they can just drop their contracts for a year or two and keep supplying milk but now with an apparently justified price increment "due to those greedy farmers" as well... 

Do you understand this? Things like computer chips age out - not because they degrade but because progress overtakes them and so they date pretty quickly. New chips and components come along that are smaller and faster and draw less power and provide more functions, and the warehouse full of last year's top mobile phone processor chips? Well, best luck trying to move them this year with the new teraflop gigacore processors selling for the same price or cheaper.

Meat, milk, eggs, fruit, vegetables, and flour. sugar, and salt on the other hand are pretty much immortal when preserved in cool rooms and microcontrolled freezers. And so, supermarkets must be finding that building freezing facilities and storage facilities pays for itself otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. And their profits are our costs...

Your Takeaway:

Don't believe the hype. Don't stockpile eggs. There's only so far that the supermarkets can push a shorting of eggs, and if people don't pay their inflated prices, they'll be stuck with egg. In stores, in warehouses, and on their faces (one hopes) - so share this post, share it share it share it and the more people see it the fewer gullible victims there'll be to be ripped off.

Share This Article Share This Article Share This Article !!!

BTW: 

Here's a little list of ways you can have eggs: 

• Scrambled eggs
• Sunny-side up
• Soufflé
• Shakshuka
• Scotch eggs
• Spanish omelette
• Strata
• Shirred eggs
• Soft-boiled eggs
• Spaghetti carbonara
• Scotch egg roll
• Sausage and egg casserole
• Scotch egg pie
• Sambal telur (Indonesian dish)
• Scrambled egg sandwich
• Scrambled egg burrito
• Scrambled egg wrap
• Scrambled egg muffin
• Smoked salmon eggs Benedict
• Spinach and feta omelette
• Spinach and mushroom frittata
• Spanish tortilla
• Scrambled egg tacos
• Scotch egg curry
• Scotch egg salad
• Shrimp and egg fried rice
• Smoked salmon scramble
• Spinach and cheese strata
• Spanish-style baked eggs
• Spinach and goat cheese omelette

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I'm Not A Fascist, But

 

... would we even recognise it for what it is, these days? 

I like Eco's thinking, and have followed it through the Rose, the Pendulum, and Numero and have sort of nibbled at the other four books and I'm aware he has some 20-30 nonfiction works at least, (Actually, here's a biblio of Eco.) I remember reading The Name Of The Rose after whetting my appetite with Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code (And here are his books) had my interest all piqued, and my father suggested I might like to read a "better class of fiction" as he called it. It was, I found and read Foucault's Pendulum and then started opportunistically picking up Eco books in libraries whenever I lived near one.

Now there's a piece on OpenCulture about Eco's experiences with fascism and I've extracted the fourteen features of fascism according to Eco:

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

This abridged list (available in full at The New York Review of Books) comes to us from Kottke, by way of blogger Paul Bausch, who writes “we have a strong history of opposing authoritarianism. I’d like to believe that opposition is like an immune system response that kicks in.” -- 

https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html 

And the article is right - we've satirised Fascism so much in the last decades that it's no longer clear what Fascism is - so how can we even guard against it? It's a hot button topic for me, not because I have a history of bad experiences with Fascism but because I (and you and a large chunk of the world) are dealing with Fascist governments and treatment right now. Pick any of the 14 points above and then compare it with your government and politicians - and then get ready for that cold shiver . . .

Because no one of those points comes into our lives alone, but seeing just one of them should be enough to get your Spidey senses tingling. VERY tingly. Not a single one of those listed signs is good for society, for wellbeing, or for peaceful living. 

Tradition.
I can't even count how often right wing politicians bring out tradition as a reason for a particular action, a certain Law they want passed, or as a defence against some imagined evil about to pounce and destroy society. Their idea of a society, at any rate. Ironically enough, our RW party is opposing the indigenous population's having a voice in Parliament to allow their traditions to continue. "It's a disaster! We'll all be back to living in caves and throwing boomerangs if they have their way!" seems to be about as good as it gets.

BTW I've made and thrown boomerangs after listening to and practising with my indigenous schoolmates way back last century, I know how to fend for myself if I have to - and I then spent a good life getting into technology, electronics, communications, IT, newspaper publishing, community radio, and everything I'm doing nowadays. And I can still make a spear or boomerang and probably use it... 

