re: UN calls for greener food production to feed world in 2050

"aimed at helping developing countries boost clean energy technology, sustainable farming and other initiatives, the survey said.

The survey said the 2007-2008 food crisis and higher food prices “revealed deep structural problems in the global food system” that produce high carbon emissions and lead to a warmer climate, as well as more polluted land and water."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/un-calls-for-greener-food-production-to-feed-world-in-2050/2011/07/05/gHQAVnlqyH_story.html

There's an opportunity here: If we of the First World really have an obligation to fix everything, why not really fix it? Third World countries are only making horrible messes of themselves because they don't have the infrastructure and the resources to use the resources they have properly, and they're taking the cheapest, fastest ways to catch up with us. So, why not help them? It's not competition: it's mutual survival. If the whole world is at the same level, no one is getting cheated, so we should find a way to get them there.

And here's the opportunity: All those Third World Countries don't have infrastructure like we do. There isn't the need to dismantle a US food system to get something better in place. We could (or the UN could, or the World Health Organization could, or a new entity meant for this could) build an ideal infrastructure for them, and show them how to support it, maintain it and keep it healthy. The Third World could show the rest of the world how it's done, elevating them above that mental space where everyone seems to think there's nothing Africa or South Asia can offer the rest of the world other than manufacturing.

It's not simple to do, I know. There's issues of imperialism and local instability and we'd have to have the country as a whole behind the plan, but I think it's a very simple idea. Make Everyone Better. Isn't that a better goal than Bigger Faster Cheaper Now?

re: 2050, the year we all eat each other

Quotables, because Mark Morford is so very quotable:

"It's not like it's easy being here on the planet 40 years from now, around the year 2050, the time when the new U.S. census data indicates, after much sighing and general wringing of hands, that we as a rapacious and relentlessly procreative species will be exploding all over ourselves in numbers that, at first glance, seem entirely ridiculous and untenable and doomed, but which, when you look at them more carefully, are completely ridiculous and untenable and doomed.

Here it is: A mere 40 years from now, the world population, which just recently reached a sweating, gasping seven billion, will be well over nine billion. Ethiopia and Nigeria are on track to grow the fastest, nearly tripling in population, along with similar patterns in other "high-fertility" African regions, which is all kinds of absurd given that continent's struggles to adequately feed and water even a fraction of its current population.

Minorities will soon flip to the majority in America, much to the horror of Arizona, Texas and many, many panicky Tea Partiers, who very much believe that God really wants America to look exactly like a giant Idaho Wal-Mart, only with more gluten.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/06/notes070611.DTL#ixzz1Rij7BuBC"

"America will retain its place as third largest in the world, mostly by birthing 100 million more confused coffee slurping fans of reality TV (308 million now, 423 million then), some of them very beautiful, life-affirming and totally cute in those jeans, but many of them mal-educated, broke and living with their parents -- and by the way, if you're around 25 and reading this right now, that parent is probably you.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/06/notes070611.DTL#ixzz1RijXSzwT"

"Sure, we've managed to avoid complete cataclysm so far. But only barely. It turns out we are fabulously good at reproducing like drunken rabbits. It's everything after that where we seem to lose our collective minds.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/06/notes070611.DTL#ixzz1RijsB3mu"

"Some experts argue that the human species, if we did ourselves right, could sustain all those bodies fairly well. We have plenty of physical space. Plenty of natural resources, even. It's simply a matter of distribution, of economic health/wealth, conservation, environmental protection, careful resource management. Also, consciousness, awareness, spiritual evolution, a shared sense of humanity and ethical mindfulness. I know: Good luck with that.

Nevertheless, some say we're fully capable of sustaining 10 billion humans. We just don't seem to have it in us to do what it takes. We're terrible at efficiency, long range planning, distribution of wealth and power.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/06/notes070611.DTL&ao=2#ixzz1RikFxWWP"

"The wolf is lurching ever closer to the door. In fact, he's almost here. Unless that's just the UPS guy with a new iPad 2, yoga books and our new wine club delivery. Gosh, maybe it's not so bad after all. Guess we won't know until we open the door.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/06/notes070611.DTL&ao=2#ixzz1RikpVGib"

I love the snark, but snark aside, this is what people are actually talking about more and more often: can we survive the way we have been? I think the answer is no, not entirely. And I think sometime soon it's going to be a Big Deal and we'll have to start taking Drastic Measures to keep things going. Probably in my lifetime, or my kids' (though, really, I hope I can witness it, because that's something amazing, isn't it, the end of everything we think we know?).

My favored solutions are also, apparently the expensive ones that will probably get dropped in favor of, like, police states and wartime-rationing mentality, but I think they're better ideas: Vertical farming in cities to feed the people who live there, home farming to feed individual families as much as possible, extensive terraforming of marginal areas using ancient methods of making a place livable, and then sending people to live there--give them some incentive, some reason that's better than slums and death and crime, and then send them there. Space colonies to create more space. Clean, new energy to reduce the need for coal and oil until it's just a footnote--water and wind and geothermal are super-efficient, and we can mine natural gas off garbage dumps which we have plenty of. New planned cities that function as organisms, not horrible sprawling eyesores. 

There are people who know how to do this stuff, we just have to decide, as a planet, that we're willing to take the chances and pay the costs to make the whole planet better and cleaner and more sustainable. I think the decision will have to be made this century.

link: Ten Goofy Foods You Can Find In A French Supermarket

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2011/06/10-goofy-foods-you-find-in-a-french-supermarket/

"1. Mes 4 Croissants

Poppin’ fraîche has gone global and even with over 1200 bakeries in Paris, why would anyone bother walk all the way across the street to get a fresh, buttery croissant in the morning, that only costs 90 centimes, when you can simply unroll a package of doughy crescents and never slip out of that comfy peignoir de bain? For all you lazy types out there, I took a bullet for you and tried them out.

