Trust Us Is Getting Old

Today’s post was written by Barbara O’ Brien, who represents www.maacenter.org, a leading web resource for asbestos exposure and cancer information. In addition, her blogging at the.Mahablog, Crooks and Liars, and AlterNet earned her the notoriety of being a panelist at the Yearly Kos Convention and a featured guest blogger at the Take Back America Conference in Washington, DC. In other words, she’s a much more practiced and accomplished blogger than I. She sent the following post for publication on this blog. It’s a timely subject and an important message we all need to hear, no matter where we fall on the political spectrum. Hope you enjoy. Please don’t hesitate to send me material if you would like the opportunity to share your thoughts on anything to do with kid-friendly organic life. I’m hoping to feature many guest bloggers this summer mostly because I’m lazy, but also because there are so many people out there with good information and thoughts to share.


“Trust Us” Is Getting Old

When British Petroleum (BP) applied for a permit to build the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and begin drilling, it claimed to have the technology and know-how to handle any oil spill.

But in the face of an actual spill, BP is much less confident. “This scares everybody: the fact that we can’t make this well stop flowing, the fact that we haven’t succeeded so far,” BP CEO Doug Suttles said. “Many of the things we’re ¬trying have been done on the surface before, but have never been tried at 5,000 ft.”

They’ve never been tried at 5,000 feet. Drilling for oil this deeply under the ocean is a relatively new enterprise for our species. Oil has been drilled offshore in shallow water for more than a century. But deepwater drilling is much more expensive than shallow-water drilling. For a long time drilling in deep water wasn’t tried, because it would have cost more to extract a barrel of oil than a barrel of oil was worth on world markets. It took the spikes in oil prices in recent years to make deepwater drilling profitable.

Politicians and oil executives assured us that offshore oil drilling was safe. Those tree huggers who worry about environmental disasters are nuts, they said. Yes, there have been oil rig disasters in the past, but (big wink) we know what we’re doing now. Trust us.

The laws of physics work differently nearly a mile underwater than they do on land, or shallow water, however. By now, it is obvious BP is still trying to invent a procedure that might stop the oil leak, maybe, if we’re lucky. No one appears to have been ready for the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Really, this “trust us” business is getting old. How many times have we been told to “trust” some new thing, and then when the dangers surface we find out the “trusted” ones hadn’t told us the whole truth?

In the mid-20th century we humans went into overdrive digging asbestos out of the earth to use in countless structures and products. There is asbestos in navy ships, asbestos in our homes and schools, asbestos in old car parts, asbestos in landfills. And eventually, years after medical science had determined asbestos exposure causes terrible disease, industry executives and politicians reluctantly agreed to shut down asbestos production, or at least most of it. And now the cost of asbestos abatement and mesothelioma treatment is an ongoing problem for individuals, taxpayers, and businesses.

And do we want to talk about Vioxx? Tanning beds? And now there are questions being asked about Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical found in just about every plastic bottle you’ve ever touched. It may be dangerous, it may not. Opinions vary. Just note that the same political and business leaders who deny BPA could be dangerous are the same ones who like to yell “drill, baby, drill.”

I guess the strongest take away from all of this nonsense is to be careful who you trust. Educate yourself through experience and research and believe in yourself to make the right decisions on what we as consumers purchase. Take action against those who are making these harmful environmental choices, whether it be your neighbors, or members of corporate America.

Barbara O’ Brien
June 2, 2010

How Do You Do It All??

A friend visited recently and wanted to see all my gardens. As we walked from bed to bed, she kept remarking, “I don’t know how you have time to do all this!” As I tried to explain to her, I don’t. There is rarely a day when I can throw together consecutive hours to work in my garden. I do it in minutes stolen here and there. Some weekends I am blessed with an afternoon, but those are very rare with three kids heavily involved in life and sports.

Here’s my secret. And no, this isn’t where I confess that I have a staff like Martha’s that swoops in with mulch and compost and designer plants. I wish. That’s right up there with Esmeralda the maid I wish I had. Last night after two children and one husband had literally run from the dinner table to make it to a baseball game, I was left staring at the ruins of dinner. My remaining child looked at me and shrugged his shoulders and then got up to leave too.
I sighed and said, “This is when I wish Esmeralda would come in and clean up.”
My son paused, having heard this before, and asked, “Mom, was there every really an Esmeralda?”
I told him, “Not really, but if there was, she would clear these dishes and then come back and wipe the table and pick up the black beans that your brother spilled on his chair, and after that she would do the dishes and even change the laundry that’s been sitting in the washer all day.”
He watched me carefully, perhaps wondering if I was in to the dope that has been reportedly flowing freely through the middle school, and said, “That’s too bad,” before leaving me with the mess.

