Love the idea of cucumber juice cocktails. A friend has been playing with making cucumber margaritas.

It’s also the time of year when basil goes insane.  This recipe for a basil vodka gimlet is pretty amazing

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/drink/views/Basil-Vodka-Gimlets-238926.

I’ve got some basil going and I’m going to be making those for friends coming over Monday night.

I am intrigued by the apple and kidney beans dish.  What does it taste like?

It was really good.  I just ate the leftovers for lunch, and enjoyed it thoroughly.  The savory and sweet play off each other.  You make it with thyme as the main herb, and cook the apples in either sherry or red wine.  Very tasty.

I’ve got a ton of basil in the garden and loads of green tomatoes that are just starting to ripen.  I planted a little late and the growing season is short-ish where I am, so I’m hoping for just a few more weeks of good weather so I can harvest those.  I want them so bad.

But I got my first heirloom from the garden yesterday, a black krim.  I just had it for lunch on a baguette with roasted garlic, a big handful of the basil, and thinly sliced leftover roast beef.  That was the best tasting tomato I’ve had in a really long time—it was a great birthday present to myself and now I’m full and happy.

You should have added cornstarch to the pie filling and it wouldn’t have been so runny. It would also help to have less crust on top to allow more steam to escape. To be honest, I’m not a fan of mixing fruit types in pie. When I make a pie with a fruit like blueberries, the fruit is good enough that I don’t want it eclipsed by other things.

Yep, I always mix a little corn starch with the sugar I use in pie fillings and then toss it all together with the fruit. With juicy berries I’m a fan of having *no* top filling at all, just letting them cook down like a tart. Pies can be tricky.

You need to toss your fruit and/or berries with 1/4 cup cornstarch plus however much sugar you want to use (I usually use a scant 1/2 cup). IMHO, ALL fruit and berry pies are best with a crumb topping.

Crumb Topping

Pulse 3/4 cup flour, 1/2 cup sugar, and a pinch of salt in the Food Processor. Cut a stick of butter up into it. Pulse until it looks like the size of crumbs you would like; pea size is best. Don’t over-pulse or it will turn into dough and you don’t want that. Dump on top of the fruit/sugar/cornstarch filling that is already in the pie crust.

The Pie Lady

Another pie tip:

When you have a thick fruit such as peach, pear or apple; toss it with some sugar and let it sit in a colander or strainer for about half an hour (although longer the better) after you peel and slice.  This will pull out some of the excess moisture out of the fruit so it doesn’t end up watery in your pie crust.

I made spaghetti sauce and I have some extra red/green/yellow bellpeppers and onion.  What should I do with it?

Fajitas are a great way to use up extra peppers and onions. Slice them into strips, and pan fry or grill them until slightly charred. Season with salt, pepper, hot sauce, and lime juice. Serve with warm flour tortillas, sour cream, salsa, and other toppings as desired.

@9 If all else fails, pop the (raw or cooked) prepared peppers and onions into a container, label and freeze for the next time you’re cooking something that uses that.

human #9:

If you’re not a vegetarian, make Italian sausage subs or junkyard dogs (chopped-up hot dogs with onions, peppers, and cheese).

Okay, I have a question for non-vegetarians who buy vegetarian books for the occasional research. I picked up a vegan baking book the other day primarily for the food science. So far it seems like a pretty impressive book, but the preachiness that seems required for vegan books is still all over the place (if not quite as pervasive as you’d think). Is there any such thing as a vegan book of the same nature as Bittman or Moosewood that doesn’t seem to insist on evangelizing every other page?

(Incidentally, I had much the same problem with the Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book, which is so jammed with woo that I’m amazed it’s still the go-to book for whole-grain baking.)

The picture of the cucumber juice cocktail shows us that your butcher block countertop is getting some wear .  .  . which can be the sign of a busy cook!  But a couple of the splotches, particularly behind the stem of the glass, look a bit like a polyurethane finish coming off.  Maybe it’s just moisture beaded up, but if it is a finish coming off, some wood finishes can be toxic if consumed.  You could sand it down to get off any finish, and then apply some form of butcher block oil finish to it.

“The Joy of Vegan Baking” by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. It does seem to offer a fair bit of insight into the ins and outs of vegan baking, but the guilt tripping and emotional appeal is annoying. (And I’m also remembering what Amanda said a couple weeks ago about anti-honey attitudes being stupid to the point of being self-destructive.)