But of course OUR tradition is far more traditional than any tradition THEY could have. Mum, beer, and meat pies, mate - 'Straya was founded on those!

Rejection of Modernism
Oh wow have I ever landed on the wrong side of the Fascists there, hey? I live for tech and tech solutions. I think science on the whole makes life much much better, I think people are coping better with the technology to manage their lives and environments, and - eventually - figure out how to manage their lives with it.

"If only we could go back to the good old days!" is their plaint, but take away: the guns and the medicine - oh and the safe water and food, the housing that wasn't freezing and damp in winter and hot and filled with wildlife in summer - and you'll have a riot on your hands.

Interestingly enough this is also A Thing with some non-Fascist people now too - I'm working on an article about AI, GPT, AGI, the Arts, and the future of work in general. Because this new advance is the work of the devil. Or Fascists. No not those Fascists, these fascists. No, not like that. Nazis. Or something.

But let's have mining and factories and land clearing because we want to have money to buy the latest technology. But then let's not get that latest technology - because who knows where that'll end? Look at how destructive disastrous and polluting mining and power generation are - this new tech stuff may end up being wayyyyy woooorrrrse! Augh!

Action, Not Thinking
This is pretty self-evident. And stupid. If we'd thought more about (for the sake of being current, let's use the example of) AI, and GPT in particular before acting to make money off it hand over fist but before we've even thought about how that was going to affect us, maybe we wouldn't be in this situation where no-one really knows anything, no-one knows what's next, and no-one thought about consequences.

But the same applied to DNA, GM, encryption, surveillance, and a host of other technologies where the most Left-wing of inventors and scientists started getting dollar signs in their eyes and said "you know what? Fuck it, we'll make a few bucks and then a few more cleaning up the mess!" and with that they slipped silently across the Divide... 

It's the Geeks/Jocks situation, just with more grown-up names . 

The next two are related -
Disagreement is treason, especially when it's
Us and Them and They're different. 
This is what every cult, every religion, and every ruling class has relied on, it's us and our way or them and treason, where do you stand? Boomerangs or submarines? Come on, you have to decide if we keep you or kill you!

And that's the other aspect of Fascism - there's really no "us" or "them." Everyone else is a "them." In the end I'll kill everyone in town, then in my church group, then my family - before they get me. Because that's another aspect of Fascismo - it's very insecure and afraid. 

Social Frustration
Why do some of the girls prefer smart geeks to me? I'm a great physical specimen, I can (or already have) father lots of kids and not sick around for any of them - hey! - I'm a gift to the planet's gene pool! Whaddya mean what's the square root of nine? Are you having a shot at me, other person? One a these days, mate. I promise ya a knuckle sammich. 

Also, I am a goddamn bonafide HERO. That's what it means to be a Fascists RW guy. So that includes the Everybody is educated to become a hero part of the signs, too.

And it also explains the obsession with a plot part.
Life's tough, it's way tougher if you're stupid. Therefore, it's hard to work out if someone's on your side or not - better to assume that everyone including your family might just be against you. Including you, other person... I got my eye on you...

The enemy is both strong and weak.
And you never know just how good the other person is. You ridicule them for being weak but at the same time if you're bullying them then they're a "worthy and skillful opponent" so that you can't be seen as a bully. 

Don't ever give an inch, stay strong!
The next plank. You can't make peace, you just have to keep on punchin' on. That's the next thing. Don't stop being against that other, because if you stop, you might have to talk, and if you talk, there's a chance that this clever and powerful enemy will gain the upper hand over you or at least point out to you how stupid and pitiful you actually are. And yeah - they'd totally do that, totally. They're other, ya know?

Of course, at the same time as drumming up protection against that enemy that's both to be pitied and yet is stronger than you are and might bully you if you let them, don't ever cut any slack for the weaker people in your camp. Contempt for the weak. But not us - no, we're not weak, just that the other might be stronger than us and they'd surely show us no mercy so we need to weed out the weeds. Hehehe - geddit? Geddit? 