My secret with all the gardens is to steal minutes. When I have yelled and yelled that it is time to leave for practice and no obedient children have come running, but several less-obedient children finally realize they don’t know where the other cleat is and there are no clean water bottles, I grab my favorite weeding tool and work on the strawberry patch while they locate the errant cleat and wash the water bottles.

When I get back from the school and realize I have 20 whole minutes before I need to start dinner, I grab my seed packets and markers and plant whatever needs planting.

In the morning after I feed the horses, when I’m not sure I want to wade back in to the fray of before school preparations, I’ll pick up a few thyme plants that are waiting to be transplanted from their pots to the garden and tuck them in.

When I’m on the phone with my dear friend in Idaho who I could talk to for hours, I balance the phone on my shoulder and use my stirrup hoe to clean up the areas between the rows.

The reason I can garden like this is- I leave my stuff out. I know that dad’s everywhere will cringe at this directive, but it works. I leave my stirrup hoe leaning against the pea fence in the vegetable garden. That way it’s where I need it whenever I have a free minute to weed. I do realize that garden tools last longer if you don’t leave them out in the weather. I’m sure that’s true. My garden hoe is over 10 years old and still works like a charm, so I’m willing to challenge the “put-the-tools-back-where-they-belong” commandment.

I also leave out my garden bin. It sits on the porch near the door where I can grab what I need at a moment’s notice. No, it doesn’t look so great with plant markers and empty yogurt container seed pots spilling out of it, but I’m not about that. Again, I’m willing to challenge the “the-porch-should-be-spotless-and-beautiful-at-all-times-just-in-case-someone-important-comes-to-visit” commandment. All the important people in my life garden or love what comes out of gardens and they’ll understand.

In my garden bin I keep:
• Seeds to be planted
• Plant markers
• Permanent markers to write on plant markers
• Small shovel
• Weeding tool
• Plants ready to go outside (if they are large I just put them where they will reside in the garden in their pots so they are ready to go when I am)
• The Seed catalog (so I can refer to it, if I have a question about planting or harvesting)
• Gloves (2 pair because one always seems to be wet)

Near every garden you will also notice a weed bucket left out. A weed bucket in our world is a manure bucket with holes drilled around the bottom rim (or cracks created when they are handled less than carefully when the weather was freezing). The holes and cracks are necessary because these beauties sit out in all kinds of weather and a bucket filled with weeds and water is not only ungodly heavy, it stinks to high heaven. I know the buckets are not so attractive, but once the veggies get going, you don’t really notice them.

This last thing is my real secret – the list. I keep a list on my kitchen counter of the current needs of my gardens. That way I don’t experience that deer-in-the-headlights feeling that can overpower me when I suddenly realize I have 10 minutes all to myself. If I don’t know what needs done, I scan the list and pick something. Right now the list says:

“Pick swiss chard and blanche, plant pumpkins somewhere, find sticks for bean teepee, weed the peas and corn, put the rest of the mulch somewhere, snip the bottom branches off the tomatoes, check the garlic & shallots.”

It’ll only take a few minutes to plant the pumpkins (after I figure out where I have room), and weeding the peas and corn can be done in spurts, so those are great 10 minute chores. The tomatoes are an “every time I walk by” chore. You have to be vigilant about the bottom leaves touching the ground this time of year (the blight is always lurking!). It’ll take longer to locate the right size branches to build the bean teepee, so that might require 20 minutes, and checking to see if the garlic and shallots are ready will take 2 minutes. I’ll need 25 minutes or more to pick the swiss chard and clean it and blanche it for freezing. I might need even more time to start the pick-up and clean out the remaining mulch from its bed (the bulk of this time being the starting the pick-up part). All these things will get done in between the rest of my life this week.

This is how I garden – a minute here and a minute there. If I waited for the hours, it would never happen. There are tradeoffs of course, the inside of my house doesn’t look so good, but that doesn’t matter so much since this time of year we’re all outside anyway.

The Power of Best Friends

I guess that I am the first of any of Cara’s readers that have actually posted a guest blog. I think that makes me the guinea pig. Depending on who Cara’s avid readers are, some of you may know me, some may not. My name is Lisbeth, I am one of Cara’s best friends from childhood (the really young years…7 -13) in Hockessin.

