• Denver ranks first in the nation in per capita beer production.
• Denver is second in the nation in number of total breweries in a city.
• Denver is third in the nation in volume of brewpubs and craft breweries.
• In all, there are roughly 100 breweries statewide, the majority of which are found in Denver.
• In 2007, Colorado was named the nation’s top beer-producing state, surpassing California.

These days I’m even an SMS beer reviewer, which is to say that I actually get paid to produce reviews and trivia items. Which is nice. (It also means that, in theory, I should be able to deduct my beer expenses on my taxes, although I haven’t tried that one yet.)

ABInBev isn’t in danger of going out of business, but what I see around me tells me that I’m not the only guy who’s crazy about craft beer. A lot of us love beer that’s handcrafted, unique, original and innovative. There’s simply not much the big industrial brewers can do to match the passion and quality of smaller-batch beers from around the country. Even when they roll out a faux-micro brand, like Blue Moon, Shock Top or Land Shark, the results usually taste like exactly what you’d expect from a big-ass macrobrewer trying to cash in on something it doesn’t really understand.

Despite the explosion of microbrewed wonderfulness sweeping the country, there’s a disturbing trend that needs talking about: a runaway obsession with hops. American brewers have always been partial to India Pales, English Pales, American Pales, Extra Pales – sometimes-light and sometimes-bold, always driven by the hops. And that’s great. Some of my friends love hoppy beers and what I see when I go to Argonaut or Liquor Mart or to the little store in my neighborhood, the surprisingly well-stocked Highlands Wine & Liquor, or to just about any brewpub or bar in Colorado indicates that hop-heads are a solid majority. Sometimes I walk into a pub and see that the place has as many three pale styles on the menu (and a taste of their Amber often reveals that it’s actually an American Pale in disguise). This isn’t the ideal situation for me personally, since I’m really not a hop-head. Most of my favorites lie decidedly to the malty side (during warm weather I usually prefer Weizens of one stripe or another and my current specialty beer explorations are taking on every Sour and Saison I can lay my hands on). Still, this isn’t a big issue – I can find something I like most of the time (most, not all), and if I can’t I can always go someplace else where they cater more to my preferences.

Lately, though, we’re seeing a couple of problems. First, too many brewmasters with no imagination. So many new offerings come off like little more than an exercise in “let’s see how many more hops we can stuff in a bottle.” The result: less character, less originality, less everything except blinding hop bitterness.

The second issue, and the worse one by far, is that now they’re starting to mess with other styles. At various times in the past two or three years I’ve ordered brews that are, by definition, maltier balance styles, only to have the first taste hit me like a firehose pumping raw hop-water. I’m talking about Irish Reds, Browns, Porters, Scotch Ales, Winter Warmers, Ambers and a wide variety of winter seasonals. (I’d also include Barley Wines in here, with a caveat. The style definitions allow for hoppy variants, although in practice they have traditionally been very malty and sweet. So if you’re heading over to the other end of the spectrum, please, a heads-up on the menu would be appreciated.)

What’s worse is when I specifically ask the bartender or waiter or the clerk at the liquor store and am told no, this isn’t hoppy when it is. In a pub this is no big deal – the taster hasn’t cost me any money. But you can’t get a sample in a store. If anybody wants the rest of this six of Deschutes Jubelale let me know. Otherwise I’m pouring it down the sink.

To be clear, again, this is not a rant against hops. Here’s my review, from last year, of a popular hoppy beer made by a brewer that specializes in hops:

BEER: Stone Brewing Co. Arrogant Bastard Ale, CA. HUGE hops, strong citrus notes. Rich, assertive hoppy boot to the face. Like hops? A+. Otherwise stay clear.

Those who know me have also heard me rave about Dogfish Head’s 90-Minute IPA, which I have gone so far as to rank as one of America’s absolute best beers. My review of it gave it an A+ (or an A++ – I can’t remember for certain). I frequently provide my readers with takes on a variety of Pales and I try to be honest and thoughtful, even though those aren’t in my wheelhouse.

It’s simply a question of truth in advertising. When I order a Nut Brown or a holiday seasonal, I expect that the brewmaster knows at least as much about what goes into the recipe as I do. Preferably lots more. If I order a Porter and get a Pale, I’m upset. If you, as a hop fanatic, order a Double IPA and get a stout, you have every right to be annoyed, too.

My plea to America’s brewmasters is simple. First, emphasize subtlety, elegance and quality. More hops isn’t creativity and it isn’t craftsmanship, it’s evidence that you have run out of both. Take your cues from the likes of Dogfish Head and Russian River, who manage daily to distinguish between more and better.

Second, if you want to brew a Pale, do so. If you want to whip up a special batch of something neat and different for the holidays, go for it. But don’t bait and switch me. Call it what it is. If it’s an extra hoppy IPA, cool. And if you’re being innovative and what you’re doing doesn’t actually fit in any of the established categories, by gods make up a new category name and slap it on the bottle or tap handle. Just so long as I know what I’m getting before I gag and spew it out my nose.

Finally, I’m going to call out a recent (and egregious) offender by name. While on vacation in North Carolina over the holidays I picked up a pack of Oatmeal Porter from Highland Brewing Company in Asheville. I was never overly impressed by Highland when I lived in NC, but that’s been five years and things change. Also, they seem to be doing well, which means a lot of others like their products. An Oatmeal Porter sounded good. So I gave them a shot.

[sigh]

This item will be included in my SMS beer review for February: [UPDATED: this item has been softened a bit after reflecting on comment #1 below.]

BEER: Highland Brewing Oatmeal Porter. Another brewmaster who thinks more hops is the answer to everything. Not really a Porter – an IPA in disguise. Avoid.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, here’s hoping everybody finds something they love to drink. NFL playoff season is afoot, basketball is under way and we’re into the meat of the Premiership, FA Cup and Champion’s League chases. I’d hate to face all those sports thirsty….

#13

My own experiences in Vermont constitute the worst times of my life, through no particular fault of the Green Mountain State. There, in a third-floor cinder block tenement in Montpelier, I spent most of my eighth-grade year living in fear of my mother’s drug-abusing boyfriend. A decade and a half later, I thought it ironic to find myself back there for a low-residency M.F.A. program, uncomfortable about facing the bad mojo from my past—little realizing that I was about to deal with more bad mojo there as my marriage began to unravel.

So my Vermont and John Elder’s Vermont strike me as two different places—different states of mind, at the very least.

“Vermont is a state where wilderness is recovering,” Elder writes in The Frog Run, a collection of three long essays (and some biographical and bibliographical appendices) that captures what Elders describes as “variations on the theme of coalescence.”

The first essay in this collection offers a vision of wilderness and sustainability in my adopted state, while the second chronicles my evolution as a reader. The third relates our family’s adventure in sugaring and reflects upon the ways it helps us belong more deeply to Vermont.

As transplanted Californians, Elder and his wife first assumed their sojourn to Vermont, made possible because of Elder’s appointment to the English Department at Middlebury College, would be temporary. But at some point along the way, they realized, they wanted to stay. They wanted Vermont to be their home. “Recognizing and celebrating this fact…has felt so liberating,” Elder writes. “[It] removed a range of potential distractions, allowing us to deepen a chosen and committed relationship with place.”

“While lacking the sublime wilderness of the western mountains, this state’s interfolding forests, villages, and farms brought experiences of natural beauty into my daily life,” he says.

