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Could the Monsanto Protection Act get repealed?

by Natalia681 Posted on May 21, 2013

Could the Monsanto Protection Act get repealed?

By Claire Thompson

Food Democracy Now!

Smuggled into the bill President Obama signed to avert a government shutdown in March was a sneaky little rider called the “farmer assurance provision.” It’s since come to be known as the Monsanto Protection Act, being very assuring to the biotech giant, if no one else. It allows farmers to plant genetically modified crops before they’ve been declared safe by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in defiance of court orders suspending planting until environmental reviews can be completed.

Once food-advocacy groups and then the general public found out about the quietly passed provision, outcry against it spread, in the form of petitions and even rare displays of bipartisan solidarity. On Monday, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) announced that he’s introducing an amendment to the Senate version of the farm bill that would repeal the Monsanto Protection Act in its entirety.

“The Monsanto Protection Act is an outrageous example of a special interest loophole,” said Merkley in a press release. “This provision nullifies the actions of a court that is enforcing the law to protect farmers, the environment and public health. That is unacceptable.”

Twilight Greenaway explained the background of this special-interest loophole for Grist last year:

As it stands now, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) can suspend planting while the environmental impact of one of these crops is being assessed. Or that’s how it’s been in theory at least.

And it is what happened in 2007 when a federal judge overturned the USDA’s approval of GMO alfalfa, in response to a lawsuit filed by farmers and the Center for Food Safety. (Planting of alfalfa resumed again in 2011 when the USDA fully deregulated the crop.)

In the case of GMO sugar beets, another hotly contested crop, planting was supposed to be suspended, but by the point that suspension was ordered, the market had been cleared out and there were no longer enough non-GMO seeds. As we reported recently, “America faced the prospect of a 20-percent reduction in that year’s sugar crop. In response — and in defiance of the federal judge’s order — the USDA allowed farmers to plant GM sugar beets anyway.” Now, all this back and forth could be moot to most farmers (unless a crop is officially, finally deemed unsafe — and well, that hasn’t happened yet).

The problem with planting GMO crops before they’ve been proven safe is that doing so doesn’t only affect the fields in which they’re sown; cross-pollination is a common concern for farmers trying to practice sustainable agriculture and maintain their organic status in an industry dominated by GM seeds. Cross-pollination can even bring legal troubles for unsuspecting farmers, Tom Laskawy explains:

[I]f you’re a farmer, GMO seeds can literally blow in to your fields on the breeze or just the pollen from GMO crops can blow in (or buzz in via bees) and contaminate your organic or “conventional” fields. And if that happens, Monsanto or Syngenta or Bayer CropLife maintain the right to sue you as if you had illegally bought their seed and knowingly planted it.

In an appropriately Orwellian twist, the companies even call such accidental contamination by their products “patent infringement.”

Merkley’s amendment attempts to help the USDA cling to what small scraps of control it still has over the biotech industry. He plans to push for a floor vote on it, according to The Huffington Post. Stay tuned …

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Could the Monsanto Protection Act get repealed?

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Can we blame climate change for the tornado that took out Moore, Okla.?

by jiigy3e Posted on May 21, 2013

Can we blame climate change for the tornado that took out Moore, Okla.?

By Susie Cagle

It was a quiet year for tornadoes — until last week, that is. A string of twisters has ravaged the middle of the country over the past several days, culminating in a two-mile-wide tornado tearing up Moore, Okla., Monday afternoon. So far at least 37 people have been confirmed dead in Oklahoma, and that toll is expected to rise.

The weather has twisted a few of our fellow greenies on the internet into a tizzy. “Extreme storm, climate change, OMFG!” they cry. We almost had a seizure reading this missive from the Wonkette folks, and we’re fairly sure they had one while writing it.

But the science on tornadoes and climate change isn’t clear enough to OMFG about it just yet. As Grist’s John Upton reported recently, the number of twisters has been roller-coastering up and down from year to year. “It certainly feels like one of those boom-bust weather cycles that we expect from climate change. But there doesn’t appear to be any evidence directly linking the recent tornado cycle to global warming.”

The Associated Press wraps it up with this insight: “Will there be more or fewer twisters as global warming increases? There is no easy answer.”