I have to say that “commercial egg replacer” kind of sums up the book for me—if it’s just potato starch, why not make your own? Agave syrup? Well, I can get it, but that doesn’t mean a college student who falls for the vegan line can. On the whole, there’s a certain white-upper-middle-class-cluelessness thing to it that makes me wonder if the author drives a Prius with a bag of empty water bottles in the back.

An alternative crumb topping that I use all the time with fruit (apples, quinces, peaches mainly as that’s what grows in my backyard and we frequently get more than we can eat) as it doesn’t require a food processor.

200 g butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 cups rolled oats
spices

Melt the butter and sugar together in a saucepan over a low heat until the sugar dissolves into the butter and it starts bubbling. Add spices of your choices to the oats (cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, all work well) and stir through. Add the butter and sugar syrup to the oats and mix through until all the oats are coated together. Spread over top of fruit. Bake as normal. The topping browns up and goes crunchy. If your fruit is thick you may want to cover with foil to prevent burning as sometimes the topping cooks faster than the fruit.

You can also add slivered nuts or dried coconut to the oats for a slightly different taste.

I usually make this by feel so my quantities might be a little off. It’s very forgiving though so just add more oats (if too runny) or make up more syrup (if too dry).

I don’t usually put in base pie crust with this topping. Simply layer the fruit straight into the baking dish or pie dish and then add the topping. Great with cream, mascapone, ricotta or creme fraiche.

purpleshoes:

Ah, good to know. And I agree about Laurel being pretty definitive—I have the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain book, and it’s a pretty nice piece of work (if you bake, you should have it and the Baker’s Companion—the cookie book is optional), and even that defers to Laurel for some things.

I guess my problem overall applies to most forms of political fringe thinking—people putting principle over common sense. (Libertarians do not have a corner on pigheadedness.) Like I said, the honey thing really bothers me—if we’re not going to collect honey, should we switch to a different species of bee and let Apis mellifera revert to a feral pest? And the overall emotional appeal is intensely irritating. I recognize that great strides must be made in animal husbandry (disease-mixing chicken coops and pig shit lagoons with no on-site sewage treatment are probably the biggest issues), but the hard green and orthorexic thinking that seems to underlie veganism puts it up there with the Atkins (poorly understood and too high in saturated fat) and Feingold (shameless peddling of false hope for ADHD parents) diets for eating styles I have nothing but raging contempt for. (Raw foodists (including raw milk advocates, who are playing Russian roulette every time they pick up a milk bottle) and people on gluten-free/yeast-free/whatever diets who don’t have a clinical need for it are up there too.)

The food looks great.

If you want a green drink, try Absinthe. I recommend Vieux Carre and possibly Obsello (stronger liquorish taste, maybe too strong). Oh, and Carre is 120 proof (Obsello is 100), so be careful the first time you drink it to see how it affects you.

I’ve never gotten the impression that the personal purity thing is always so cut and dried as that. I mean, yeah, it is frequently a superiority trip (Pat from the comic strip Achewood is probably the best caricature out there, combining every possible stereotype in one character), but I think a lot of people think they’re making a difference, however small. The problem is that they don’t really think about what kind of difference they’re making, and the honey point is the clearest example possible of that.

I think I’ve noticed about fanatics in general (it’s endemic among libertarians, but hardly missing on our side) is a failure to understand systemic thinking. Left-wing fanatics have a vague concept of it but really don’t seem to get very far past deciding something needs to be done. There’s a feminist mural in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA with the tag “Indication of harm, not proof of harm, is our call to action.” The sentiment sounds good, but perfectly describes the tendency of some left-wing activists to jump the gun on trying to solve problems without really understanding the problems in the first place. Vegans aren’t especially harmful in that regard (especially when compared to, say, some of the extreme monkeywrencher groups), but it’s clear that there’s a lot of willful ignorance of human physiology, agricultural history, and general class issues in favor of using mushy feel-good thinking as a call to radicalism. (That’s probably why vegan potlucks have such a bad name in law enforcement—the FBI seems to think there’s an element of crank magnetism involved.)

Well, there’s certainly no lack of need for left-wing agitation. The problem is how very, very much of it is horribly misguided. It’s like having people like Deepak Chopra, Charlie Sheen, and Rosie O’Donnell among our numbers. Yes, the warm bodies are nice when it’s time to head to the voting booth, but how much can we tolerate pseudoscience and raving 9/11 trutherism when the rubber meets the road?

It’s really a bloody shame—all that energy and effort devoted to the lunatic fringe when civil rights, class inequality, the environment and the labor movement need so much more diligent attention than half-cocked action.