The “recovering wilderness” he mentions is Vermont’s attempt to bounce back from the clearcutting that essentially razed the forests flat in the mid-nineteenth century. The forests that have grown back—that continue to grow back—make it possible “to think about wilderness in the future tense, not just in the present and past,” Elder says. And the state is becoming wilder every year, with more than 12% of the forests enjoying some kind of state or federal protection and with an increasing number of private landowners adopting sustainable forestry practices.

“The human community’s flow of food, energy, and transportation must be coordinated with the migrations, browsing, and reproduction of wildlife,” he says. “The most beautiful and motivating vision is an inclusive community of life, not wilderness apart from that.”

The credo he outlines in his first essay is a noble vision, and it’s one he’s optimistic about. It’s not much different from similar credos I’ve seen from Abbey, Williams, Gessner, and others, but at least Elder sees examples of it coming to pass in Vermont. His third essay even chronicles his own attempt with his family to support that holistic, sustainable vision by actively engaging in a land-friendly maple syrup operation.

That third essay is not as charming as it could be, nor is it as grueling as the work probably was in real life. Elder’s narrative account is pretty straightforward without much literary flair. When he says, for instance, that “[t]rying to enter into any new tradition as an adult can be as complicated as tapping into a branch line through which sap is already flowing,” he feels like he’s trying a little too hard. He writes with a pleasant colloquialism, though, like a friendly neighbor sharing a story over a cup of hot carob.

The second essay is probably the toughest of the three. There, he talks about his reading list and how it evolved over time, and how it shaped his development as someone who went from teaching about Brit lit to someone completely immersed in nature writing. He talks about how much he loves certain pieces, but he never made me feel the love, too.

He cites the psalms of King David, Paradise Lost, and the poetry of William Wordsworth, Basho, and Robert Frost as examples. For nature writers, he makes mention of Abbey, Barry, McPhee, Lopez, Williams. “The shadows of deprivation and estrangement, historical folly, and personal grief function to make the moments of connection more dazzling, to convey the possibility of transfiguration,” he says, noting an important difference between their work and the work of earlier writers: “for many of them the darkness around their moments of revelation also includes a world of ecological catastrophe.”

I picked up Elder with the hope that he could help me appreciate Vermont a little more. While his admiration for the place was obvious, he didn’t speak of it with much poetry in his own voice. He underwhelmed me, even though I admired his sincerity.

Worse, there were times he confused me. For instance, his descriptions of setting up the sugar shack and running the sap lines between the maple trees came across with no great finesse or clarity.

But maybe that’s what I need, though—to ditch my old baggage out in the woods under a maple and embrace the past in a different way, maybe spend some time with the rustic no-nonsense traditional lifestyle exemplified by the sugar shack. Or maybe I need to read Basho again, or Frost. Maybe I need to remember browsing for books at Bear Pond and at Rivendell in Montpelier, and story swapping at the Clockhouse Writers Conference in Plainfield, and quiet walks to Robert Frost’s grave in Bennington.

Vermont might be a state where wilderness is recovering, but it’s also a state I need to recover from, still. I’d love to see the state Elder seems so rooted in, but I think it’ll take a writer of a more evocative bent to help me. For now, I’ll just be grateful for Elder’s hopeful tone—it helps me believe there’s hope for me in Vermont, too.

Horse meat is considered a delicacy by those epicurean connoisseurs in places like France and Japan.

President Obama signed an Agricultural appropriations bill on November 18 that included a provision for funding inspections of horse slaughterhouses. Reports the Washington Times, ”The ban had been imposed in 2006 when Congress defunded the government’s ability to inspect plants that butchered horses for consumption. Without inspections, the meat couldn’t be sold, and the industry withered.”

The new bill included money for inspections, and that means horses are back, literally, on the chopping block. The House spending bill continued the slaughterhouse ban, the Senate version did not. The horses lost in the conference committee. The change makes a lot of ranchers in places like Montana happy.

That’s not to say that things have gone well for equines before and after the 2006 ban. In places like Missoula, MT, horses, including adopted wild mustangs and old ranch horses, are routinely bought at auction and shipped north to Canada for slaughter. From start to finish the process many times has been under fire from groups like the Humane Society of the U.S. Terrified horses are jammed in to double-decker trailers and trucked for hundreds of miles to slaughterhouses just over the Canadian border.

Any horse from pricey thoroughbreds and Arabs to grade horses and rounded-up wild mustangs are all included. There are no particular breeds, like in cattle or poultry, that make better cuts of meat. Horses aren’t bred like those animals and other for meat.

One of the disgraces of the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro adoption program is the number of horses “adopted” by enterprising owners, turned out on federal land to graze, then rounded up a year and a day later when the buyer becomes the titled owner and hauled off to auction for slaughter.  This despite the fact, adopters must  sign a statement  that they won’t do this.

Though on its website, the BLM reports  it “has placed more than 225,000 wild horses and burros into private care since 1971. Many of those animals have become excellent pleasure, show, or work horses.” It has never to my knowledge followed up to inventory what happens to some of those animals.  That’s one reason the mustang advocacy groups try to closely watchdog the BLM.

A good slaughterhouse will invest two bullets in the killing process. The horses are herded individually through a shoot where they are shot twice in the head, a rear leg hooked and swung upside down as they go on the conveyer belt to be bled out and cut up. Everything is used. I know. I’ve seen this.

In a story on the mustangs I covered two decades ago, I visited a horse auction in Missoula, followed a bunch of horses sold to the buyer from a Canadian slaughterhouse, and watched the process. I became a vegetarian that same day.

The horse that most haunts my memories was not a mustang (though every horse on the death ride bothered me), but an old, raw-boned white mare with a swayback and bad hocks. She’d probably taught a half dozen kids to ride, herded cattle and worked her whole life. Her owner, whoever he was, didn’t have the decency or the money to have her euthanized humanely or the courage to end her life himself with his own rifle. Instead, he sold her for a few dollars.

She arrived in that auction ring terrified. Looking in the stands for her people. She cried out over and over again. Her eyes rolling in fear. She only got one bid. The buyer from the Canadian slaughterhouse. She was herded into the truck, a big girl who was crammed in with others. She died with two bullets to her head early the next morning.

A Washington state fruit processor that supplies the nation’s schools and a baby food maker is under scrutiny by federal health regulators for repackaging applesauce contaminated with several kinds of potentially dangerous, multi-colored molds, msnbc.com has learned.

Repackaging? What the hell is that?

Food and Drug Administration officials this week posted a warning letter to Snokist Growers of Yakima, Wash., saying the company cannot ensure the safety of moldy applesauce and fruit puree that has been reconditioned for human consumption.

Wait–I thought it was just repackaged. What is this?

“Your firm reprocesses moldy applesauce product … using a method that is not effective against all toxic metabolites,” read the FDA letter sent Oct. 20 to Jimmie L. Davis, Snokist’s president. “Several foodborne molds may be hazardous to human health.”

What? Processes moldy applesauce product? What’s “applesauce product?” Is that like “cheese food?” Wait, I don’t think I want to know. It doesn’t matter, though–whenever you think it can’t possibly get worse, it does:

Products recalled earlier this year by Snokist were blamed for illnesses of nine North Carolina children who became sick after eating applesauce at school.

The latest warning came after FDA officials said Snokist failed to adequately address problems identified during a June inspection in which regulators found large, laminated bags of fruit products that were supposed to be sealed and sterile, but instead were broken open and tainted with white, brown, blue, blue-green and black mold. Some of the compromised bags were bloated and one had “a strong fermented odor,” the report said.