Machismo and weaponry.
Yes, Fascism seems also to be ideally suited to males. Funny thing that, seeing as how males have since almost forever been the ones that take charge and denigrate and depersonalise all others. Yes there've been matriarchal societies but we're not living in a time like that. Also - weapons are the only real way to generate money and progress in other technologies, and money is important in the current time because we haven't yet managed to get back to intrinsic values yet. 

Selective populism. 
Vox pops are a fairly recent thing (TV as a concept has only been around for a century and a half, and has only had wide reach for maybe the last sixty or seventy years) and purport to represent the Vox Populi but through exerting control over the media you can control just which vox pops hit the airwaves. As has been demonstrated over and over, how you present a scene affects how the audience perceives it, so you have in effect an always-on propaganda publishing facility. 

Ur-Fascist Newspeak. 
And with this, that explains commercials and news and most sitcoms and soaps perfectly does it not? "This is how WE live, this is what we consider NORMAL, and this is how we expect YOU to behave too. Or become the other."

That's a wrap?

I don't know. There's such a lot tied up in this - it's how our governments keep acting even as they condemn Fascists in other countries - and that right there should already be a warning sign flashing on the page. (Oh how I miss the blink attribute...😹)

The thing with AI, AGI, GPT, Art, Work.

We don't learn. A few smart people realise there's an issue and try to raise awareness, but it gets swallowed up in opposing propaganda. Then when it's obvious there are gonna be some changes due to the new issue, everyone loses their minds, but by then the genie's out the bottle the cat's out the bag and the horse has bolted. 

So now the thing with AI, AGI, GPT, Art, and Work.

People who weren't in the know on the progress being made in AI (which includes almost everyone except the people doing AI and a few diehard geeks) can't have foreseen the schemozzle that it's causing. And some of the people involved probably had good intentions and high morals. But it only takes a firing, or a very aggressive boss pulling you aside and laying down the law, to make things spin out of control. 

Those of us watching it happen - I can't speak for anyone else, but I personally found it to be a Good Thing. But I'm an idealist, a peace-mongering hippie, and I tend to believe that people are smart enough to manage. 

Help Me Manage

Go back up to the banner above and click on "donate" and "subscribe" and help me with my hippie hopes...

Two Government Wins

 Two By Two from RenewEconomy  today. RenewEconomy (all links will be in the blog article for the "PTEC3D On Air" podcast listeners) has a real focus on renewables and sustainable and I do recommend subscribing to their newsletter.

(No - I'm not affiliated/associated in any way with them, I'm giving an unsolicited testimonial.)

The first two articles of theirs are to do with the two sides of a coin: setting an emissions target, and then curbing the fossil fuel's dying snarling grabbing attempts to stay alive - by gouging their customers. 

Who'll Think Of The Poor Corporations ?

I'm glad to say that I predicted this a long time ago (I'll have a link if I can ever find any of those posts) that the fossil fuel industries would experience starvation just like any other animal, and snap and bite at everything they can reach - and in this case it's their customers - in an effort to prolong their life.

And it stands to reason, right? The Fossil Fue Cartel (FFC) as I call them, is a corporation. Check out definition 2. - a body formed and authorized by law to act as a single person ... in other words, the "corp" refers to "a single body" but for the purposes of the law they treat the corporation as a human individual not just a body. Pity. They should have treated it as a predatory wild animal...

No-one (I think?) has analysed corporations as having biological behaviours. (Actually, I'm wrong. There's at least this handy dandy guide for corporations analysed this way. So we do have a precedent.) But we all know that a wild animal is most dangerous when it's dying, and the FFC is no exception.

And it's important, as your government is setting decarbonisation targets, emissions targets, etc; To email your politicians and make then aware of what the predictable reactions from the FFC are going to be. 

Notice that as EVs are gaining in popularity, the FFC has already raised fuel prices far above what could reasonably be expected. It's not going to get better because they are losing their bottom line, and if they can't sell as much fuel in the future, they need to fill their bellies now. 

Also note that we're all moving towards reducing the use of "virgin" plastic, that is, plastic produced from fossil fuel feedstock. Also please note that plastic is a FOREVER kind of material, like glass and aluminium - and note that we have highly efficient ways to recycle those and so save using virgin materials as much. Of course plastic is eminently recyclable, and of course that is not what the FFC wants because this is the second-most-lucrative market for their product. 