When you have a thick fruit such as peach, pear or apple; toss it with some sugar and let it sit in a colander or strainer for about half an hour (although longer the better) after you peel and slice.  This will pull out some of the excess moisture out of the fruit so it doesn’t end up watery in your pie crust.

Yeah, but those juices are something I want in my pie, not lost down the drain. I want them to come out in the oven and mingle with the cornstarch so I have lots of oozy flavorful thick juice when I slice the pie.

Actually, it’s interesting you mention chaining oneself to a redwood—I actually have no particular problem with that sort of protest. It’s a little daft, but it requires significant courage and (obviously) personal investment, but it’s the sort of protest that can come from making a rational, informed choice. Mechanical monkeywrenching is borderline (damaging the wrong sort of heavy equipment could make a big mess and should really only be done in places where something clearly illegal is happening and law enforcement is absolutely unresponsive), and setting free lab animals and torching car lots and subdivisions is, to put it politely, pure knee-jerk emotional behavior (not to mention pointlessly destructive) that no informed, rational environmentalist should ever be involved in because of its many implications regarding local wildlife and the necessity of animal medical research.

kristin:

For the last 12 years or so I’ve used “Apple Pie #2” from the 1997 Joy of Cooking for our thanksgiving pies, which precooks the filling. It does kind of melt down to something close to applesauce, but the upside is that it preserves most of the juices and tastes quite good.

(And all you Joy ‘97 haters can GFYS. Or just pick up the 2006 edition—I think the same recipe is in there.)

I don’t know that our woo is any different from theirs. The real problem on the Right is not the woo itself, but the authoritarianism they use to try to push it on people. It’s a fundamental difference in mindset.

There’s a feminist mural in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA with the tag “Indication of harm, not proof of harm, is our call to action.” The sentiment sounds good, but perfectly describes the tendency of some left-wing activists to jump the gun on trying to solve problems without really understanding the problems in the first place. Comment #24: BrianX on 09/06 at 02:22 PM

Only if you assume “call to action” means “call to do something right now before understanding what’s going on.”

For most feminists, action isn’t shutting something down.  We don’t have the fucking power.  It’s not like we’re the FBI and can arrest people for seeming wrong somehow.

oldfeminist:

To me it has a very postmodernist, snap-to-judgement ring to it. If it means something other than that, it is a very poorly-phrased statement.

On the mural:

Sargent’s final touches will be words representing what is called “the precautionary principle”-“Indication of harm, not proof of harm, is our call to action,” as synthesized by WCCP members. This call to action, initiated by several cancer activists, insists that even though we are lacking indisputable scientific proof of environmental causes of cancer, we have sufficient evidence of harm to take action. As WCCP member Sandra Steingraber wrote in her landmark 1997 book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment, “I am now thirty-seven and can barely remember when I last breathed cigarette fumes in an airplane or hospital waiting room. For much of my life, I have been protected from a now-proven danger by those who had the courage to act on partial evidence.”

So, BrianX, I think you might be somewhat right, but “post-modernist, snap-to-judgement”?  The precautionary principle?

This precautionary principle?!?

The formal concept evolved out of the German socio-legal tradition in the 1930s, centering on the concept of good household management.[3] In German the concept is Vorsorgeprinzip, which translates into English as precaution principle.

Many of the concepts underpinning the precautionary principle pre-date the term’s inception. For example, the essence of the principle is captured in a number of cautionary aphorisms such as “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, “better safe than sorry”, and “look before you leap”.[4] The precautionary principle may also be interpreted as the evolution of the ancient medical principle of “first, do no harm” to apply to institutions and institutional decision-making processes rather than individuals.

BrianX, it would mean to me, “you don’t have to prove to me with a bunch of studies that there’s something wrong here for us to become interested, involved, and investigative.”

I don’t know Harvard culture so I can’t speak to what such a Feminist mural is speaking to.  Was there some kind of blowup with a “not proven so shut up” response from non-feminists, maybe?

I mean, if I were raped today, I wouldn’t want to have to wait until the rapist was convicted to get support from a rape crisis center, emergency contraception, STD testing, and counseling.  If I were discriminated against in housing, employment, benefits, or legal protection, I wouldn’t want to wait until a court of law found the other party guilty for feminists to try to come to my aid.

Action is instrumental in getting to the proven state.