Well,I’m sure these guys are out of business by now, right? How could they possibly stay in business? Especially since

The FDA’s letter identified at least eight instances last year in which Snokist had reprocessed the moldy applesauce into canned goods for human consumption. The inspection report said Snokist documents showed the company had reprocessed mold-contaminated applesauce at least 13 times between January 2008 and May 2011, repackaging food into 15-ounce cans, 106-ounce-cans, 300-gallon bags and 4.2-ounce, single-serve cups.

It’s not clear whether the mold-tainted applesauce went to schools. However, the June inspection followed a voluntary recall of more than 3,300 cases of canned Snokist applesauce in May after North Carolina schoolchildren became mildly ill after eating the fruit product. The recall was blamed on faulty seals on cans. The children have since recovered.

I’m getting really confused here. These guys are still in business? And why are children in North Carolina getting sick from moldy “applesauce product” being canned in Washington? You just know what’s coming next:

Snokist officials admit that they “rework” some moldy food for future use. But in an e-mail to msnbc.com, company officials said that the contaminated fruit represents only a fraction of the company’s products, that compromised product is typically separated and destroyed, and that any reprocessed food is heat-treated to kill toxins.

“If rework occurs, our thermal process is more than adequate to render the product commercially sterile,” Tina Moss, a company spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail.

See, no problem. Tina obviously sleeps well at night. I’m still not sure what to call this stuff, though. “Food” seems to be too generous. The company uses the term “rework.” The FDA says “reconditioned,” a term I normally think of as more appropriate for luxury cars and baseball mitts, but if the FDA, an agency of the US government, is using it, that’s good enough for me.

Anyway, MSNBC goes on:

The company said it has begun testing for patulin, a common toxin produced by mold in rotting fruit.

However, the FDA said the company’s tests are not adequate and that officials must prove they’re testing for other dangerous microbes: “Most mycotoxins are stable compounds that are not destroyed by heat treatment,” the letter said.

Well, it sure as hell doesn’t sound like much is adequate there. Here’s the really, really good part, though:

FDA regulations to allow companies to “recondition” food, but the final product must be free of contamination. Firms aren’t required to notify the agency they’ve reprocessed food unless they’re required to under terms of an inspection or other action, such as an injunction. In addition, rules prohibit mixing contaminated product with sound product to get to acceptable levels of filth, said Pat El-Hinnawy, an FDA spokeswoman.

Those italics are mine. I’m just stunned to learn that these guys don’t need to tell me, or the FDA, if they’re using “reconditioned” food. So what’s the point of food labeling if these guys don’t have to tell us stuff like this?

Here’s the rest, in one fell swoop, just to get this over with:

A 2009 consultant’s report showed that the types of molds in the Snokist fruit products included Alternaria, Fusarium and two types of Pennicillium, all of which can cause illness in people.

That report was commissioned by Snokist after a baby-food manufacturer returned dozens of bags of the company’s fruit product in 2009 because they were contaminated with “a large amount of mold,” according to the FDA inspection report.

In early 2010, the consultant recommended six steps that Snokist could take to fix the problems, but during the FDA’s June inspection, company officials said they’d implemented only two.

Snokist sold more than 3.3 million cases of processed fruit with sales of $53 million in 2010, according to the company’s annual report. That represents more than 50,000 tons of processed fruit.

In the past, Snokist has supplied applesauce to schools nationwide through federal nutrition programs, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A spokesman said he couldn’t comment directly on whether Snokist had been removed from the program, but added that no firm under investigation by the FDA would be allowed to participate.

Snokist officials said they were working to address all of the concerns raised by the FDA and were awaiting a new inspection to confirm progress. FDA officials said the company has 15 days to respond to the warning letter.

So this goes for baby food, too. Jeez.

So let’s sum up. Food producers can put “reconditioned” food into their products and they don’t have to tell anyone–that means you and me–unless they’ve screwed up and made people sick. Wait, that’s not quite right. They still don’t have to tell you and me–but they do have to tell the FDA. Which apparently responds by sending letters. And even if they’ve screwed up–by making people sick, that’s my definition of screwing up here– they can still put this into baby food until they’re told to stop? Although it looks as if they can’t foist their reconditioned product onto unsuspecting schoolkids at some point–although we don’t know if these guys are, or are not, currently providing reconditioned moldy “applesauce product” to children. Any bets?

Twitter.com/LeeCamp

If you want a more intelligent pet than a dog, try a pig. Pigs learn tricks quickly. They have even figured out video games. Scientists have compared pig intelligence to that of a 3-year-old child.

In factory farms, pigs have been observed going insane and committing cannibalism.

Factory farming should be illegal.

In factory farms, corporations raise thousands of animals in a confined area. Chickens spend their lives in about one square foot of space. Once they reach full size, they die in slaughterhouses that process thousands of animals each day. Factory farmers ignore animal health and welfare in favor of a cheap steak. Around 98 percent of America’s meat comes from factory farms.

Animals suffer in factory farms. Scientists genetically engineer unhealthy animals to produce the most meat. In chickens, this means their breasts and thighs are so large that they can barely stand.
Poor slaughtering technique leads to inhumane killing. For example, if pigs do not lose consciousness after an initial shot with a stun gun, they remain aware when they get dipped in a scalding tank to remove their hair.

In factory farms, animals get sick. Rather than treating them on a case-to-case basis, farmers maintain their stock by feeding all of them antibiotics. Overusing drugs creates breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant bacteria or “superbugs.” These bugs kill people and could create a worldwide disease outbreak.

Learn where your meat comes from before you eat it. Demand that your government outlaw factory farming. End an inhumane system.

Emily West is a junior majoring in theater and journalism and mass communication at St. Bonaventure University.

photo credit: Vegetarians International Voice for Animals

Last week, Texas prison officials decided, after executing 475 people since 1976, its death row prisoners no longer deserve a last meal. You’re already taking away their lives, Texas. Don’t take away their dignity, too.

State Senator John Whitmire said the decision has nothing to do with cost, despite a tight Texas budget. The soon-to-be executed don’t deserve a last meal because they didn’t give their victims a chance for one, either, Whitmire said.

Yes, these inmates have killed or at least have been convicted of killing. But don’t dehumanize them; don’t say they don’t deserve their final nutrition intake.

Whitmire claimed a last meal gives a death row prisoner a “celebrity” treatment. How many celebrities order a meal cooked in a prison kitchen and eat it in a cold, gray cell shortly before they’re going to die?

Recently executed Lawrence Russell Brewer ordered a lavish feast of steaks, a cheeseburger, an omelet, a pizza and more before his execution last month. Brewer received his meal, but didn’t eat it. Whitmire demanded an end to the entire practice because of one man’s actions.

Limit what prisoners can and can’t order before you kill them, Texas. Don’t take away their right to a steak. After all, you might as well make your inmates comfortable before you execute them.

At least let them eat well, one final time, before you take away their ability to eat any more.

Pat Hosken, a senior, is majoring in journalism and mass communication at St. Bonaventure University.

Can aquaculture save the world’s last wild food? That’s the question posed by the cover story of the July 18 issue of Time, which takes a look at the continuing collapse of the world’s fisheries. Fish seems so superabundant on our dinner plates that one can hardly fathom how we could possibly run out. After all, the ocean is so BIG.

Well, the deep blue sea is getting emptier and emptier, and even if the shoreline seems far away, the fisheries crisis is going to start hitting close to home—soon.