So these sorts of shenanigans are to be expected, and we need to prime our politicians to look out for US and not the FFC...

Now To Energy And Ducks

Western Australia is a thinly-spread but sizeable population, and to their credit, their power transmission system has always struck me as being quite well-maintained. In most States, the energy companies charge "service" fees that they then don't use to service their power grid, and they have power outages regularly. In WA, there seemed to always be crews out working on the system grid, and so outages were fewer than here in Victoria. 

But also the State lagged behind in renewable/sustainable energy, and relied on a lot of gas turbine plants to tame the "Duck Curve" as it's called. Check out Wikipedia's Duck Curve article. As I haven't been in WA for over a decade, I can't comment to their uptake of wind and solar energy generation but I imagine it'd be quite substantial as we have sun and wind aplenty there. 

Their first grid battery is slowly going online and for all I know may already be in full production by now. It's also worth noting that each time we buy a battery system, it breaks previous records both locally and often internationally as well. 

Australians also (I think?) broke records for speed of mobile phone adoption and distribution, quickly realising the advantages of this means of communication over the wired phone system, and we're also behind a lot of the technology we've been buying back in the products we import. We're so good at innovating and so bad at capitalising on our innovations...

Help Me With My Innovation

Go to the banner above and click the "Donate" link. Also click the subscribe link to receive my once-a-week Friday newsletter with all the latest posts in it. For podcast listeners, that's https://ko-fi.com/ptec3d and https://ohaicorona.com/teds-news-letter respectively. For readers, you can find me on Spotify at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ptec3d and also on Amazon, with Google Podcasts and more coming as I find the time to register with all of them. 

Dust. It isn't fattening. It's deadly.

Please feel free to sign this petition. 

They say it's a "...debilitating and sometimes fatal but preventable lung disease..." but what they don't say is that it's also incurable, just like asbestosis and mesothelioma. 

They also don't say that it's a dust we shouldn't even be creating, nor that other dust can also cause lung diseases, nor that the environment does depend on this latter, non-man-made, dust because it's in the form of dust that microbes and other organisms are able to absorb the nutrients, but all these things are true too.

So yes - do sign the petition because it may save someone from a lifetime of crippling disability and misery. But also remember all the other things about our planet that we should be balancing and managing better. 

Be Earthlings! And keep the bastards honest!

And please visit my banner at the top of the page and donate and subscribe!

Progress Report, April:

Garden is slowing way down.

Tomatoes are still growing but no longer ripening as fast. I'm needing to post a few observations because the climate is definitely having an effect and I want to sort out a better plan of attack for growing more food in 2023/24. The gardens as they stand now have only been in place since spring/summer 2020 and it takes a few years to dial things in and get new soil working properly.

Today's Twodays Haul:

The State Of Food Growing

The collecting basket's about as full as any other two days' worth of fruit, but far fewer are fully ripe. Summer days getting short, also cloudy because this place loves clouds and humidity. Less sunlight == less ripening. I've also been trimming away any new growing shoots wherever I could find them, and have been cutting out the odd vine that no longer has fruit and is drying off. 

Time to mention a thing: If you want the salad tomatoes for salad, grab them at the orange-with-a-bit-of-green stage and let them ripen in the warmth and light in the kitchen, they'll have a far tangier flavour. If you want to add them to tomato passata, sauce, or paste, get them at the stage of being red but just before softening. When they get that ripe the flavour is bland and sweet - perfect for sauces.

The pear-shaped tomatoes are paste tomatoes. Same thing applies, but also as they ripen the flesh to liquid ratio changes hence why they're called paste tomatoes. They also taste better if left to ripen and then turn into sauce etc.

There are a few green chilli peppers up there too - I've no idea what variety they were so I'll be (CAUTIOUSLY!!! - and yes, thereby hangs a tale, and its name is Rocoto chillies . . .) testing them soon for making a chilli sauce/relish/pickle/whatever. 