Atheist, A Feminist, thanks for the background link.  I live in a city where environmental pollution is a big factor in cancer deaths yet the public health focus always seems to be on “individual responsibility” (almost always “why do those poor people smoke so much and drink and eat junk food no wonder they’re full of cancer”).

@oldfeminist

Action is instrumental in getting to the proven state.

Absolutely.  If it were a more universal call-to-arms, I agree with BrianX that it could have been worded better.  That being said, it is about the environment, and while it certainly seems to encourage “jumping the gun,” what other options are there for the environment?

Scene 1
Person A: Look at all that black smoke billowing up from the factory.  That seems bad.
Person B: Yeah, but we don’t know that it is actually bad thing.  We should wait and investigate.
Person A: I cough when I spend too much time near it.
Person B: Yeah, me too.  We don’t know it is from being near the smoke though.  We should wait.

Person A is right (and following the mural’s statement), Person B is wrong and probably Republican.

This works slightly less well for social issues/injustices/harms.

Scene 2
Person A: Look at all that money being spent to keep the government running.  That seems bad.
Person B: Yeah, but we don’t know that it is actually a bad thing.  We should wait and investigate.
Person A: If I spent that much money, it would be bad.
Person B: Yeah, me too.  We don’t know if it is exactly the same for government though.  We should wait.

Person A is probably in the Tea Party and Person B is almost anybody else.

Atheist, A Feminist:  “This works slightly less well for social issues/injustices/harms. “

Not necessarily.

Minorities notice when money is spent on people who look just like them.  The tea partyers notice when money is not spent on people who look just like them.  The difference is that “minorities” are often now majorities, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t get the majority of funding.

It’s just that, now that they are, it’s “pork,” or “special interests,” and not the government spending money on the people who are actually, you know, there.  Rather than those privileged by history.

In one sense I have some pity for Tea Partyers, in that they thought that being part of the favored group, they’d get their reward. 

But now, money is tight, and fuck the poor, no matter how pale their skin.  We can’t afford to support them any more. They learn just how thin blood can be.

We were having friends over for a not-“Mad Men” double header (“The Sweet Smell of Success” and “The Apartment”), and I was cooking dinner.  I thought it wise to get as much work done ahead of time, mostly so that I could get dishes done and not have to sweat it.

Amanda, are you doing the cooking and cleaning, too?

Well, I have to say I agree in broad terms that action should usually equal investigation before anything else. If that was the intent, then like I said before, it’s not a good phrasing. (As for whether it could be pomo or not, I was pointing out to someone earlier today that Charles Dickens and Horatio Alger qualified as pulp before the term existed. It’s the concept that matters, not the terminology.)

@BrianX

Yes, postmodernism allows us to classify Dickens and Alger as pulp.  What it doesn’t do it is encourage snap judgments.  Postmodernism is (most, overly, simply) about interrogating all of the judgments that have come before and that the conclusions reached through “objectivity” were true.  A postmodern version of the quotation would be more along the lines of “Our call to action is not proof of harm (because can we ever really determine what qualifies as proof and what qualifies as harm) nor indication of harm (because what is an indication and we still haven’t decided what harm is), but rather the intersection of the cultural and linguistic constructs that are proof, harm, and indication which led to the development or revelation of those constructs in the first place.”

@oldfeminist in #40

That is why I used the weaselly “slightly less well” and went with lots of money as opposed to debt or misdirected money in the example.

With environmentalism and health, there is only one environment and we most likely can fuck it up so that it is completely inhospitable to us.  Also, health effects will likely be proven long after there is fuck all we can do to prevent them from happening.  With social/cultural issues, people are more likely to see an indication of harm at something innocuous or good (equality, that one woman felt bad after her pre-marital sex/abortion/divorce) and so sometimes we should demand proof before acting.

The precautionary principle at its most stringent is conservative, which is great for the environment and not so much in many other areas.

@BrianX

(Sorry, but pomo is kind of my thing.)

It’s the concept that matters, not the terminology.

The application of postmodern has little to do with the date of creation, certainly.  Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a postmodern text (or at least exhibits postmodern tendencies). 

However, an aphorism (unless, maybe, it is ironic) is antithetical to a postmodern idea or construct.

oh yeah!, oh yeah!, Study shows organics ARE healthier, tastier and better for the soil and planet

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0012346

Brianx - uh, let see, my raw milk, if it were contaminated will sicken me and about 20 other folks in my co-op.  ON the other hand, “safe boiled, dead milk” did kill folks and sicken thousands in the 1990’s.  ANd hose contaminated eggs?  And the so safe Beef products INc pink protein slime the FDA wasn’t bothering to test meat made with it and then found it actually increased the e coli (largest buyer?  USDA for school lunches.) All documented. 