For those of you who simply read this blog but really don’t know Cara at all, let me tell you that she talks exactly like she types, that’s pretty much why I read it all the time, I feel like I am in her living room. While her blogging may revolve around Organic foods and healthy living for children, mine are both young adults and so what I have done or not done with them over the past 21 years no longer really has relevance, they make their own choices now.

I started out when they were little doing the homemade thing, baby food in the blender, cloth diapers, fresh juices etc., then reality set in with a husband out to sea and a job. All of that stuff that she says not to do, I did, miraculously I have 2 pretty wonderful almost adult children that ate McDonalds french fries and drank coke once in a while, so don’t fret, there is hope.

I read her blog because she inspires me, to be better, do better, live better and pay attention (at whatever level) to what I buy and what I eat. I can guarantee you that I am nowhere near her state of greatness for the environment but I am listening. I think that if all of us do that, just try one thing, if it is recycling or buying local or eating organic the planet actually might survive for a little while longer than its current life expectancy.

This brings me to the point of this blog. The influence of best friends and the power that they have over us, for LIFE!!

Cara , Linda and I grew up together, we played with horses, we complained about our mothers, we sang, laughed, fought, cried, explored, learned, loved and never ever stopped being friends. I am the youngest of the 3 but not by much, I moved away from the other 2 when I was 13, I didn’t see either one of them (although they stayed close) for 10 years.

Somehow, miraculously, now that we all have families and live in 3 completely separate corners of the country, we found each other again. Cara I see weekly in cyber space reading her blog but physically I have not seen her since Ian was 2. So what is the point of all this? The point is that our friends perhaps more than our parents or friends or coworkers have more influence over us than anyone.

I live at the beach. I do not swim in the ocean, no one can get me in the water, except Cara, she can convince me to do anything and she always has. I do not hike in the mountains, I am a city girl, I go to Idaho and hike 7 miles up a mountain, with Linda. I run (ok, so I jog) but not by choice, I am not an “I love running“ kind of a girl. I run because I like to drink wine and eat dessert (more than just one bite). Running is the only way that my clothes still fit at the end of the month. If anyone ever mentioned to me that I should train for and run a half marathon, I would tell them that they were completely nuts! These two have convinced me to try and tackle this challenge and I actually agreed, why , I am still not quite sure but it will be an interesting chapter to add to my life story. (You'll love it and feel like superwoman when it's all done, the blisters are soaking, and the wine glass is in your hand! - Cara)

If most of the readers of this blog have young children that are still heavily influenced by their peers, beware, they could possibly be around forever. The power and influence that true, forever friends have on us, for LIFE, is quite amazing. I am grateful to have some in mine!!

Salt - the New Bad Guy

Seems like everyone’s talking about salt these days. The government’s got a bee in its bonnet and is on a mission to reduce salt in the American diet. Good luck with that. Our bodies require about 1500 mg of sodium a day. Most Americans get more than twice that. And too much salt can lead to high blood pressure which can cause stroke, heart attack, osteoporosis, and asthma, to name a few. Salt is the new bad guy, but really you can’t blame salt.

Salt brings out the flavor in foods. It makes food taste good. Ever leave the salt out of your chocolate chip cookie recipe? Yuck. Hard to believe sugar and flour and chocolate couldn’t be delicious, but without the salt it’s basically cardboard. And truly, there’s nothing wrong with salt. We all need it.

Sodium is essential for life. Without it our body can’t balance its water regulation. It’s also necessary for muscle contraction and expansion, nerve stimulation, acid-alkaline balance, and the proper function of the adrenal glands. Deficiency symptoms include confusion, low blood sugar, weakness, lethargy, and heart palpations. On the other hand, I read from a reputable source that a salt-free diet will often cure acne and oily skin. That might have been helpful when I was 16, but I’m not sure it’s worth the risk.

I love salt. We use celtic sea salt granules in a grinder at our table and I’m pretty guilty of grinding away over my food. My husband always winces as he watches me douse my food with salt. I feel pretty healthy and my blood pressure is always excellent, so I try to avert my eyes when my hubby gives me that look that says “Stop using so much salt or you’re going to DIE.”