Timings And Re-timings:

The tomatoes, chillies, and basils were planted between Christmas and January. That was way too late I suspect. Weather's strange these days. So I'm going to have a bit of a tabulation here:

• Salad Tomatoes: Did the best this year but there's still kilos on the vine that will now have to become fried green tomatoes, green tomato relish, and green tomato chutney. I estimate that it's produced well north of 12kg to date and there's another 3kg of green left. 

• Paste Tomatoes: These didn't start to bud and ripen until much later, and there are several reasons for that. I'll probably have to add the several kilos it produced to the green tomato products.

• Rocoto Chilli: This one was also a bit sparse and unproductive but same reasons as the paste tomatoes. I know the issue and I'll get on top of it next year. Also, it peaked early with only a few fruit.

• Unknown Chilli: This one started late as chillis do and is now doing reasonably well, I also know the reasons for that.

• Basils: These could also have started a few weeks earlier and been way more productive, but that's also my mistake. The Greek basil has been a surprise runner in the field and I hope the plant will overwinter and run away again next year only far more so. 

Things are getting warm earlier so soils are ready to grow things but the days still have limited daylight. So the trick is going to be to figure out when's the best time to put plants in the ground so their roots will be nice and warm but not so early that photosynthesis lags behind and they grow spindly. Luckily most of the plants I want to grow have been bred to thrive in a variety of climates but I don't think any breeders thought seriously about how climate change was going to change how the plants need to behave in order to thrive.

There are seriously going to be so many crop failures because many agricultures are locked in stasis. Expect rice to get expensive because farms that have been expressly set up for rice are now outside of rice's climactic comfort zone, and the places that are now in those climate bands aren't anywhere near able to switch from the crops the used to grow there a decade ago to rice. Agile Farming is going to become a buzzword soon, mark my words.

I'm betting that I'll change my most successful crop varieties every few years here, and so preserving and keeping everything is going to be a thing if people want to enjoy a famine-free life. 

ODD THOUGHT OF THE DAY: 
What if all those ancient calendars were the shamans and priests of their eras' way of trying to figure out why the crops they'd been recommending to plant "on the full moon of the Coronation" didn't work so good any more, i.e. just frantic attempts to keep themselves looking infallible while changing climate patterns just overwhelmed and overthrew them? 

Mistakes Were Made: 

• I allowed the plants to be planted by a gardener and so they ended up in the wrong locations. 

• I also relied on garden-centre/Bunnings-type seedlings and they still start them way too late for today's climate so they're behind the 8-ball from the get-go.

• I didn't plan well enough for layout or anything and so I've mucked up a lot of opportunities this year. 

One of the biggest oversights was to not really really take account of the changing climate pattern. I've known it's happening for decades but I still have trouble shaking off the old "conventional wisdom" fallacy. It's a blind spot I share with almost everyone in agriculture: "Welp, this is how it was grampa's day and dad's day and while I was kid - except for that drought of '73 of course. Oh and the drought of '84, and that one in '95..." - and it's a blindside we all seem somehow still stuck with, just like those shamans and priests when they couldn't just go with what their senses were telling them. 

(And yes I will fight people on this - neolithic people that did farm, didn't just all know exactly when to put in a crop or how. Look at us today: Once upon a time in my life I could do lightning long maths in my head. Now, I can still do it if I can be bothered when there are calculators and sites that calculated out formulas for you instantly. When I want to know the recipe for khushari I grab my phone. In the same way, those hominids would let their shaman tell them when the right time was, how deep to plant, etc. Yes there were always some exceptional ones but we are and always have been economical with our brains.)

Another one was that I felt too unwell to go and site the plants myself, if I had, there'd have been a bit less competition for sunlight. The paste tomatoes were too close to and behind the salad toms (and partly this is because my beds aren't really deep or wide so space is at a premium and needs to be carefully managed) and the chillis also ended up behind the cherry (salad) tomato plant.

Feeling unwell meant that I didn't get the beds overwintered properly and so there wasn't much cover to begin with, and that meant that I couldn't get in some plants that I really wanted there to shelter the new season's summer crops.