As for the taste - grassfed, whole (cream naturally, at home separated for other uses) is tastier and healthier for me.  No animal cruelty and no better for the soil. 

Don’t like it, don’t drink it, and myob.

Kristin, don’t tell the people in the other food thread, but if you drain the fruit and sugar mixture into a jar and buy some seltzer, I know where you can get all-natural soda for cheap.

Oh my heavens no. I boil fruit in sugar *specifically* to add to seltzer water. I still want my pie juices to stay in my pie!

phylosopher:

Okay, two things. Well, three really. The first is that you’re being a putz.

Second, raw milk is a bodily fluid and should be treated as such, just the same as a pint of blood; just because a dairy is clean doesn’t mean that the operators have complete control over what pathogens might turn up in their herd. You want to go play Russian roulette while deluding yourself about the numbers (hint: it’s not raw numbers, it’s percentages), fine, but don’t go off half-cocked like a fundie with a persecution complex (i.e. “myob”) just because you don’t like what’s being put before you. Raw milk is only a sensible choice for a) aged cheese and b) people who don’t believe in germ theory. (If you fall into (b), go slurp down some salmonella eggs and report back.) Raw milk is a pointless and unnecessary risk that sells entirely on emotional appeal and knee-jerk “you’re not the boss of me” marketing. If you can’t face that, well, that’s between you and your toilet.

Third, yes, organic food is generally better for the soil; the problem is that organic farming as we know it does not produce nearly enough to feed everyone on earth. But even the promoters of the Green Revolution knew it was only a stopgap on the way to a better solution, and IMHO organic agriculture and genetically modified crops are going to have to come to some kind of peaceable settlement to produce a more permanent solution. As long as squishy, half-cocked doctrinaire people like you are calling the shots on the slow food side, that won’t happen.

Godit you’re an arrogant asshole, BrianX. Marketing??? For raw milk??? hahahahaha.  Think about it. 

Milk is a body fluid??? NO shit?  I think the would be dating world can now be assured that BrianX won’t be interested in cunnilingus, fellatio without some very painful and mood breaking sanitization. Or he’s a fucking hypocrite (pun intended).

I’m just fine with germ theory - it’s you who’s got germ paranoia. E coli isn’t an all or nothing, it’s also e coli load and strain, and it’s resistance to among other things, stomach acids. If you want to keep drinking boiled mastitis discharge - i.e. pus - hey - go get thee some pasteurized milk.

As we know it?  SO then we need to ramp up the organic.  It can be much more productive (yields) longterm than conventional.  That’s why we use the word sustainable.  ANd rule #1 about nutrition is good soil=good food.  We’ve acted like miners instead of farmers for years.  That corporate short term gain attitude is what brought the economy down; the same happens in farming.

GMO and organic cannot co-exist, esp. with Monsanto’s and other GMO corps’ all out attack on even things like seed savers/ growers. 

Go educate yourself.

phylosopher:

Unlike you, I’m not afraid to evaluate everyone’s claims. First off, emotional appeal right and left. You fail at debate. Second, I’m not talking about E. coli—I’m thinking things like tuberculosis and brucellosis.

You live in a fantasy world where the food adulteration scandals of the late 19th and early 20th century never happened, where all we have to do is Go Back To Nature and everything will be The Way It Was. You raw milk fans are of a kind with the antivaxers, the global warming deniers, and the libertarians—you have no idea how good you have it, so you’re lashing out at something you don’t understand, deep in denial over how things got that way in the first place. In short, your attitude is anti-science and anti-what-should-be-common-sense.

And you don’t exactly understand agriculture or the relationship between science and business either. GMOs are not inherently bad. Some of the companies that push them are—there’s no question that Monsanto is purest evil—but to proceed from that to attacking the science is a nonsequitur that only makes sense to someone so blinkered they may as well be a Fortean. Organic food is a great idea; I was on the fence about it until I read Jeff Gillman’s books on gardening remedies (The Truth About Organic Gardening is an excellent and generally positive book on the subject, and in addition blows away much of the woo that surrounds it. Turns out the fertilizer is less of an issue than pest management, and a lot of what people consider all-natural simply isn’t well-enough tested to know whether it’s better or not.) But organic agriculture as we know it can only support around half the current population of the world, and the Green Revolution will only last until Peak Oil. The answers will be found—we have no choice—but not by sticking to sentimentality and woo.