“Most climate scientists believe that clearer answers will be forthcoming with better climate modeling tools — and patience,” according to the Huffington Post.

Post-Superstorm Sandy, we’ve entered a kind of fugue state when it comes to natural disaster, forgetting that there has been a long history of extreme weather events that sometimes have nothing to do with how much carbon is in our atmosphere. For as disastrous as Sandy was, be honest: You relished pointing out that climate change connection.

We really like to find reason in chaos, though, and we also like to blame things! At one point today there were several little kids trapped in the rubble of a building in Moore, Okla., that earlier today was their elementary school. If we can’t blame climate change, who can we blame?

Maybe scientists will conclude that this really is the fault of that atmospheric carbon. Maybe they won’t! For now, at least, the only thing I’ll be blaming for this mess is Sarah Palin. Because, you know.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Taxpayer Dollars Are Helping Monsanto Sell Seeds Abroad

by gwm6zjf3 Posted on May 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Nearly two decades after their mid-’90s debut in US farm fields, GMO seeds are looking less and less promising. Do the industry’s products ramp up crop yields? The Union of Concerned Scientists looked at that question in detail for a 2009 study. Short answer: marginally, if at all. Do they lead to reduced pesticide use? No; in fact, the opposite.

And why would they, when the handful of companies that dominate GMO seeds—Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow—are also among the globe’s largest pesticide makers? Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds have given rise to an upsurge of herbicide-resistant superweeds and a torrent of herbicides, while insects are showing resistance to its pesticide-containing Bt crops and causing farmers to boost insecticide use. What about wonder crops that would be genetically engineered to withstand drought or require less nitrogen fertilizer? So far, they haven’t panned out—and there’s little evidence they ever will.

Yet despite all of these problems, the US State Department has been essentially acting as of de facto global-marketing arm of the ag-biotech industry, complete with figures as high-ranking as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mouthing industry talking points as if they were gospel, a new Food & Water Watch analysis of internal documents finds.

The FWW report is based on an analysis of diplomatic cables, written between 2005 and 2009 and released in the big Wikileaks document dump of 2010. FWW sums it up: “a concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology overseas, compel countries to import biotech crops and foods that they do not want, and lobby foreign governments—especially in the developing world—to adopt policies to pave the way to cultivate biotech crops.”

The report brims with examples of the US government promoting the biotech industry abroad. Here are a few:

The State Department encouraged embassies to bring visitors—especially reporters—to the United States, which has “proven to be effective ways of dispelling concerns about biotech crops.” The State Department organized or sponsored 28 junkets from 17 countries between 2005 and 2009. In 2008, when the US embassy was trying to prevent Poland from adopting a ban on biotech livestock feed, the State Department brought a delegation of high-level Polish government agriculture officials to meet with the USDA in Washington, tour Michigan State University and visit the Chicago Board of Trade. The USDA sponsored a trip for El Salvador’s Minister of Agriculture and Livestock to visit Pioneer Hi-Bred’s Iowa facilities and to meet with USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack that was expected to “pay rich dividends by helping the Minister clearly advocate policy positions in our mutual bilateral interests.”

Another example: this 2009 cable, referenced in the FWW report, shows a State Department functionary casually requesting US taxpayer funds to to combat a popular effort to require labeling of GMO foods in Hong Kong—and boasting about successfully having done so in the past. Why focus on the GMO policy of a quasi-independent city? Hong Kong’s rejection of a mandatory labeling policy “could have influential spillover effects in the region, including Taiwan, mainland China and Southeast Asia,” the functionary writes, adding that her consulate had “intentionally designed anti-labeling programs other embassies and consulates” could use.

The report also shows how the State Department hotly pushed GMOs in low-income African nations—in the face of popular opposition. In a 2009 cable, FWW shows, the US embassy in Nigeria bragged that “U.S. government support in drafting pro-biotech legislation as well as sensitizing key stakeholders through a public outreach program” helped pass and industry-friendly law. Working with USAID—an independent US government agency that operates under the State Department’s authority—the State Department pushed similar efforts in Kenya and Ghana, FWW shows.