And because of that lack of cover I had to keep the cat screens in place for way too long, and they got grown into by the plants, which restricted my access for pruning back and shaping. And that's played merry hell with my ability to harvest - and weed. It also contributed a lot to the runaway successful ability of one plant to overgrow and outcompete everything else. But I can't predict illness and so I guess the best I could do is what ended up happening.

This year is going to start around the time I started on the Not So Bastard Gate last year, i.e. around October/November but this year it'll be with warm sunny spots for seedling raising. Luckily I think I'll have a perfect spot - if the landlord's plans for the driveway don't muck it all up... If not, then I'm going to be kind of stonkered. ("Stonkered", in the sense of 2nd meaning, i.e. "foiled." Time to bring back some old expressions, I say!)

If the driveway spot becomes unavailable then I have two more choices, one behind the NSBG and one which is currently not available but would become so if landlords' Plan A goes into effect.

Team Ted Goals:

• Next year I need to plant out most seedlings about a month earlier. Given this was mostly December, that means way more work will need to start in November this year.

• In order to have seedlings to plant out, I'll need to start a lot of them in September and then thin them out to the best of the lot. 

• That means working out a sun-warm sheltered spot for the plants (see a few paragraphs back) and that's not going to be easy but I'll put my thinking cap on soon. If things here work out to plan I may have the perfect spot.

• When planting out, tomatoes will have to go at the back of the beds on the east side, front of the beds on the south side. The SE side is going to be tough to call.

• I don't think I'll bother with chillies next year because they were fine but they were a rescue, I'll now have enough there to supply us for a few years, and besides sriracha and so forth are cheap to buy.

• Much more basil will need to go in among the tomato rows and parsley too behind/under/among. Any spring peas or beans will need to be catty-corner to the tomatoes and have a wire trellis to keep them to themselves. 

• I also have plans for gherkin cucumbers and eggplant and that may make 2024 a bumper year for a 5.5m x 80cm total of garden beds. 

• Training tomato plants to an almost espalier pattern and really training peas and beans to their trellises might be a good thing too. 

Also, by next year I'll actually have the reticulation system working all the way around and dialled in for the plants. Programming is getting harder as my brain slows - it takes me weeks to get into "The Zone" where I retain the flow of a program and how to integrate a circuit with that code and then how to integrate that product into its real life environment, and every time I had a good Zone going, something came along to blow it up. Hope for better focus this winter.

Money: I had a survey company I worked with which paid around $20/mth to buy parts, and they did the dirty and ditched on us and reformed as another company which would now only pay me $5 for the same amount of work if I'm lucky, and that makes it just no longer worth the long hours I was putting in. So now I have no way to buy thing other than saving a few bucks from my pension here and there, and most of those bucks pay for web hosting, domain names, and minor fees, with now nothing left in the tank for the retic design nor any recycling gear. (Which will end up on Instructables and on my blog suite as a free design, just not as soon as I could have done them before...)

So a quick tap on Paypal, Ko-Fi, or Liberapay would always be appreciated.

I have my excuses - in the form of several surgeries, copious amounts of winter SADS because we've had a really stressful two and a half years what with new landlords, moving garden plots to allow them to split the block, having to somehow move six out of almost a dozen garden beds in the process, putting up with fences going up and a house being moved into the new division, demolition and new building going on across the road, half a dozen plan changes by the landlords that each required (as Deadpool would say) maximum effort in each case to just retain the things we had in place, and illnesses of various sorts and durations and caring for one another at times. 

Currently the "malaise du jour" is Influenza A, something I've had before - almost thirty years ago - and even back then it knocked my on my ass for five weeks. This time, my lovely wife has it also, and she is finding it much harder going than I am so I'm the de facto nurse. But enough for you to know that the drainer full of tomatoes at the top of this article cost me about 20 minutes afterwards of trying to stop sweating and feeling like I'd just had a steamroller run over me. Wife's pulled a few muscles just from coughing and is laid up with heat packs and hot lemon drinks and analgesics, getting old really sucks. 

For The Moment:

Before the weather turns wintery I'll have to put in broad beans, some other beans and peas, onions, garlic. I'll have to top up soil in some garden beds due to pulling up root balls and "cat activity." 