I’ve been following the big salt crisis, as I have a vested interest in not dying. Here’s what I discovered. The salt that is sickening us is not coming from our salt shakers. In fact, only 11% of our sodium intake actually comes from what we add to our food at the table. Where the sodium is really lurking is in processed food and restaurant foods. Chefs all over are panicking at the idea that the government might regulate how much salt they are allowed to add to their signature dishes. Most chefs add salt to their cooking by the fistful, not the teaspoon. Time’s recent article revealed that the Admiral’s Feast at Red Lobster has 4,400 mg of sodium. That’s three days worth! Country fried steak dinner at Denny’s has more than 3600 mg of sodium – the same as 24 strips of bacon.

Now, I’m certainly not holding up Red Lobster or Denny’s as the example of fine dining, but the parking lots of places like that are crammed, so somebody must like their cooking. We have a Cracker Barrel just a mile from our house and ever since it opened I’ve never driven by and not seen it stuffed. We ate there once, just to see what the fuss was all about. I couldn’t find anything on the menu that wasn’t smothered in gravy or deep fried. And the vegetables were boiled to death and drenched in too much salt for even my taste. Collectively we are encouraging this kind of restaurant to exist and expand, just like our waistlines.

The other place that the bulk of our sodium intake comes from is processed food, and I’m not just talking about lunchables (ham and swiss lunchables have 930mg of sodium!). Breakfast cereals and snack foods, the staple of any normal kids’ diet are loaded with sodium. Check out your bottle of ketchup - 150 mg in a tablespoon. I don’t know about your kids, but mine practically mainline the stuff. Ranch Dip has 290 mg of sodium in a 2 tablespoon serving. It all begins to add up. You can count on sodium in pretty much anything you buy from the store, it’s even found naturally in some foods, like meat, poultry, vegetables, and milk. One cup of low fat milk has about 107 mg sodium. Progresso Hearty Tomato Soup has 1,110 mg and here you thought you were being healthy having soup for lunch. In college we all ate through cases of Ramen Noodles because they were so cheap, but they are loaded with sodium – 1120 per serving!

Sodium chloride is everywhere. I was reading the ingredients in a bottle of hair conditioner the other day and found sodium chloride listed as the final ingredient – in hair care?! So what’s a person supposed to do? I think it’s fairly simple. Avoid processed food. Cook food yourself. Buy your food from people you know. I was explaining this to my 13-year-old and he said, “that’s your theme, I think.” So at least he’s getting the message even if he doesn’t always heed it.

If you do buy processed food, and let’s face it, it’s pretty hard to avoid, pay attention to labels. Salt is a great preservative, so food manufacturers use it heavily to protect food. They depend on it to reduce the dryness in crackers, and bring out the sweetness in cakes and cookies. And don’t overlook that salt is also found in sodium-containing compounds like monosodium glutamate (MSG), baking soda, baking powder, disodium phosphate, sodium alginate, and sodium nitrate.

I admit that I can be heavy handed with the salt shaker on my own plate, but I can do that because most everything I cook comes from fresh ingredients and I add very little salt when cooking. In fact, I’m kind of famous for leaving it out. My poor family has endured all manner of salt-less concoctions. All this bad press about salt has me reading labels again and that’s a good thing. The key for most of us when it comes to eating healthy is awareness. Salt is not the bad guy – our eating habits are.

Note: See the post, “Salt is Salt is Salt…or is it?” from September 2009 to learn about the healthiest types of salt.

Everything Evolves

We’re all evolving. At least we’re supposed to be. This blog has evolved a bit too. I no longer find myself writing about strictly organic topics. I seem to digress to parenting, philosophy, chicken-keeping, gardening, and managing a home, with the occasional political rant thrown in for fun. Hope that’s OK with you. As it evolves, I would invite you to suggest topics. Some weeks I have more ideas and words than I know what to do with, and other weeks (like this week for instance) I have to scrounge around for something relevant to say.

I like to post twice a week, but if it gets to the point where I find myself writing just to be writing, I’ll try to spare you and get by with just one post. There are topics I covered last year that I may revisit because my own understanding of a particular topic has evolved.

I would also just LOVE to have a guest blogger contribute something, so if you have something to say, pass it along. I’m a gentle editor, if I was a little tougher you wouldn’t have to wade through so many words each post. I’m still waiting for my cousin Carolee to send me her guest-post on Air-dried Laundry (ha! Now you have to do it!).