Yet, as FWW points out, in so aggressively pushing biotech solutions abroad, State is bucking against the global consensus of ag-development experts as expressed by the 2009 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a three-year project, convened by the World Bank and the United Nations and completed in 2008, to assess what forms of agriculture would best meet the world’s needs in a time of rapid climate change. The IAASTD took such a skeptical view of deregulated biotech as a panacea for the globe’s food challenges that Croplife America, the industry’s main industry lobbying group, saw fit to denounce it. The US government backed up the biotech lobby on this one—just three of the 61 governments that participated refused to sign the IAASTD: the Bush II-led United States, Canada, and Australia.

So why why are our corps of diplomats behaving as if they answered to Monsanto’s shareholders with regard to ag policy? My guess is GMO seed technology, dominated by Monsanto, as well as our towering crops corn and soy crops (which are at this point almost completely from GM seeds) are two of the few areas of global trade wherein the US still generates a trade surplus. The website of the State Department’s Biotechnology and Textile Trade Policy Division puts it like this:

In 2013, the United States is forecasted to export $145 billion in agricultural products, which is $9.2 billion above fiscal 2012 exports, and have a trade surplus of $30 billion in our agricultural sector.

I guess US presidents, Democratic and Republican alike, are bent on preserving and expanding that surplus. President Obama altered much about US foreign policy when he took over for President Bush in 2009; but he doesn’t seem to have changed a thing when it comes to pushing biotech on the global stage. And the impulse is not confined to the State Department. Back in 2009, when Obama needed to appoint someone to lead agriculture negotiations at the US Trade Office, he went straight to the ag-biotech industry, tapping the vice president for science and regulatory affairs at CropLife America, Islam A. Siddiqui, who still holds that post today.

Meanwhile, the State Department operates an Office of Agriculture, Biotechnology and Textile Trade Affairs, which exists in part to “maintain open markets for U.S. products derived from modern biotechnology” and “promote acceptance of this promising technology.” The office’s biotechnology page is larded with language that reads like boilerplate from Monsanto promo material: “Agricultural biotechnology helps farmers increase yields, enabling them to produce more food per acre while reducing the need for chemicals, pesticides, water, and tilling. This provides benefits to the environment as well as to the health and livelihood of farmers.”

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Taxpayer Dollars Are Helping Monsanto Sell Seeds Abroad

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VIDEO: 97 Percent of Climate Scientists Can’t Be Wrong

by Burt Bollman Posted on May 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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Telling Americans that scientists don’t agree is the classic climate denial strategy. It’s been over a decade since consultant Frank Luntz famously furnished the GOP with strategies to kill climate action during the Bush years, recommending in a leaked memo PDF: “you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.” Oh, yeah, and avoid truth: “A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.” It seems to have worked: Only a minority of Americans believes global warming is caused by humans: 42 percent, according to a 2012 Pew study.

That “consensus gap”, as it’s known, has proven fertile ground in which to sow resistance to climate action, says John Cook, a climate communications researcher from the University of Queensland in Australia. He has led the most extensive survey of peer-reviewed literature in almost a decade (published online this week in Environmental Research Letters). And what he found, just as in other attempts to survey the field, is that scientists are near unanimous.

A group of 24 researchers signed up to the challenge via Cook’s website, Skeptical Science (the go-to website for debunking climate denial myths), and collected and analyzed almost 12,000 scientific papers from the past 20 years. Of the roughly 4,000 of those abstracts that expressed some view on the evidence for global warming, more than 97 percent endorsed the consensus that climate change is happening, and it’s caused by humans.

His team pulled work written by 29,083 authors in nearly 2,000 journals across two decades. “People who say there must be some conspiracy to keep climate deniers out of the peer reviewed literature, that is one hell of a conspiracy,” he said via Skype from Australia (watch the video above). That would make the moon landing cover-up look “like an amateur conspiracy compared to the scale involved here.”

Cook is hoping to capitalize on the simplicity of his findings: “All people need to understand is that 97 out of 100 climate scientists agree. All they need to know is that one number: 97 percent.”