That’s the outlook, grim as it is, forecast by author Paul Greenberg in his recent book, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. Greenberg dives into the topic with gusto—in part, one has to imagine, because the oceanic crisis is so catastrophic.

The four fish Greenberg highlights—salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna—mark “four discreet steps humanity has taken in its attempts to master the sea.”

“[E]arly human fishers first overexploited their freshwater fish and then moved down the streams to their coasts to find more game,” Greenberg explains. “[H]umans marshaled the resources of industry into building offshore fishing fleets when they found their near-shore waters incapable of bearing humankind’s growing burden.”

Each fish, then, symbolizes a step in the evolution of fishing practices. Each fish symbolizes, too, an ecosystem plundered by those same practices.

Salmon, which live their adult lives in the sea but travel into freshwater to spawn, are “the species that marks the point at which humans and fish had large-scale environmental problems and where domestication had to be launched to head off extinction,” he says.

Sea bass, a close-to-shore species, represent the point where people “first learned how to fish in the sea and where we also found ourselves outstripping the resources of nature and turning to an even more sophisticated form of domestication to maintain fish supplies.”

Cod, an off-shore species that existed in “seemingly irrepressible abundance,” heralded “the era of industrial fishing.”

Tuna, finally, a giant deep-water species, is “the stateless fish, difficult to regulate” because it migrates through the territorial waters of a number of countries and, where it’s most vulnerable, through the largely unregulated waters of the open sea.

Greenberg contends that “the world fishing fleet is roughly twice as large as the oceans can support.” That overcapacity, he says, is maintained through government subsidies, which also make wild fish “unreasonably cheap” at the market.

Worldwide, seafood consumption continues to rise—sixty percent since 1974, according to the Time article. In America alone, some seven million tons of seafood gets eaten each year.

“So,” Greenberg says, “if we take as a given that humankind will keep eating fish, more and more of it every year, then we need to come up with a way to direct that appetite away from sensitive, unmanageable wildlife and usher it toward sustainable, productive domesticated fish.”

Greenberg’s book explores several key suggestions:

• A profound reduction in fishing
• A move away from heavily extractive (and heavily subsidized) vessels that employ very few individuals
• The conversion of significant portions of ocean ecosystems to no-catch areas
• The global protection of unmanageable species—that is, species that swim from one country’s waters to another’s to another’s or that populate international waters
• The protection of the bottom of the food chain

“What is needed above all,” he says, “is a standard for boosting fish supplies in as sustainable a manner as possible.” Fish farming seems obvious, perhaps, but it does come with its own challenges. Selective breeding—the same way farmers breed sheep or cows for certain features—can help overcome some of those difficulties, Greenberg says. Critics worry about “Frankenfish” that might contaminate wild populations, a legitimate concern that aquaculturists must be prepared to address.

Greenburg also advocates the “smarter use of subsidies” to promote polycultural, rather than monocultural, aquaculture practices. Instead of just raising salmon, for instance, a farm would also raise muscles to filter the salmons’ waste from the water.

The world’s last wild food, then, might not remain wild, but farmed fish is far better than no fish. “Or we can run roughshod over the wild ocean,” Greenberg says.

In that case, the world’s last food will have no future at all.

First, some background. Not too long ago I wrote a post in which I observed that pudgy Southern teen girls often grow up to be pudgy women. I expected some reaction, but I didn’t expect the reaction I got, which was to get pelted from every angle. The right and the left. Men and women. Old and young.  It was as if I spit into the ocean and caused a tsunami.

OK, at the bottom of the page before you post a blog there is a small box that says “Check to allow comments.” If you check that box, as I do, and write about controversial topics in provocative ways, as I do, then you shouldn’t whine (even though I do.)

But as is usually the case, from pain comes insight, or at least insightful questions. In this case: Why the extraordinary sensitivity to comments about overweight young Christian women? If I’d written a line critical of skinny adolescent male Muslim pot smokers, do you think people would have leaped to their defense? I don’t.

What was it about this group that drew this reaction? Was it because they were young? Women? Christian? Overweight?  I think it was because they are overweight.

90% of my blogs are humorous. This is one of the other 10%.  I am profoundly serious about what I am about to say. Many people believe it is unfair or cruel to call out people for their weight. They are dead wrong, and here’s why. 

There is a general trend in our society to be less judgmental. Since you have no choice whether you are born white or black, male or female, smart or dumb, or gay or straight, we have agreed as a society not to judge based on those inherent characteristics. We use public approbation to try to enforce those rules on everyone in our society. Good for us. But our society has simultaneously decided that it is still OK to discriminate on the basis of the choices people make.

We discriminate against some choices for good and obvious reasons, like pedophilia and wife beating. Some for less obvious and less good reasons, like practicing a religion other than Christianity. Some choices we discriminate against more aggressively  than others, like smoking. As a society, we have decided it is OK to be openly mean to smokers. In part, that is because we believe it to be a choice that affects all of us negatively, through second hand smoke, birth defects and health costs. In part, it is also because we believe by being mean to them we are helping them.

I don’t smoke. I have never smoked. I hate smoking. Most people agree with me. A few years ago in Berkeley, I saw a young professional woman cross the sidewalk to get as close as possible to two smokers, and when she got next to them wave her hand in front of her face, cough theatrically and mumble something. That same young woman would never, ever walk across the street towards two fat people drinking milkshakes, puff out her cheeks and mumble, “Oink! Oink!” The very idea horrifies most us.

Because unlike smoking, where most of us feel free to openly criticize our friends who smoke, we all give the obese a free pass.  Perhaps it’s because so many of us carry extra pounds ourselves and we sympathize. Or perhaps it’s because it seems too personal. Or perhaps it’s because we view obesity as a condition rather than a choice.

If it’s the last reason, we are simply wrong. Less than 1% of all people have a medical reason for obesity like thyroidism or Cushin’s syndrome. That means that for 99% of people who are overweight, obesity is a choice, or accumulation of choices. The choices are subtle. It’s hard to see saying yes to whipped cream and caramel on your frappucino as  deliberate decisions to be fat, but they are.  Semi-medical reasons like “slow metabolism” are not legitimate and sufficient excuses for being overweight, any more than chemicals in the brain are excuses for smoking, drinking, or gambling. If you have pale skin, use more sunscreen. If you tend toward gaining weight, eat less or exercise more.

There are good arguments for being mean to fat people. Like smoking and riding a motorcycle without a helmet, obesity is a choice that drives up health costs for all of us. And there’s an even better argument: Because it works. In 1950, roughly half the population smoked. It’s now fallen below 20%. Why? Because of a panoply of mean-spirited anti-smoking measures, from taxation to advertising to social stigmatization to good old fashioned scolding. Humans are social creatures. We can’t help it. We care what others think. Make something uncool enough and we will stop doing it. Currently 2/3 of adult Americans are overweight and 1/3 are obese. If we are mean to fat people as we are to smokers, could we get that down below 20% as we have smoking?

Instead though, not only are we not mean to them, but we bend over backwards not to be critical, particularly young overweight women. It’s well intended, but foolish. We seem to think that nagging them about their weight will either cause them to get an eating disorder or erode their self esteem. 1000 people die each year from anorexia, 300,000 die from obesity. Eating disorders are a tragic problem. Obesity is a pandemic. And no, we don’t want to erode young women’s self-esteem. But do we really think scolding them for being fat is going to erode their self-esteem more than being fat itself?

Why weren’t we this considerate for smokers? We never worried about their self-esteem.