Brucellosis… for which there is a vaccine for cattle, which is required by law.  - Canada has been brucellosis free since the late ‘90’s.  In the U.S., let’s just say I haven’t been drinking any raw wild elk milk. 

All but two states in the US are TB free, and it would be far likelier to to catch TB from hunting/field dressing a deer. 

Are you serious about the food adulteration?  Look back at my posts you ignoramus - who’s been recommending Upton SInclair just about forever.  The problem is that those practices haven’t stopped, just been covered up by supposed USDA/FDA rubber stamping.  Look up Beef Products INc. 

And you, of course, claim to understand ag when you conflate it with organic gardening (a useful endeavor, but not quite on the same scale, to the extent of a difference in kind).  GMO’s are inherently bad under the current corporate structure.  GMO’s are also inherently bad in that we humans play in the lab, and release into the real world.  You can’t grown corn or beans in a dome. 

And one more time, yes, organic can be sustainably as productive as green revolution.  The flaw in your argument, of course is thinking that there can’t be conversions - we’re currently using corn for fuel, and more for unnecessary sweeteners. 

Have you read the latest on CCD in honeybees?  neo-nicotinoids. 
beediary.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/requiem-for-the-honeybee.doc. 

then try herbicide resistant weeds in GMO crops

Relying on technology instead of trying to rebuild sustainable systems has generally been disastrous in its short history.  Of course organic isn’t woo - and quite reputable scientists know that, which is why many are involved in the research of looking at why an organic method works.  And on the well-tested enough - of course not, why test something when there’s no money to be made on the result - so it’s a very slow process.  Which is why we’d better go about re-establishing organic method farming - Peak Oil is coming, and organic is a certain success for sustainable production - GMO’s are answers that cause more, and more serious, problems.  Honeybee CCD is a prime example - gmo and new insecticides to use on GMO crops - and what happen is a decrease in food because of destruction of pollinators.

You know what, phylosopher? Now that you’ve pulled the implied “playing God” card, I now feel safe in dismissing you as a pigheaded idiot. U fail @ science.

Yeah, right, asshole - you’re the one bringing up preventive measures against practically eradicated diseases and I’m the one who fails at science?  Not to mention your utter failure to comprehend basic writing.  Here’s a little test, quote the exact place where I imply the “playing god card.”  Tell us, how much does MOnsanto or Cargill pay you to post?  Or are you some frustrated, authoritarian bureaucrat over at the FDA?

@phylosopher

There is also quite a bit of compelling evidence for CCD being caused by malnutrition in bee populations.  Since you seem to enjoy telling others how to live and dislike it when those you are preaching at express displeasure, maybe you could go lecture the bees?  I promise they won’t talk back.  They probably won’t listen, but you don’t think anyone here is listening to you anyway.

myob.
Comment #46: phylosopher on 09/07 at 10:36 AM

Phylosopher, heal thyself.  You seem to think it’s okay to tell other people what to do, while calling them names, but tell anyone who wants to disagree with *your* infatuation with natural cow boobs to shut up, while calling them names.

I mean, at first I thought it was just because you were end-of-weekend pissed-off drunk posting at 2am.  But either you’re a lot more drunk a lot more often than most people, or it wasn’t the drinking at all and you’re just raging away because you can’t seem to help yourself.

purpleshoes:

Oh, I agree. I’m perhaps a bit overly optimistic in some regards but I do think there’s things that can be done, if governments and institutions are willing to put forth the cash for evidence-based pilot programs. But I still think there’s going to have to be quite a lot of GMO acceptance, for things like wheat with nearly the production of a cornstalk (a fantasy), golden rice (already a reality), and that sort of thing. It’s possible to make such things work, but the realities of the matter are that we a) need to get GMOs out of the stranglehold of corporate monsters like Monsanto and Syngenta and b) get over our fear of so-called frankenfoods. Without cutting fear and abuse out of the loop, it’s only that much harder for us to deal.

All the more reason to limit the market power of the big biotech companies. Gene patents are as dumb as software patents to begin with.

Yah think?

Genetically modified crops are commonplace in fields across the United States, but a new study suggests that some plants have spread into the wild. A survey of North Dakota has turned up hundreds of genetically modified canola plants growing along roads across the state.

The results, presented Friday at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Pittsburgh, show that the vast majority of feral canola plants in the state contain artificial genes that make them resistant to herbicides. Researchers also found two plants that contained traits from multiple genetically modified varieties, suggesting that genetically modified plants are breeding in the wild.