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VIDEO: 97 Percent of Climate Scientists Can’t Be Wrong

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Heritage Foundation Ignites Conservative Civil War Over Dynamic Scoring

by Unacoomt Posted on May 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Pass the popcorn! Today the Heritage Foundation, under the leadership of conservative dreamboat (and former senator) Jim DeMint, released a study showing that immigration reform would cost taxpayers a gazillion dollars over the next 50 years. The actual number doesn’t matter much, just the fact that it has a nice, shocking number of zeroes in it. The methodology of the report doesn’t matter much either. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that it’s shoddy, but this isn’t a PhD dissertation. It’s not meant to be accurate, it’s meant to provide cover for any member of Congress who wants to give a speech and have a few handy numbers to quote. (You can read all the gory details of the study’s shoddiness here if you’re feeling especially masochistic today.)

So far, so boring. But here’s what’s really great about this: Heritage is getting raked over the coals today by fellow conservatives for issuing this shoddy study. Why? Not because they happen to disagree about immigration reform, but because Heritage was able to produce its gigantic number only by abandoning the sacred conservative cause of dynamic scoring.

Dynamic scoring is critical to the conservative movement because it’s the way they can claim that tax cuts produce higher tax revenue. The basic idea is that you can’t just look at, say, a 10 percent tax cut and assume that it will reduce tax revenue by 10 percent. That’s fusty old static scoring. Instead you have to take account of the fact that the tax cut will supercharge the economy, which in turn will produce higher incomes and higher tax receipts even though tax rates are lower. The Heritage immigration report, however, doesn’t take into account the fact that undocumented immigrants are all dynamically creating extra wealth and increasing the size of the economy. Jennifer Rubin reports:

Josh Culling of ATR said that while Heritage was a “treasured ally,” its work was a rehash of a flawed 2007 study….Cato’s Alex Nowrasteh was even more outspoken saying “how disappointed” he was that Heritage abandoned conservative dynamic scoring….The prize for candor, though, went to American Action Forum’s Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who stated flatly, “It really misleads.”

….These are longtime allies of Heritage and promoters of free market capitalism who are witnessing the intellectual bastardization of a once great institution….Fiscal, pro-growth conservatives are concerned (as they should be) that the movement may turn reactionary, rejecting not just dynamic scoring but faith in a dynamic economy and society.

….However the debate turns out, one hopes that real scholars at Heritage and its supporters reject the slovenly work in the Heritage report and reaffirm the conservative message that more workers create more wealth, higher incomes and upward mobility. For if they do not, then virtually all their criticism of the Obama administration has been wrong and free markets (for labor and goods) are a cruel farce.

Will the “real scholars” at Heritage speak up? Will Heritage manage to reverse its growing intellectual bastardization? Or will the rest of the conservative movement eventually have to acknowledge that Heritage has always been willing to use whatever methodology happens to produce the results it wants? Stay tuned.1

1Just kidding. Here are the answers: (a) No. (b) No. (c) No. And as long as I have a footnote handy, it’s worth saying that nearly everyone agrees that dynamic scoring is reasonable in small doses. Heritage, however, has always been a champion of truly gargantuan claims for the potency of dynamic scoring. This is what makes their U-turn today so notable.

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Heritage Foundation Ignites Conservative Civil War Over Dynamic Scoring

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Europe Bans Bee-Harming Pesticides; US Keeps Spraying

by Isela Harris Posted on May 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Monday, the European Commission voted to place a two-year moratorium on most uses of neonicotinoid pesticides, which are a widely used class of chemicals suspected of contributing to a severe global decline in honeybee health.

In the wake of Europe’s decisive action, the US Environmental Protection Agency dithered. Well, it did release a joint report with the US Department of Agriculture on Thursday, generated from a “National Honey Bee Health Stakeholder Conference” the two agencies held last fall. The report fingered no single culprit behind colony collapse disorder (CCD), the name for the steep annual bee die-offs that have been stumping beekeepers since 2006. Instead, it pointed to a “complex set of stressors and pathogens,” including poor nutrition (mainly from loss of flowering weeds due to increased herbicide use), viruses, gut parasites, and, yes, pesticides. But it includes a summary of a presentation by a USDA scientist Jeff Pettis noting that “several studies” have shown that low-level exposure to neonics make bees more vulnerable to the common gut parasite Nosema. (Pettis himself is the co-author of one of those studies.) .