Most of us have been fat at one time or another in our lives. We all have fat relatives. We all have fat friends. If we love them, we will nag them continuously. We will make it uncool. We will tax frappucinos  just as we did cigarettes.

A few years ago, a seriously obese relative invited us to a party. My wife and I, each of whom could stand to lose  ten pounds or so, were by far the thinnest people there. The tables were loaded with the least healthy assortment of food I’ve ever seen. Her friends ate from paper plates stacked high with cheese and fried chicken wings dripping with sweet sauce. One chubby six year-old stood at the table with a deviled egg stuffed in each cheek and one in each hand. If I was at a party where the host allowed her six year-old to smoke, or do cocaine, or even drink a beer, I probably would have said something. But I said nothing to this kid or to the parents. Instead I was polite. Or lazy. Or cowardly. Take your pick.

For some reason, we are reluctant to call out fat people and the behaviors that cause obesity. But our silence isn’t kindness, it’s enabling.

So I ate a banana instead. I was so pleased with this sensible diet choice—I make one about every fortnight—that I decided to have a salad for supper. This was that magic diet moment I had been waiting for: I was going to start transforming myself into a nutrition superstar.

I am not nearly ambitious enough to buy a head of lettuce, carrots, onions, tomatoes, green pepper, etc., to make a salad from scratch. Fortunately, several food companies are willing to do this and charge only the amount it would cost for me to buy fresh fruit and vegetables for an entire month. It just so happened I had one of those prefab salads in the refrigerator. And for once, it wasn’t 11 weeks past the “best by this date” advisory. For me, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and leads to a tollbooth in the grocery store produce aisle.

OK, let’s see what we have here: bagged lettuce with bits of cabbage, some shredded carrots—this needs something else. I remembered seeing a small bottle of sun-dried tomato halves dressed in Italian herbs in the back of the refrigerator. This bears repeating: These were not just any herbs. They were Italian herbs. Perfect. And, the label added in a gold-lettered flourish, extra virgin olive oil. (I’ve never been able to understand the concept of “extra virgin” ever since the girls from my town’s Catholic high school used the phrase as an excuse to not go out with me. But those are tales for other times.)

As it turned out, this bottle had been sitting in the back of the fridge so long that the Italian herbs and olive oil had congealed to the consistency of amber just before it solidifies around some hapless fly, which is then preserved intact for thousands of years. This mixture was well on its way to also becoming a historical record. I could imagine people eons in the future, holding the jar up to a bright light and wondering exactly what they had found. As I extracted the tomato halves out of the jar with a fork, the goo stuck to the tomatoes like gum sticks to your favorite shoes. And when they were alone at the end of the fork, they looked just like little tomatoes would look if they had been walking along the shoulder of the highway and been run over by an 18-wheel tractor-trailer hauling cauliflower and Brussels sprouts. However, the prospect eating herb-flavored bits of what appeared to be red rubber did not deter me. Who knows? All that time saturated in spices might have made them even tastier.

Next ingredient: shredded Romano cheese. Just about everything tastes better with shredded Romano except ice cream, but to tell the truth, I’ve never tried it on ice cream. (However, I once tried Tabasco sauce on vanilla ice cream, to mixed reviews.)

The green, leafy mixture was starting to show promise, but it lacked zip. I was ready to reach for the peppermill, but I decided to up the ante: Frank’s RedHot pepper sauce. I sprinkled some on the salad and then peered into the fridge for a dressing.

And there it stood. It was like destiny—well, as much as destiny can be associated with a salad, that is. “It” was the perfect dressing for my mélange: a sun-dried tomato vinaigrette.

I unscrewed the cap and started shaking the bottle so the dressing would drip through the hole in the middle of the plastic stopper at the top of the bottleneck. The only problem was, that little dribbler of a spout was part of the cap I’d unscrewed, so the dressing gushed onto the salad like a Hawaiian lava flow. Panicking, I checked the nutrition label on the dressing bottle. A tablespoon contained 60 calories, and I had just doused the salad with what appeared to be a gallon of it. As I began eating, I hoped it would simply sink to the bottom of the bowl.

How was it?

The Romano cheese was a good choice.

Ditto for the Frank’s RedHot.

The vegetables from the bag were OK, but I suppose I could break down and buy an onion and green pepper to give the salad some flavor. Who knows? Maybe croutons loom in the future, too.

The sun-dried tomato halves worked better as a concept.

And the dressing? Well, I figure I ate a 700-calorie salad. I’m hoping another banana will make up for it.

It’s this last point I’d like to discuss.

It would be easy for anyone to create a quick, common sense list of things you’d think I probably wouldn’t want to find in my fruit, or really in any of my food, ever. Let’s try.

1) Mold
2) Pesticides
3) Bugs of any kind

Pretty simple, pretty standard, pretty predictable. Not asking for much here.

Now let me show you how it’s gone the last few times I’ve bought organic raspberries.

Every. Damn. Time.

I mean I guess that’s a bit of a dramatization — the bee is actually *frozen* inside the raspberry, not angrily flying out into my face. But either way, I think it’s clear that the real point here is that there is always a BEE inside my raspberry. Always.

I have never found a bee inside a non-organic raspberry. I’m sure because of all the pesticides. And I appreciate that this must mean there really are no pesticides in the organic raspberries.

But why is there ALWAYS a bee? I’m not even kidding you, in every single box I buy there is one bee tucked inside a raspberry. I love you, nature, and I want my food to be organic – but all these dead bees are getting to be a bit much. Can’t the raspberry companies put up a fan to shoo all the bees away from the boxes or something? Or how about luring them away from the fruit with a trojan horse made of pollen? I can keep going here, I’ve got a lot of great ideas that don’t end with a bee floating in my cereal.

Anyway, I remember a few years ago, everyone was freaking out, like, “where have all the bees gone,” and it was this big national tragedy about the disappearing bees, and it was going to have all these unforeseen consequences and end up killing us all. They thought the bees were going extinct because of cell phone towers I think, or avian flu, or Justin Bieber? I don’t know.

But guess what haters? You were all wrong. Apparently I’ve singlehandedly figured out what happened to all the fricking bees. I swear to the gods, there is a bee in my raspberry. Every. Damn. Time. And I cannot be the only person in the world buying organic raspberries.

So there you go guys, mystery solved. The bees are in the raspberries. Wow, I feel like Columbo… if Columbo had eaten a bee this morning.

I’m never buying raspberries again.

All good speculative fun, in its own weird way. The problem is that life often has a tendency to imitate art. So now we have this new form of e. coli bacteria (technically, Escherichia coli O104:H4 (STEC O104:H4)) that has killed a number of people in Germany and elsewhere (17 dead, and over 1,600 ill so far, and counting). And, contrary to earlier reports, it appears that the bacteria did not come from cucumbers in Spain. In fact, no one seems to know where it does come from. The German health minister has said that the origin may never be traced. The one thing that seems clear is that it’s related to consuming fresh vegetables, but whether it’s from where and how they’re grown, harvested, stored or distributed is still anyone’s guess. But it keeps killing people, and even in the survivors causes extensive kidney damage–470 people with kidney failure at this point, and who knows where this levels off. And it’s contagious, apparently. And it has now reached the US. This looks like the worst e. coli outbreak ever, in terms of the severity of the reactions, and no one knows where it came from, or how it got to where it is now. Or what happens next, apparently. Science writer Christine Gorman, who writes about this stuff over at Scientific American’s blog, is worried. No, make that scared.

(And just today, here in Britain, and presumably purely by coincidence, a new strain of the MRSA superbug has been found in milk on farms around the country. Great.)