“What we’ve demonstrated in this study is a large-scale escape of a genetically modified crop in the United States,” says Cindy Sagers, an ecologist at the University of Arkansas, who led the study.

Ahh, some ad hominems, I see, yet no one has addressed that BrianX is trying to use scare tactics about dangers that are scientifically negligible, barring biological warfare.

Fear of frankenfoods - only to the extent that allergen transfer is possible, and isolating gm has already proven to be fallible - remember the star something corn in the taco shells? So, nope, strawman argument on that Brian.  I’ve had the conversations with people fearful of eating “cloned meat.”  Agreed, many of the fears are unfounded, and based on scare tactics - which is what you are using in your milk arg. And if some folks are succumbing to scare tactics, that doesn’t mean there are no valid reasons for questioning the efficacy and ramifications of GMO’s. . 

Uhh, no AaF.  There have been a number of possible factors speculated about, and it seems that it may be a combination - some which weaken the bees (monoculture caused malnutrition and the varroa mite) and make them susceptible to other illnesses.  Monoculture is antithetical to small scale organic ag, and particularly to biodynamics with it emphasis on crop rotations and diversity.  GMOs would exacerbate the monoculture problem, narrowing the gene pool.  GMO’s also require higher water inputs and water will be the new oil (prediction). 

Current increases in output (more food production) have not been made by GMO’s, but by conventional hybridization.  GMO’s have been utilized primarily for pest resistance or as catalysts for pesticide sales. 

@ purpleshoes:  yeah, I’m out of that loop - but I bet BrainX would still be the one up washing his hands and brushing his teeth before the bed stopped rockin’.

hauling compost up a mountain - uhm, where do we start - mountain soils are notoriously thin and not really very good for ag in general.  IN a subsistence culture, one generally gets the compost/fertilizer producing machine to the site - goats grazing on hillsides in a sustainable pasture system do a great job of fertilizing the area.  SO it would seem contributing to heifer international would be a better route than fertilizer.

But you sound like you’ve had first hand experience - so…..????

re: the vitamin A - for meat eaters, just raising animals outside improves the content. 
 
Sorry to disappoint OF, but I barely drink these days.  I’m happy to learn about new ways (or be reminded) about something that has a sound arg/basis behind it.  Loop back to top of post.

@phylosopher

My apologies.  I just assumed that when you argument was one (most likely misspelled) word and a link to a five page, three and one-half year old doc file that my correct, but incomplete observation in the service of making fun of you was rigorous enough.

I am glad you seemed to take it as a defense of GMOs (which it wasn’t) and a new opportunity to lecture me.  I meant it though: for fuck’s sake, please go lecture the bees.  You might think they aren’t smart enough to understand, but just feed them some bacon.  I’ve been told by an expert on all things food-, nutrition-, and lifestyle-related that babies need it to grow brains.  I am sure it will work on the bees just as well as it works on human infants.

eh, AthFem.  I’d say go fuck yourself - but I really don’t wish you to have any small chance of pleasure - so just put a sharp stick in your eye or something. 

And I see you’re math challenged, too.

@phylosopher

I shouldn’t bother, but in my Microsoft Word Viewer, it is five pages.  It is dated April 24th, 2007 (in the fucking file, not when the blogger found it and posted it).  Roughly three and a half fucking years ago.  Did you not even look at the fucking thing you posted?  And you expect us to take you seriously?

Haven’t you been asked to not do the stupid diminutive nickname thing before?

AH, Athy FEMMIE,.  - Thanks for letting me know publicly that it got you all hot and bothered.  I attempted to find the most concise, pertinent doc on the web, because the practical (beekeepers I happen to know personally)  and research based theoretical (colleagues who are PI’s in the ag/biosciences who are doing the actual research haven’t published yet) doesn’t change the fact that the most current research points to neo-nicotinoids.

And when is your study from - oh, wait, you haven’t posted any link.  So here’s another showing combi-toxicity.  late 2009 - less than a year old.  Read it and weep, sweetcheeks.

mauve footcoverings, let’s just say that I believe knowing the family is good enough.

Hmmm.  No, the goats should have been “let loose between plantings.  Compost aint’t fertilizer, unless you’re talking manure tea. Seriously, where were you?  I’m mostly a flatlander, but 45 degree angle ag fascinates me.  Looking to do some soil/ag outreach marketing/foodnetwork to impoverished area this year.