Yet, as Natural Resources Defense Council senior scientist Jennifer Sass put it in a Thursday blog post, the joint EPA/USDA report limits itself to “recommendations about best management practices and technical advancements for applying pesticides to reduce dust,” while avoiding “recommendations that would reduce the overall sales and profits for chemical makers.”

Nor does the report express much urgency; it promises an “action plan that will outline major priorities to be addressed in the next 5-10 years.”

Meanwhile, the European Commission’s decisive action came amid what the Guardian called a “fierce behind-the-scenes campaign” to stop it from Syngenta and Bayer, the Europe-based chemical giants that market them. The move was prompted by a January report by the European Food Safety Authority, which identified “high acute risks” for bees from exposure to neonic-treated crops like corn and sunflower. And studies from independent researchers implicating neonics in declining bee health have mounted.

Even before the decision, France, Italy and Slovenia, and Bayer’s home country, Germany, had all suspend use of the chemicals pending more research on bee health. Now neonics will face severe restriction in all 27 European Union countries for two-year period starting Dec. 1, 2013, during which time the Commission will continue its assessment of their impact.

The move trains a harsh light on the EPA, which approved the chemicals based on what its own scientists have called flawed research and is currently reviewing them in light of the threat to bees and other pollinators. Earlier this month, an agency spokesperson told CBS News that the review would take five years—meaning that they’ll continue to be used widely on farmland in the US during that period. As I reported a while back, neonic-treated crops cover between 150 million to 200 million acres of farmland in the US each year—a land mass equivalent to as much as twice the size of the California.

I contacted the EPA to ask whether the EC decision might speed the agency’s timeline on reassessing neonics and their threat to bees. The response, in an emailed statement: “At this time, the data available to the EPA do not support a moratorium.” The time frame for completing the reassessment remains in place, the statement added, with this caveat: “If at any time the EPA determines there are urgent human and/or environmental risks from pesticide exposures that require prompt attention, the agency will take appropriate regulatory action, regardless of the registration review status of that pesticide.”

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Europe Bans Bee-Harming Pesticides; US Keeps Spraying

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Tom’s Kitchen: Miso-Glazed Pork Chop with Stir-Fried Veggies

by d2wk58 Posted on April 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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At the end of the week, my stock of perishable foods consisted of the following items: a bunch of kale, two knobs of gorgeous, purple-skinned kohlrabi, and a fat pork chop. The veggies were leftovers from the previous weekend’s farmers market run; the chop was an impulse buy after lunch at a new Austin butcher shop/salamuria called Salt and Time, where they buy whole animals from local farmers, break them down, and put the results to various uses: everything from sandwich fillings to cured sausages to a magnificent case of expertly cut steaks, chops, and the like.

Disclaimer: I don’t eat a lot of meat, but I think pastured animals play a critical role in sustainable agriculture. And when I do indulge, I love to buy it from skilled butchers sourcing directly from nearby farms. I have made the economic case for locally owned butcher shops here and here.

Okay, back to the kitchen. My challenge late one recent weekday evening: how to turn these staples into a fast, delicious dinner. My first thought was a stir fry—just cut everything up, sear it off, and then nap it with a quick, soy sauce-based sauce. But cutting up that beautifully rendered pork chop seemed silly—like taking a scissors to a Picasso canvass to make it fit a tight space. So I decided to sear the pork chop whole and stir fry the veggies as a side dish.

I decided on an East Asian flavor palate—ginger, rice vinegar, and soy sauce. Fermented soy products like soy sauce deliver that ineffably deep, savory quality known as umami. To ramp up the umami factor, I turned to the ultimate fermented soy product: miso, a jar of which had been languishing at the back of my fridge.

Kohlrabi tastes a lot like broccoli stem—a high compliment, in my view.