The response thus far has not really been a surprise, although there’s always some other levels of interest to this sort of thing—Russia has banned raw imports of vegetables from the European Union, following on an earlier ban of vegetables just from Germany and Spain. Spain, ruffled by the initial accusations from Germany about the quality of Spanish cucumbers, is now seeking compensation from Germany for lost sales of €200 million a week. In the US, where a couple of cases have been reported, the CDC is in “monitoring” mode.

All of this has a number of implications. If you’re a Public Health person, you have to be wondering how you respond to outbreaks of disease that have never appeared before? It may be that the World Health Organization over-reacted a couple of years ago when it looks as if a new strain of swine flu might take off—it looked pretty deadly at the time. As it turned out, it wasn’t, but governments around the world spent hundreds of millions on flu vaccines anyway (including one with possible dodgy side-effects), enriching as number of pharmaceutical companies further. But it’s not clear to me, anyway, just as a concerned citizen who is not involved in the decision-making on any of this, that the line between justified and unjustified caution isn’t pretty darn blurry. This isn’t clear-cut by any means, as opposed to the hysterical nonsense over the concerns about a possible (but never, ever scientifically validated) link between autism and the MMR vaccine.

Then there’s the general issue of the sprawling and increasingly-difficult-to-monitor food production and distribution network we’re saddled with, a network that, on the positive side, manages to deliver generally safe (and often even healthy) food to an extraordinary number of people on a daily bases. Offsetting this is the increasing difficulty governments and regulatory authorities have in monitoring this network, even in places where governments and regulators actually want to do a good job in this regard (like Europe, as opposed to the US, which seems to have largely given up). And incidents like this one are on the increase. While the overall number of outbreaks appears to be lower than in the 1990s, they still appear with depressing regularity. And—wildly speculating here—there seems to be no question but that these are associated with practices at factory farms. These now dominate US agriculture, and are increasingly common in Europe. Anyone who has read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, to take a popular example among many books on the food industry these days, knows the grisly history of regulatory capture of regulators and Congress by the processed meat industry in the US. And since it now appears more likely than not that the current strain comes from cows, that’s where investigators will be looking. Does this mean that factory farms in Europe are the likely culprits here? It’s too soon to tell, clearly—how does factory farm anything relating to cattle somehow get intertwined with vegetable distribution?

So do we look forward to a future where the increased industrialization of agriculture inevitably is accompanied by increasingly virulent disease outbreaks? This seems plausible, and worrying. Up to now, at least, there’s little evidence that these outbreaks won’t keep occurring. What has worked reasonably well up to now (although not perfectly, obviously) has been the regulations under which food safety inspectors operate under. In the US, of course, these have been under pressure for years, and were rolled back significantly under the previous administration—and Obama’s attempts to strengthen them have run into bitter Republican opposition. In Europe, there has been reasonable success in harmonizing the regulations governing all of this, although the issue remains complicated by national borders and domestic agricultural issues.

Once again, there’s that vague sense of helplessness that arises in the face of the corporatization of everything. But there’s reason for optimism—here in the UK, at least, I’m in a position to actually know where my meat and vegetables come from, which is next to impossible to do in the US. And this is still the case in much of Europe, and in those parts of the globe where industrial agriculture has not yet taken root. As Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson and the folks over at Front Porch Republic keep reminding us, we need more localism than we have now, and we need to figure out how to get it back in those areas where it’s been lost. In Britain, at least, that’s still possible in a number of domains, including food, and this remains true in many parts of Europe as well. What this most recent outbreak shows as that the international intertwining of the food system is far enough advanced to provide instant global infection in the right circumstances pretty much anywhere—Germany has some of the most effective food inspection regimes out there.

It’s not the Kansas City flu yet. But unless we figure out a way to get a sensible combination of localism and globalization than we have now, the odds are not moving in our favor. There are reasonable justifications for both processes to continue, but the trend at present remains more global than local, and we need to reverse that somehow. The harder part for most people, in the US anyway, particularly in urban areas, will be to reconnect to the local. Unless we can do that, the risks of a real Kansas City flu outbreak along the lines of an even more sever e. coli outbreak will continue to hang over us. Maybe it’s just assumed that this is a price we’re willing to pay for the relative efficiencies (and environmental consequences) of the modern industrial agricultural system that generates an increasing proportion of our food. But I don’t remember being asked.

• A 2007 eMarketer survey of the most trusted sources of information for US consumers was topped by “friends, family and acquaintances” and “strangers with experience.” These sources outranked “teachers” and “newspapers and magazines.”
• A CDC study shows that moms trust pediatricians the most, but that they trust “friends and family” more than everybody else, including parenting books, employees in the doctor’s office, and newspaper and magazine articles.
• Heck – just sift through this page at BazaarVoice if you need dozens more examples of this phenomenon.

I’m assuming that reviews from trained professionals (like movie, music, food and software reviewers) would be included under the general “newspaper and magazine” categories, although I can’t be sure.

One of the artifacts of the Web 2.0 explosion has been the profusion of sites soliciting consumer feedback. One of the most successful such operations (maybe the most successful – it’s certainly the one I am personally most aware of) is Yelp, but you can find comments on all kinds of businesses at the Web sites for local TV and print outlets, alt weeklies, independent blogs, you name it. Because by golly, in the age of social media, we care what you think!

Which leads me to my reason for writing today. I have been known to comment that, yes indeed, opinions are like assholes – everybody in fact has one. (Well, except for this guy.) However, informed opinions are more like Mercedes-Benz E550 convertibles – that is, they’re somewhat rarer.

Last Saturday I found myself hankering for some good Mexican – specifically, something slathered in the chile verde that this part of the country is famous for. There are a couple of places that have long been my go-to options for green chile – Lime and Benny’s are very different, but I love both. I was feeling like exploring, though, maybe trying something new, and I remembered that a week or two ago my Yelp e-mailer devoted an issue to “D-town Green Chile Lowdown.” So I dug it out, read the reviews and recommendations, and settled on one of the two places closest to where I live. The commenters had some small carps about various peripheral issues, but the consensus was that the green chile was righteous.

I had to wait awhile for a seat because the place was packed. Good sign, as a rule. I ordered my favorite Mexican dish – beef burrito with chile verde. It arrives, I dig in, and let me tell you, “righteous” isn’t quite the right word. A better word would be … let me think here, because I want to get this right … ummmm … what’s the word for “completely and utterly without any taste whatsoever”?

The beef itself was doing its part to hold down the restaurant’s seasoning costs and the chile, well, put it this way. I’m not a renowned Mexican chef by any stretch, but I have two recipes that are worlds better.

Disappointed? You betcha. I can’t imagine going back there, especially since it was also a dollar or two pricier than other Mexican restaurants in its general class.

I can only theorize that all those positive, nay glowing comments on the sparkling fabulosity of this place’s verde were written by employees or family members of the owners. And that’s the problem with consumer reviews – comments are of no value in the absence of some means for determining credibility. If you’re vested in the business, you may lack objectivity. Or maybe you’re an idiot, which also tends to compromise the value of your contributions.

Sure, I have family and friends I might trust on certain questions – a brother-in-law who’s a CFO in the furniture industry, for instance, might be of some value if I’m hunting for furniture bargains. But I have other relatives and social associates that I wouldn’t trust if I were trying to figure out what color the sky is.

The bottom line is that you can hit a consumer review site, read the comments, and still have no idea how to decide. One product has dozens of positive reviews – that could mean it’s really good. Or it could mean that the marketing group does a good job leveraging the power of social media.