And speaking of taking bullets, when I peeled back the first layer of the package, the dough exploded with a startlingly loud pop, which so shocked me that I jumped as the dough quickly expanded as it burst from its tight confines. I almost had a crise cardiaque."

This is exactly why, whenever we have Crescent Rolls, I have to open the tube-- H has a heart attack every time! We eat them because the Bunnery closes long before dinner and is a mile and a half from our house, and there's nothing closer. No bakery, no breadshop.* But why, oh, why would anyone bother to eat them in France?

I could very easily go on a tangent here about how gross American exported culture is and how we're slowly killing the world, but that's already Jaime Oliver's platform and he does it better than me. Suffice it to say that I pretty much agree, and that I'm trying to find ways to avoid falling into the bad-food trap. Every time I haul myself back on the eating-well wagon (I refuse to say "diet wagon" because that sounds too much like a little death of a bad sort), I'm more convinced that it's almost impossible to be healthy in this country. And it only enforces my basic urge to move somewhere else.

gripe<>

* If they really want to reinitialize our neighborhood, the Council should encourage things like bakeries to move into the old, empty shopfronts, and make it easy for them to offer lower prices than the supermarket, which is ages away anyway.

Today's challenge: 6-10-11

Recall a smell or taste that has a happy personal memory for you.

Fresh apples, before they're cut. When I was about eight or nine, my favorite fruit of all time was apples. Mom brought some home one time and one of them was just so fragrant and apple-y that I couldn't bear to eat it. I put it in a little basket and kept it next to my bed so I could smell it when I slept. I carried it around the house with me. I specifically remember sitting in the dining-room window, which was deep-set enough in the old part of the house that the will was wide enough to sit comfortably, sniffing my apple, while the golden afternoon sunshine poured through the window and warmed up everything. I felt like a princess before she finds out the apple is poisoned--I knew why the princess would take the bite even though the old lady giving the apple was so obviously creepy. I finally ate that apple and it was tart and sweet and crispy and juicy and perfect, and I ate everything but the stem.

summer

This is the first week that it's really felt like summer, even though it's been warm for ages. I knew it was when I came home from work the other day to a house that smelled like my Grandmother's back room--old house, old furniture, books, a running washing machine, Florida humidity, grass, the dirt outside the open windows. I walked in, and for a moment, I thought I was going to cry. It's been almost a year and a half and I still keep getting broadsided like this.

But then, that passed and I remembered all the happy summers when we'd come back from wherever we were living all over the world, and we'd live in Grandma & Grandpa's un-air-conditioned old house, sleeping on cots and roll-out beds and the floor, and the heat didn't matter then because we were little and it doesn't matter to kids. I wish the summer could still be like that. I still get the urge, as soon as the temperature spikes, to go somewhere other than here. The emails I get from various travel sites probably don't help much with their "799$ for a week in an Irish Castle!"-type deals.

I guess I'll always be a gypsy like that. So I've made it a goal: I want to make enough money in my living to be able to just pick up and go every few months when a good deal to somewhere I want to go comes across my desk. I'll stay a week or three, decompress, work from the beach or a castle or whatever, and come home happy to see the place again.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to enjoy the sun before it gets so bad I can't bear to be outside.

I am now sans creepy mole

As you can see



Not that bad, considering they literally cut a piece off of me and charged me 115$ to do it. It was really rather anticlimactic: I went in at 3 and I was out at 3:11, including payment time. The most painful part was getting the Novocaine shot that made my foot numb for, like, twelve hours. For two days it hardly hurt at all. Then, when I went back to work, it started aching the longer I stood on it, and it's like now it remembers that it's an injury, and it hurts more. It's basically a moderately deep cut with a burn over it, so I guess it's entitled to hurt, but it's still annoying.

I'm going to replace my mole with a prosthetic one, then, later, a cyborg mole, and it'll be the first part of me upgraded. Barring that, and depending on how it scars, I might just tattoo around the scar in a circle filled with  safety and healing symbols. You know, until the cybernetics are perfected.

I'm still waiting on the lab results, and that's the last bit of nervousness I have for this thing. He says it's probably going to come back fine, but until those results are in my hand, I'm still a bit twitchy about it.

More weird things from downtown

This is a fairly normal sight here in the Oldest City

midweek gripe session

I feel like I'm doing everything wrong. Scheduling, sticking to the schedule, keeping up with stuff, communicating with people. I keep forgetting things that need doing, and winding up doing them crappily at the last minute. I keep saying I'll do things I don't really have time for, and then being way late. My stupid computer lags more and more no matter waht I do. I can't get my external HDD to register. I don't have time to exercise, and when I do, my knee hurts. I have this stupid mole making me paranoid and enough flea bites that I am far too aware of every single thing that bothers me about my skin. I'm forever behind on everything. I just want to quit it all and crawl into a hole and never come out.

But I'm too damn stubborn to be a quitter, especially when I've put this damn much effort into school and stuff.

But I still hate being late on assignments. And I still am so freaking tired of arguing genre and critiquing things that don't really need my input. And I'm so tired of being awake so damn much. I want to sleep more, and not have to start working as soon as I wake up. I want to not have to worry about money. I want to get on with my life already.

It's too late. I'm going to  bed.

This is my newest project

...that I probably don't have time for. A gift from J.