Miso-Glazed Pork Chop with Stir-Fried Kohlrabi and Kale
Serves two

2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 knuckle-sized chunk of fresh ginger, peeled with a spoon and chopped
A few whole peppercorns
A good pinch of dark-brown sugar
A robust pinch of crushed red chile flakes
1 tablespoon of rice vinegar
2 tablespoons of soy sauce (my favorite is the sublime Ohsawa)
1 large thick-cut, bone-in pork chop, which will be a half or two-thirds of a pound
Some freshly ground black pepper
1 bunch kale
2 bulbs of kohlrabi
A little cooking oil, such as peanut or sunflower
1 cup water or stock
1 tablespoon miso

First, make the marinade. Pound the first five ingredients in a mortar and pestle until reduced to a coarse paste. Add the vinegar and pound and stir the mixture. Do the same with the soy sauce. Dump the marinade into a container not much bigger than the pork chop. Add the chop, turn it a few times with a tongs to fully coat it, and then let it sit in the fridge. (The chop can marinade for a few minutes, while you prep the veggies; or up to an hour or so.)

Preheat the oven to 400.

Now prep the veggies. Stack the dry kale leaves on top of each other and roll them lengthwise into a cylinder. Slice them crosswise into half-inch strips, stems and all, down to where the leaves end. (This last bit is controversial; most people remove the stems. I find that if the kale is fresh, a bit of stem adds a nice crunch.) Now rotate your cutting board 90 degrees and slice the kale strips again, again in half-inch increments. Place in a bowl and set aside.

Trim the kohlrabi of stems and tough parts. Slice each bulb in half, and place the halves on the cutting board, cut-side down, and slice them thinly into crescents. Cut those crescents in half. Set aside.

Get two heavy-bottomed skillets going over medium on the stovetop: a small one for the chop, and a large one (or a wok) for the veggies. Add a little cooking oil to each. While they’re heating, remove the chop from the marinade, scraping away the chunks with a butter knife. Reserve the marinade in the container, including any chunky bits from the chop, and add a cup of water to it. This will become the base for the miso glaze.

Dry the chop well with paper towels or a kitchen towel that will be set aside for washing before any other use. (This step, while annoying, is critical for properly brown the chop—wet meat will turn a dull gray instead of caramelizing.)

Let it get good and brown—the caramelization adds to the dish’s umami.

Give the chop a vigorous lashing of fresh-ground pepper on both sides, and place it on the smaller, now quite-hot skillet. Let it sizzle.

Now add the chopped kale to the larger, also-hot skillet or wok. Toss the kale in the hot oil until it starts to wilt, add a few dashes of soy sauce to the pan, and turn the heat down to low and cover. Let the kale steam in the covered pan until tender. This won’t take long.

When the chop is beautifully browned on the bottom, turn it over. Let it go a minute or two on the stovetop, and then place it in the hot oven. For a thick-cut chop, finishing in a hot oven is a great way to ensure the meat is properly cooked without scorching.

Meanwhile, when the kale is done, set it aside, and return the skillet or wok to medium heat. Add a bit more oil, then add the kohlrabi. Tossing often, let it sauté until it’s starting to brown and is tender, but still retains a bit of crunch. Now add the cooked kale and half of the watered-down marinade. Add a half-tablespoon of miso, and stir until the miso has become incorporated and the marinade has reduced to a glaze.

By now, the pork chop should be done. I shoot for medium—no rawness, but a touch of pink inside. At that point, the chop should feel firm but springy to the touch. You can also cut into it to take a peak.

Remove the chop to a plate. Pour off any excess fat from the skillet—careful, it will be smoking-hot, Add the other half of the watered-down marinade to the hot skillet, and stir with a wooden spoon to dissolve any caramelized bits on the bottom. (This is known as “deglazing the pan.”) Add the other half tablespoon of miso and stir to incorporate. Let the meat rest another minute or two, and then dump any juices that have accumulated on the plate into the skillet, stirring to incorporate. This is your miso glaze. Cut the chop in half, placing each on a plate. Divide the veggies onto the two plates. Drizzle the miso glaze over each chunk of pork, and serve. A bit of brown rice would be a welcome addition as well.

This dish goes well with malty, slightly sweet beers—think the German alt style—or simple lagers. For wine, look to dryish, zippy Rieslings or Gruner Veltliners.