@phylosopher

You posted a short document written by a man who thought that the H1N1 was probably created in a lab and that the vaccine would kill tons of people and not even prevent the flu (flu vaccines don’t work at all, y’know).  The document was written for The Institute of Science in Society, which is headed by a woman who thinks there is strong evidence that HIV and AIDS are unrelated and that living organisms probably don’t follow the laws of thermodynamics.

Look, it is perfectly fine to look for lay-person accessible arguments (although, really, the Wikipedia article on CCD would probably have been your best bet), but claiming something is “the latest” and then linking to an unsourced doc file from over three years ago doesn’t make your claims look serious.  Similarly, not knowing when or who the file was from also makes you look like you are not arguing in good faith.  I had no trouble finding out both where the file came from and better articles on the subject.  In doing so, I learned about the malnutrition thing which seemed to be right up your alley.  Although, apparently jokes at your expense are not your thing.

I suppose this is open to debate, but preference seems to be for “neonicotinoids” rather than “neo-nicotinoids.”  The emphasis on the neo as a result of the extraneous hyphen certainly appears to be conspiracy theory fear-mongering.  Hyphen rules are incredibly complex, but a basic rule of thumb is that the more accepted a compound like neo+nicotinoids is, the more likely it is to be written as a single word.  You may be interested to know that the original version of your “Requiem for a Honeybee” article does not hyphenate the word.

Finally, yes, I’ll admit it.  I was upset when I posted my last response.  Most of the “fucks,” though are a result of me finally figuring out what your mistake had been.  At first, I genuinely thought that you were implying I couldn’t count the number of pages because of a difference in how we had each opened the file.  Then, I realized that you might have meant the date and was upset that you would call me out on rounding up to the nearest six months.  Then, I theorized that you must have meant the difference in time from when the document was written to when it was posted on the blog.  All of that made it in, but one thought at a time.  What can I say?  I like the word fuck.  Normally I try not to stick so many of them together like that, but since each “Wow, phylosopher is a fucking idiot” thought came nearly unconnected from the others, each fuck made it in.

wow assy, femfuck, you spent all that time on researching what I’d posted on a two bit, late night,almost dead blog thread.  I’m soooooo flattered.  Really, rose petals on satin sheets before you licked and sucked would have sufficed.

Out of curiosity - Do you have a life?

@phylosopher

I have health problems that are none of your fucking business, but despite them, I do still have a life.  The fact that I can read blogs and respond to assholes like you despite my health problems actually makes my life pretty fucking great in many ways.

Also, it took me about 5 seconds to find the site and once I did, it was hard to leave.  You should check it out.  Those people are nuts and the fact that they think they are doing science is pretty fucking funny.  I laughed a lot (at them and at you for thinking that was a wise choice to post on an anti-woo feminist blog).

If you haven’t noticed, I like engaging with trolls.  I feel less bad about this when threads are almost dead because then I know that my desire to laugh at them isn’t interfering as much with intelligent discussion.  At this point, you probably rate almost as trollerific as McKay.  Keep working though, toss in a defense of the Catholic Church discriminating against homosexuals, a reference to 90% white America, or a declaration that plants reproduce asexually and you’ll make it.

Nice to know I’m not the only one who thinks you’re an ignorant putz, phyl.

toss in a defense of the Catholic Church discriminating against homosexuals, a reference to 90% white America, or a declaration that plants reproduce asexually and you’ll make it.

If God wanted there to be gay people he wouldn’t have created plants to be asexual (I’ve certainly never seen 2 plants fucking!) he would have made plants gay so the Catholic Church is just trying to save us from pollen-on-pollen perversion and also we need het couples to keep the white birth rate up bird & bees style (no plants involved in that, you’ll notice! ‘Cause they’re asexual) because OMG I’ve heard there are maybe brown people in Amurka and that’s unUHMRRRK’N is why!

(*gasps for air* Did I do good, Atheist? ;p)

More importantly, what’s up with phyl’s weird nicknames for people? They’re not even clever...

@Bagelsan

Hee.

I have no idea about the names (although I know he has done “oldfem” for oldfeminist and “ASSlysia” for alysia).  The only other poster around here who does that (that I know of) is MikeEss and he has the decency to save it for the obvious trolls.

That desperate - hey Brian?  What happened?  Mommy find your stash of 1963 Playboys?

In other news:

Another thing you can do w/ the juice that you’ve strained out of your fruit is reduce it in a pan and add it back to the fruit for flavor/moisture.