When I got home, the first thing I did was unsubscribe from that Yelp e-mailer. All it can really do is call my attention to businesses I didn’t know about, but I can get that from a lot of places, including a local alt-weekly – and when I go there I can also find reviews from, you know, reviewers. People who do it for a living. I may not agree with them all the time, but odds are their taste buds can distinguish between tasty chile verde and dishwater thickened up with flour. Also, I’m probably not reading something my waiter wrote on his day off.

“I don’t think it’s normal to eat that much bread pudding,” I said. “I wonder if anybody else celebrates International Bread Pudding Day?”

“I’m still not convinced that holiday exists,” said Nancy, “But it is winter in Connecticut, and you need your winter fat.”

“Har, har. My feet are cold. Do I have socks on? I don’t think I can move.”

And I didn’t move for hours. I sat there like a gorged tick. Later that evening, I was able to push myself upright and stagger to bed. I’m lying. I staggered to the refrigerator for a few more bites of bread pudding. Hey, IBP day only comes once a year. The next morning everything had changed.
“I know the family dinner is supposed to be about food,” I said, “but what I did yesterday was just wrong. No one person should eat that much food. Now, my comfy pants are no longer that comfy. I’m going to have to buy bigger ones. Or maybe it’s time that we…did something.”

“It wouldn’t hurt any of us to start eating healthier,” said Nancy. “And you need to cut back on the iced tea. All that caffeine can’t be good for you. I suppose we could get back on the treadmill.”

Ah, yes. The treadmill that is in the basement… somewhere. We hide Christmas presents on it.

“I don’t think the treadmill is the answer,” I said. “Healthy eating is part of it, but I think we need weight training. You know. A gym membership.”

Nancy stared at me for a long time. “I don’t know,” she said. “The problem with a gym membership is that you have to use it. And the problem with using a gym is that the gym is already filled with people who have been using it for years. I’m not sure I want people to see me before I get into shape.”

“So the trick is to get in shape and then enjoy the gym,” I said. That made perfect sense to me.

“I have to find five scales,” said Nancy. “To chart my progress.”

“Why five?” I asked. “Are you going to get an average?”

“No,” she laughed. “Have you never been on a diet? I need five scales so I can always refer to the one that says I’ve lost the most.”

“I’ve never been on a diet,” I said. “Maybe I’ll just drop the tea.”

Nancy looked at me in a funny way, as if she was trying to decipher something, then ignored it. We decided to get in shape. The most important step is admitting you have a problem, in my case a ponderous, pasty problem that would take months if not years to remove. But once it was fixed, I could boldly walk into any gym and lift some weights and scoff at the overweight and unsculpted.

But we didn’t have any weights. We didn’t have dumbbells or barbells or kettle bells or cowbells or any other kind of bell people work out with. Fortunately, I found an exercise DVD that didn’t use weights. Instead, you worked out with a weighted ball. The ball was the size of a shot putt, only weighing 2 pounds. I told Nancy I would order the ball for her, but I would find my own exercise ball, or substitute two cans of green beans. I found a ball that weighed 5 pounds and thought, this is what I’ll use. Still, I felt kind of silly. How much good could a 5-pound ball do for me?

When the DVD came in, I stood before the TV confidently holding my 5-pound weighted ball. We hit the play button and we worked out with Mitch…Somebody. The first 4 minutes were all about stretching, so by the time the actual exercises began, I was already winded.

“We have a short workout today,” sang smiling Mitch Somebody. “Only 10 minutes, so let’s get started.”

“Is somebody knocking at the door?” asked Nancy.

“No, that was my shoulder popping,” I said. “And my knee.”

Let me say something about weighted ball training. A 5-pound ball might not be better for you than a 2-pound ball, but the 5-pound ball hurts more when you drop it on your foot, which I did, twice. Halfway into the workout, I was afraid I was having a stroke. Nancy was behind me puffing and wheezing. Joey sat on the sofa watching.

“Is this supposed to be fun, daddy?” he asked. “Because you keep saying bad words and mama looks all funny.”

“This… pant… is how… pant… grown-ups have fun,” I wheezed.

“Are we done yet?” begged Nancy. “Because I see a light.”

“Don’t go into the light,” I replied. “I think we have 3 minutes to go.”

Finally, the 10 minute workout was over. Mitch was smiling, and oh, how I hated him. I collapsed into a puddle of my own sweat. Nancy passed out on the sofa. Eventually, we were able to stand under our own power, and we climbed the steps on our hands and knees and fell into the most comfortable sleep either of us had had in a long, long time. I dreamed of Mitch Somebody and the workout ball all night long. The next morning we were both so stiff and sore, we moved like zombies. I think it was obvious that Mitch Somebody and his magical exercise ball was not a good match for us.
“I’m thinking we should clear off the treadmill and give it a second chance,” I said.

“What are you saying?” asked Nancy.

“I think what I’m saying is I have no desire to participate in the Marquis de Mitch exercise program anymore,” I said. “I sneezed this morning and almost passed out from the pain. And I think I broke two of my toes.”

“It’ll get better,” said Nancy. “We can’t quit this yet. We just started. We’re going to do it again tonight. We’re going to do the first 10 minute program every night for five nights.”

“Five nights, huh,” I said. “OK. Then maybe we can send it back and get a refund.”

“No,” corrected Nancy. ”Then we will do the second 10 minute workout as well. Then we’ll add the sculpted tummy workout. A 30-minute workout with a weighted ball seven times week will certainly be good for both of us.”

That was January. It is now March, and I am proud to say that we continue to use the Mitch Somebody workout routine 5 to 6 times per week. Is it working? Well, I don’t pop and wheeze like I used to. But I did retire the 5-pound weighted ball. The two cans of green beans work just fine, and don’t sting nearly as bad when I drop them on my feet.

The loophole is another city ordinance that allows the city manager to permit sidewalk sales at city residences.

Common sense did prevail. Local Girl Scouts will be at their tables selling cookies at busy Oglethorpe and Bull Streets this weekend. The Girl Scouts still have to pony up to their civic responsibilities as part of the deal as noted in the letter from the city manager.

Kudos to acting city manager Rochelle Small-Toney.

Why? Because under a Savannah ordinance, the cookie sale is considered street peddling, a violation. The ordinance reads: “Sec. 4-1001. To be used for public purpose only. No person shall use the streets, sidewalks, lanes or squares of the city for private purposes of any sort. They shall be used only as public ways and for the public purposes for which they are intended.”

There is not enough room on the historic home’s property on the corner of Oglethorpe and Bull Streets for the girls not to be on the sidewalk. That it’s a great place to sell the cookies is without doubt. Local scout leaders report the girls can sell up to 250 boxes in three hours on a good weekend. Cookie sales are a major fund raiser for Girl Scouts nationwide, and those Thin Mints are addictive, at least to me.

The Low home gets tens of thousands of visitors annually, and many Girl Scouts make the pilgrimage to the home of the woman who founded the group back in 1912. When the home, which remained in the Gordon family for generations, fell into disrepair and was slated for the wrecking ball in 1953, the Girl Scouts of America organization stepped in, purchasing the home and restoring it to what had been one of the most fashionable homes in Savannah in the 19th Century. Part of the purchase included original furnishings. In 1965, the home was among the first group listed by Congress as a National Historic Landmark.