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Tom’s Kitchen: Miso-Glazed Pork Chop with Stir-Fried Veggies

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What These Vintage Illustrations Tell Us About Apples Before Our Time

by DonnieaBlevins Posted on April 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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In 1905, the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station published a supplement to their annual report: two big, hulking, beautifully illustrated tomes called The Apples of New York, Volumes I and II. The nearly 800 pages summed up over two decades of horticultural research, but what the author really wanted to brag about was the pictures—all made under the “personal supervision” of the Station’s head horticulturalist himself.

Its nearly 200 illustrations really are worth bragging about, and not just for their scientific value either. They capture the full beauty of apple hues during a time before widespread color photography. On top of detailed historical and scientific scholarship of 800 apple varieties, the books also teaches readers step-by-step how to identify a mystery apple.

Today, the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station has the world’s largest collection of apple varieties—a pomological Noah’s Ark. Its 2500 apple varieties hail from as far away as Kazakhstan, where apples first originated. And the Station’s been noticed before: Michael Pollan profiled the place in his book The Botany of Desire, and Venue recently did a great interview with Jessica Rath, a ceramic artist inspired by the Station’s apple collection.

I first discovered The Apples of New York while fact checking Rowan Jacobsen’s feature about heritage apples—the thousands of apple varieties that used to thrive in the US but largely disappeared with industrial agriculture. In 2013, I fully expected the best apple resource out there to be a shiny mobile app that could identify fruit with a snap of a photo. But no. John Bunker, the Maine apple detective profiled in Jacobsen’s piece, instead directed me to a book published over 100 years ago.

Despite its old age, The Apples of New York remains one of the finest resources for the amateur New England apple enthusiast, in part because it is freely available online. The most easily accessible copy is digitized courtesy of the Internet Archive’s Open Library project. The original physical copy is housed at the Prelinger Library, a privately funded public library tucked away in a San Francisco warehouse. I paid them a visit this week to see the illustrations in person—they look even better not washed out by a scanner’s flash—and figure out how a New York state’s annual report made it to California.

Rick and Megan Prelinger told me that the agricultural reports were printed and often sent to a local politicians, who then gave them away as gifts. One edition I found online carries the stamp of the Hon. Josiah Newcomb, a New York state congressman from the early 20th century. From there, the books’ provenance became murkier. The Prelinger’s edition used to belong to a different (unknown) library, and they said they likely acquired it through a government documents exchange.

But we don’t necessarily need yellowed old books to get a taste of pomological history; even a trip to the ordinary supermarket is a direct line to the apples of yore. A McIntosh apple illustrated and described a century ago in The Apples of New York is exactly the same as one I can buy today in a California supermarket.

That’s because apples of the same variety are all clones. Mix the genes of any two apple trees, and you’re unlikely to get the exact combination necessary for the familiar tart red-and-greenness of a McIntosh. Instead, orchardists cut a twig from an existing tree and graft it onto rootstock, growing a genetically identical apple tree. Occasionally, the offspring of two different trees does produce an apple worth keeping. And that’s when you get a name and photographs and maybe even supermarket fame.

A photograph included in the opening pages of The Apples of New York

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What These Vintage Illustrations Tell Us About Apples Before Our Time

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Liberal Super-PAC’s First 2014 Target: Michele Bachmann

by donseoo Posted on April 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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CREDO Super-PAC, the group that spent nearly $3 million to oust five conservative congressmen in 2012, has announced its first target of the 2014 midterms: Tea party firebrand Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). The super-PAC says it will spend at least $500,000 to boot Bachmann out of office.

CREDO Super-PAC, an offshoot of the progressive phone company CREDO Mobile, knows Bachmann all too well. In 2012, the super-PAC named Bachmann one of the “Tea Party Ten” lawmakers that it set out to defeat. But Bachmann’s opponent, Democrat Jim Graves, and the outside groups hoping to oust her fell just short: She won by a few thousand votes. When I interviewed Becky Bond, the politically geeky president of CREDO Super-PAC, after the elections, she told me her biggest regret was the Bachmann race. “If we could do it again, we would’ve taken her on earlier and she would’ve lost,” Bond said.