I have time to work out a trellis system for vining plants, and (as mentioned before) need to set up a spot for early seedling raising. Being a very humid coastal region I think conventional portable greenhouses are going to be a problem so I'll try and work on a 12V / 24V heated insulated platform, a fan, and some clear plastic to make the magic happen, and lots of small nursery pots. There's my next project for a rainy day - and luckily, from now on we'll have a lot of those. 

I'm also refining my systems for protecting plantings from the ravages of our felines, and our felines from my necessary use of at least some snail pellets. Snails have also been loving the warmer and wetter overall climate, and much as I hate chemicals, the beer traps didn't work as well and couldn't keep up, and most other "remedies" are actually "bullshit" and don't work. 

I'll start a calendar where I can start placing observations, experiments, and results. I'll look for a shareable calendar and link it from here. For now, this blog post is my memo to myself more than anything else, and I hope you too get something out of it.

Seed Viability, Testing, Using.

In which we look at testing common 'dried beans and pulses' to see if we can perhaps plant and grow them. Spoiler Alert: That description 'dried beans and pulses' literally describes the concept of 'seeds'. 

I still haven't gotten around to the pictures yet, but here goes the basic principle: 

How To Test For Viability

I've done this more times than some people have had hot homecooked meals and I'm sooo kicking myself for not doing anything about taking pictures. But my broad beans are due to go in soon so perhaps I'll run a viability test and take pictures. 

The basic idea that I've tried on all my dried pulses etc all go a bit like this:

• I get hold of the disposable trays that meat, cakes, and some vegetables come on and clean them while doing my dishes. You can use any small flat tray with a depth of 1cm or a bit more as long as it's non-toxic. 
• I get hold of a roll of paper towel. This is pretty much THE medium to use, facial tissues are sometimes treated with aromatics or chemicals and so might spoil results. 
• I pick out some of the seeds (dried beans, lentils, etc) and set up a tray apiece for them. I number the trays with a texta somewhere visible outside.
• To prepare a tray, I put a few millimetres of water in the bottom of the tray, then fold paper towels to a size that pretty much precisely fits in the bottom, stopping when I've put about ten layers down. 
• Now place ten or twenty of your test subjects in neat rows on the folded paper towel, and fold up another four layers of paper towel and place on top of the seeds and (hopefully) soggy bottom paper. Make sure the top layer is just damp, not too drowned.
• Write down in your notebook the origin and type of the subject seeds, the tray number, and then put in a cool dark place. 
• Every few days, check in on your experiments and make sure they haven't dried out, drizzle a bit of water on if they're too dry, and watch for bulges that might indicate that seeds are sprouting.
• When it's obvious many seeds have sprouted, give it a few more days for late sprouters, and then: 
• Carefully lift the top paper off and count how many seeds have sprouted and how many haven't. This gives you the viability percentage of the seeds and now you know how many seeds to plant if you want a minimum of a certain number of plants. Write that down in the notebook so you'll know for next time.

If you're desperate for seeds, you may be able to cut the paper towel and plant the squares containing viable sprouts but generally I just plant new seeds at the right time. But doing this I've planted mung beans, poona peas (aka field beans), kidney beans, white beans, soya beans, chickpeas, and a few more. 

A Cool Money-Saving Note:

I also have some food-grade plastic containers with loose fitting lids and I often throw in a double layer of mung beans or poona peas and so forth, cover them to almost double that depth with water, and leave them in a cool place for a week or two. The seeds sprout and make a great addition to sandwiches, salads, stir fries, and other cooking. A bag of mung beans costs a few bucks and if you cook them up you can get perhaps half a dozen meals from them. If you sprout them, you easily triple that or more. And you'd pay top dollar for a tray of sprouts at the supermarket, whereas that bag of beans was relatively cheap. 

Also, some things like poona  peas, mung beans, and radishes make a great green manure for your soil - plant them by the handful, allow then to get 30cm tall, and spade-dig them back into the soil.

Now for some notes about the seeds your supermarket sells as drygoods.

Drygoods Or Seed Stock?

Almost all those dried goods are seeds. Red beans, red kidney beans, great northern beans, white beans, broad beans, chickpeas, mung beans, and some lentils and seeds are just dried naturally. This is how beans grow in nature - the pods and beans dry on the plant, then the pods split from drying out and seeds fall out, and hopefully some will get a purchase in the soil and a new plant or twenty will come up. Things like wheat are sometimes viable but also many times they've been blasted clean and may not be viable at all. 