The cookie sales are popular with tourists, but a complaint filed last year, obviously by some Scrooge or rival group, put an end to it. Both Savannah’s City Manager and the Savannah area Girl Scout leadership have tried to find a loophole. None existed.

Fortunately, a local council member is now planning to introduce a variance that would put the cookie sales back in business. Hopefully, in this instance, common sense will prevail.

Let’s be clear about this—this should not have come as a surprise. What is surprising, perhaps, is that the demonstrations and rioting in Tunisia were actually successful in driving out a hated government—although what will replace it remains a bit unclear. What prompted the riots in the first place was a dramatic rise in food prices. We discussed the global food situation and its precarious balance two months ago, and cautioned that this was likely to get worse. And sure enough, it has. Commodity prices, especially grain prices, keep rising in the face of constant downward revisions to estimates of what the global grain and other commodity harvests will be this year, and many commodity prices remain at or near historic high prices. Then there are those floods in Queensland, and a pretty alarming year for extreme weather events, probably related to a pretty strong La Niña which will continue to affect crop production in 2011. Over at Reuters, Peter Apps has done a good summary of some of the potential trouble spots that are likely to be affected by a catastrophic increase in the price of basic staples. And you know what? There are a LOT of them. Egypt. Syria. Saudi Arabia. Morocco. The list is long.

It is not surprising that most of these countries are political dictatorships—or at least hardly functioning democracies. One could call Egypt a democracy, I suppose, in the same way that Russia and China are democracies—everyone gets to vote. But in many cases, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, these countries are the opposite of democracies because of US (and Europe and Russia, it should be noted) pressure to keep the lid on Islamist revolt. But this is going to be harder to do if the governments in question can‘t keep food prices low enough for the majority of these countries’ populations. Which, let’s face it, are usually poor, in fact direly so. These are countries where economic opportunities are limited, unemployment (especially among young males) is high and getting higher, and where food prices suddenly aren’t low. They’re going up. Because that’s what food prices around the world are doing again.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) recently ( January 5th, in fact) warned that we are likely to see a repeat of the food riots that shook governments in 2008. That was pretty prescient of them, but at least someone is paying attention. Well, it’s not just Mozambique or India any more—it’s counties in the most geopolitically unstable part of the world. Let’s hope we don’t start seeing similar riots in Pakistan. But Pakistan has a lot of poor people too.

Lester Brown has been nattering on about this for years now, hoping that someone would start taking notice. He has recently pointed out that we’ve been in a food bubble, and it’s bursting. As far as I can tell, political institutions aren’t particularly well prepared for this. Certainly the Tunisian government wasn’t. We all knew there was a day of reckoning coming, except for the significant portion of the political class that remains in denial, or just assumed that we had lots of time. Well, we may not have all that much time. Brown has a number of suggestions about how to forestall a global environmental and food crisis, but what about the political crises that we’re about to be hit with if food prices keep escalating? We keep telling ourselves that technology somehow will save the day. But, you know, at some point there just might not be enough food to go around. Then what?

Nothing broke. My griddle just likes to protest every time it wakes up.

I watched the little orange light next to the heat controller: It would go out once the griddle heated to 400 degrees.

I still had a few lumps in my batter to mix out, so I was in no big rush. I mix mine from a box of Bisquick. Nothing fancy. A couple eggs. A cup of milk. I’m golden.

I don’t do pancakes from scratch the way my dad’s mother used to. She had a secret recipe for buckwheat pancakes passed down from her mother—although, like everything my grandmother cooked, she’d profess that her pancakes never tasted as good as her mother’s. My brother and I thought they tasted just fine.

For whatever reasons, the buckwheat pancakes required refrigeration overnight. Sometimes when we went to my grandparents’ to visit, my grandmother would remember to mix up a batch for us before bedtime. Then she’d make us each a cup of Ovaltine and hustle us off to bed and we’d dream sweet buckwheat dreams in anticipation of the morning.

Sometimes she’d forget, though. We wouldn’t know until morning. We’d wake up and trundle down to the kitchen, and our grandmother would go to fetch the batter from the fridge and suddenly hiss a harsh “Sugar!” Those would be the mornings we’d eat juicy orange halves, scooping out the citrusy pulp with spoons that had serrated tips.

As it happens, I come from a family of legendary pancake makers.

My stepmother used to break out paper pouches of Robin Hood pancake mix and pour flapjacks as big as the pan. We’d challenge her to make the biggest pancakes possible, and time after time, she rose to the occasion. How she flipped those Paul Bunyon-sized flapjacks, I still don’t know. Perhaps being from Maine gave her special Bunyon-like flapjack flipping powers.

On my mom’s side of the family, my mom’s sister, is the reigning queen of ’cakes. As kids, my brother and I spent a lot of time at my aunt’s. We clamored for her pancakes, which were oh-so-fluffy and light and to-die for, and she would always oblige.

My Aunt Barbara—“AB,” as we call her—stood at the griddle with her glasses still on, as though the science of pancake making required the kind of extra attention and intelligence that only glasses can give a person. She was a scientist, after all. Her pancakes, however, represented art of the highest order. They are, hands down, The Best Pancakes Ever.

AB hovered over the griddle with spatula in hand, holding it straight up as though it were a flyswatter ready to slam into action. With a few deft scientist/ninja moves, she’d flip all the pancakes in orderly fashion, and keep right on visiting with us. She’d cook and visit and laugh. She has always had a wonderful, robust laugh. Fewer things make a childhood more memorable than a kitchen full of laughter.

Fewer things make pancakes so delicious, too. I am convinced that laugher was the special ingredient that made her pancakes so good.

That’s certainly why my grandfather’s pancakes tasted so good despite being the worst pancakes ever.

My mom’s father had a recipe he whipped up from scratch and every so often, when he’d stay with us, he’d whip up a batch. My brother and I sat at the kitchen table, eager for another of my grandfather’s pancake adventures.

As he cooked, he regaled us with stories about his service in World War Two. Health issues forced him to serve behind the lines: he could hardly hear out of one ear and could hardly see out of one eye. He insisted they take him even though he couldn’t pass the physical, so they put him to work for the commissary department. We was kind of like a Radar O’Reilly, and he was full of zany exploits.

We heard stories about France, and smuggling candy bars out for his buddies on active duty, and soldiers lighting up with delight when they’d get a letter from their sweetheart back home. Through a crowd, he once saw what he thought was the top of Winston Churchill’s head.

He told one story about a time a bunch of servicemen got in a line to get kisses from pretty French girls—for reasons, today, I can’t remember—and after he and his buddy got their kisses, they ran to the back of the line so they could get another turn.

As he told his stories, he made his pancakes, always in a skillet on the stove rather than on the pancake griddle. He paid them little heed as he cooked them. Inevitably, the pancakes always came out burned on the outside and gooey on the inside—a culinary contradiction that still puzzles me to this day.

But it didn’t matter one whit. He probably could’ve ladled spoonfuls of batter onto my plate and, with enough syrup, I’d have eaten it. On those occasions, it was his stories that were delicious, not the pancakes, which were edible but incidental. I have no fonder memories of childhood than those breakfasts of burned-n-gooey pancakes that the three of us shared.

Today, I carry on the family tradition about once a week. I’m not much of a breakfast eater, but I’ll mix up a batch in the evenings sometime. It makes a perfect little dinner for two: Me and Aunt Jemima. Or, sometimes, me and Mrs. Butterworth. (Ironic that both syrup mavens resemble each other so much.) I call it “bedtime breakfast.”

I don’t cook much, and I don’t cook well, but I sure can cook pancakes.