That explains why CREDO Super-PAC is launching its anti-Bachmann campaign 18 months before the 2014 elections. In its announcement, CREDO says it will use the same data-driven, grassroots-centric strategy to oust Bachmann as it did in 2012. As I’ve written before, CREDO is something of an outlier on the super-PAC landscape: While most super-PACs poured millions of dollars into TV, radio, and Internet ads, in many cases to little effect, CREDO opened field offices in ten congressional districts, hired organizers, signed up volunteers, and used political data to inform their work.

Here’s what CREDO said in its Bachmann announcement:

“What kind of a signal does it send that not only is Rep. Michele Bachmann in Congress, but she’s on the House Intelligence Committee?” asked Becky Bond, president of CREDO Super-PAC. “Bachmann’s bigotry and bizarre political views don’t represent Minnesota values. Bachmann has launched an anti-Muslim witch hunt, actually believes that gay marriage is the biggest problem facing the nation, and has even claimed that Obamacare kills people.

“Bachmann won by a mere 4,000 votes in 2012, and is beatable in 2014. If our volunteers in Minnesota’s 6th district can turn out enough voters, the Tea Party Caucus in Congress will be down yet one more bigoted conspiracy theorist.”

Aside from being a climate denier and promoting hate and bigotry, Rep. Bachmann has been making headlines lately for being embroiled in multiple campaign scandals. Rep. Bachmann is currently under investigation by the Federal Election Commission, the Office of Congressional Ethics and the Iowa Senate Ethics Committee for allegedly authorizing improper campaign payments, among a host of other potentially illegal activities.

Instead of spending millions on expensive TV advertising, CREDO Super-PAC will employ a proven campaign model that helped defeat some of the most extreme Tea Party Republicans in 2012, including former Reps. Chip Cravaack and Allen West. CREDO Super PAC will open an office in Minnesota’s 6th congressional district, hire on the ground organizers, and begin mobilizing volunteers to get out the vote against Bachmann. CREDO Super PAC will use cutting-edge research to target a specific universe of voters in MN-06 to help make the difference on Election Day.

Jim Graves, Bachmann’s 2012 opponent, says he will run against her again in 2014.

Right now, Bachmann is in a tight spot. A former aide, Peter Waldron, alleged that Bachmann’s presidential campaign made secret payments to an Iowa state senator in violation of Iowa ethics rules. And Bachmann’s former chief of staff, Andy Parrish, said in an affidavit that Bachmann “knew and approved of” those payments to the state senator, Kent Sorenson. Sorenson has denied the allegations, calling them “totally baseless, without evidence, and a waste of Iowans’ time and money.” An attorney for Bachmann says the congresswoman “followed all applicable laws and ethical rules and instructed those working for her to do the same.”

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Liberal Super-PAC’s First 2014 Target: Michele Bachmann

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The Paleo Diet – Loren Cordain

by Myrna Posted on April 23, 2013

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Paleo Diet

Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat

Loren Cordain

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: November 29, 2010

Publisher: Wiley

Seller: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.


Eat for better health and weight loss the Paleo way with this revised edition of the bestselling guide-over 100,000 copies sold to date! Healthy, delicious, and simple, the Paleo Diet is the diet we were designed to eat. If you want to lose weight-up to 75 pounds in six months-or if you want to attain optimal health, The Paleo Diet will work wonders. Dr. Loren Cordain demonstrates how, by eating your fill of satisfying and delicious lean meats and fish, fresh fruits, snacks, and non-starchy vegetables, you can lose weight and prevent and treat heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, metabolic syndrome, and many other illnesses. Breakthrough nutrition program based on eating the foods we were genetically designed to eat-lean meats and fish and other foods that made up the diet of our Paleolithic ancestors This revised edition features new weight-loss material and recipes plus the latest information drawn from breaking Paleolithic research Six weeks of Paleo meal plans to jumpstart a healthy and enjoyable new way of eating as well as dozens of recipes This bestselling guide written by the world's leading expert on Paleolithic eating has been adopted as a bible of the CrossFit movement The Paleo Diet is the only diet proven by nature to fight disease, provide maximum energy, and keep you naturally thin, strong, and active-while enjoying every satisfying and delicious bite.

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The Paleo Diet – Loren Cordain

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