Birdseed is often a good source of viable seed. Out of a kilo bag of sunflower seeds for parrots I was able to grow a decent patch of black sunflowers. Seeds of those sunflowers were okay to eat, but the whole plants from roots to heads were also a great feed for the poultry and by rationing them out they supplemented the chicken feed for the rest of the year. Bunnies and goats would also enjoy the plants and even a few seeds here and there as a treat. So don't overlook stuff like that. 

Some online seed catalogues sell things like alfa-alfa seeds in bulk, and they make great salad sprouts or fully grown feed for the herbivores. Your local seed libraries often have seeds. And all of these can be tested for viability as outlined above and grown. 

Things like radishes also grow well from seed, and if you let a few plants go rather than digging them up, you can let their pods dry, then save the seeds for the next crop. Rocket lettuce will surprise you by growing to a metre tall and setting pods full of seeds too - and yes they're viable and easy to grow for greens, micro-greens, and more seed. Carrots are an exception, they seed on a two year cycle, so you should leave them in the ground or over-winter them somewhere they won't get frosts, and let them go the second year and collect the seeds once the plant dies back. 

Potatoes themselves are all you need to grow more potatoes, and to be honest, they're even a pest in my garden, no matter how carefully I dig the beds over and remove all the little Kipfler spuds, they come back year after year and if I'm honest I'm actually quite happy to have them in the kitchen. 

Silver beet and rainbow chards will really eagerly go to seed if you let them, and if you just let them have their way they'll grow absolute jungles of new plants every year so you can then cut back the old ones and let the cycle repeat with the young ones. And as with so many of these plants, the poultry and herbivores (if you keep any) will enjoy the trimmings, cuttings, and spare seed heads. 

Once I have beans or peas planted and growing happily, I'll mark out one plant or one vine for seed, and not pick the pods of that marked section. I sometimes loosely wrap a piece of wool around that vine section so I can tell it apart from the rest. I then just let those vines stay in the garden until they're dried and the pods are dry - now I have seed for next year. 

E.g. I started with about 15 broad bean seeds from a store-bought packet seven years ago, and we've had beans enough for a dozen meals that I cooked directly from each planting since then, or that I blanched and froze, or kept as dried beans by picking them before they started to dry off, podded, and let dry in a hanging dehydrating tent then stored. I could also have placed them in a dehydrator and done the same. 

And I also ended up with around a hundred or so beans for seed that first year, which I swapped with others and kept a few to plant the next crop and the next, keeping about forty seed beans. At this stage they've actually gone for five generations in those seven years and I'm only just now going to buy a new pack and plant them just to revitalise the line. 

But I could as easily have kept on keeping seed and mixing generations to keep the gene pool mixing a bit. After all, these big boi seeds can stay viable for quite a few years. 

A seed box can be something like a couple of shoeboxes, with seeds in folded-up paper towel envelopes marked with the seed and year. Once you've raided the pantry drygoods and the local garden clubs and seed libraries, you can keep planting year after year, saving new seeds every year. Just keep the box in the coolest and driest place in the house and keep the newest seeds and sow the oldest ones and you'll be golden. 

Ornamentals

To me, there's nothing as beautiful and ornamenting as a good healthy crop of edibles and herbs and fruit - but there are also people (my beloved among them) to whom the aesthetics of a garden are also important. Flowering plants also have seeds that can be saved in many cases, and they can be saved the same way, traded with other people for other varieties, and replanted. They're just beyond the limited scope of my article here, and I may find a few sources online and update this document here with those resources.

One More Thing

Please go to this page on my other blog and take the time to read it. I'm trying to make the world a better place again, a place where you can grow save and plant and not have to worry if the water and soil are safe for you to grow in, if the climate this year means you need to plant earlier or harvest earlier or if that plant will even grow in the heat this year, and - more importantly - if the children today will inherit a world where they too can enjoy gardening, seed saving, and seed procurement from unusual sources. I really urge you to go, take a look, and decide if you want to become a part of that movement.