In the spirit of evolving, I’d like to share my latest wheat bread recipe for the bread maker. I’m always trying to perfect my sandwich bread recipe so my kids won’t resent the fact that their crazy mother refuses to provide store-bought bread. I know lunchtime finds them a bit self-conscious of the size and shape of the bread itself, so I’ve been working towards making the bread so delicious that they suffer the humiliation gladly. Here’s the latest evolution of our sandwich wheat bread:

Honey-Flax-Sunflower Wheat Bread
(makes a medium loaf)

1 ¼ cup water
3 Tablespoons honey
2 Tablespoons butter
1 ½ teaspoon salt
¼ cup sunflower seeds (I finely chop mine in the food processor so no one suspects there are nuts in the bread)
¼ cup ground flax meal
2 cups Whole Wheat flour
1 ½ cups unbleached bread flour
1 ¼ teaspoon yeast

Place the ingredients in the processor in the order listed. Bake on Whole Wheat setting.

Every bread maker is different, but mine takes these ingredients and makes bread that has a delicious crust, yet is soft and moist on the inside. It's full of wonderful flavors. Sometimes I substitute pumpkins seeds (ground up, of course) for the sunflower seeds. One of these days I'll get real crazy and throw in both! Gotta love my exciting life.

Are GMOs the Answer?

Demand Organic. That’s the latest campaign of the Rodale Institute, founded in 1947 by organic pioneer J.I. Rodale. If you look around your book shelf you may find you have a Rodale book or two – they are prolific in their promotion of organic gardening and healthy living. Or maybe you’ve read Organic Gardening, the best magazine out there for those of us trying grow things the way nature intended if nature intended to be corralled in a garden.

My oldest son recently wrote a paper in defense of GMO farming practices. I, of course, was pretty horrified. But after talking about it, he admitted he was only going on the stuff he’d read in class. I offered more information and he told me that was interesting but the paper was due tomorrow. Hmm. When I read his paper he made some very valid points about how difficult it is to feed the world’s growing population. He felt that genetically modified foods were the only solution. They aren’t. In fact, besides being potentially hazardous to our health (there are no long term studies to prove otherwise), they increase our dependency on individual companies and set us up for world-wide famine in the case of a crop failure.

If, for instance, we convince 100 farmers in a desperate region in Africa to plant a particular gem of a GM seed and then that seed turns out to be a health hazard, what then? Or, if those farmers plant that GM seed and are then obligated to use the same company’s pesticides and fertilizers to protect the seed and stimulate its growth, they strip the land of what little nutrients were present in their soil to begin with and create a dependent relationship with that seed company. Farmers can’t save the patented seeds produced by the crop they grow, and even if they did they are dependent on buying even more fertilizers and pesticides to make their soil capable of growing anything. Sure those seeds produce a massive harvest, but over time all those chemicals create some awfully screwed up, sterile soil. It may be a short term fix, but it won’t last over the long haul. Plus all those fertilizers and pesticides run off in to the water supply or are carried off in the air supply and they will slowly poison not just the planet, but us. That’s just one scenario. I’m certain I’m only scratching the surface of the potential dangers of depending on GMO food to solve the hunger crisis.

The Rodale Institute has been carrying out the longest-running US Study comparing organic and conventional farming techniques and has helped to train soil building farmers all over the world. Their methods work and they won’t kill us in their effort to feed us. I trip over my own words too much in my efforts to explain all this and I don’t completely understand all the methods of organic farming, so I’d love it if you would check out Rodale’s website www.demandorganic.org so you can get a first rate explanation. I don’t have the answers; I’m just trying to raise awareness. Rodale has done the work and they’ve been doing organic since way before all of us wannabes got started, so they are your best source.

Besides learning about how organic farming methods can teach the world to feed themselves, you can learn lots about how to grow your own organic food and demand organic products in your own community.

Here are five things you can do to help promote organics:
1. Buy organic and local whenever possible.
2. Give an organic gift.
3. Don’t buy GMO food.
4. Ask your local markets to carry more organics.
5. Speak up to your friends (and your family) and explain why you prefer organic and local products.
6. Learn more so you can speak intelligently. Visit www.demandorganic.org.

OK, that was six things. I always have too much to say. Here’s my last request – Don’t accept the status quo. My son’s textbook and classroom teacher told him that GMO food is the answer to our future food crisis. But it’s not the only answer. When people say, organics are fine for rich people, but they will never work for the general population, call them on this because it’s bullcrap (sorry, it just makes me angry). Our ancestors survived and thrived on organic farming methods. It wasn’t until someone showed up with a Star-Belly On machine that we Sneetches decided we needed to change the way we were growing food. Just because something is new and glossy doesn’t make it better. Doing the hard work of caring for our land, rather than just spraying something on it, may make us tired, but haven’t we learned by now that the easy way is not always the best way?