Category Archives: Food

Rule Five War on Food Friday

Again from Issues & Insights, which is becoming one of my favorite daily reads, we have The Elites’ War on Food.  Excerpts, with my comments, follow:

A few months back, stories of “suspicious” fires at food-production plants raged across the media. The narrative said the sites were being sabotaged to disrupt the food supply. And it was most likely wrong. But that doesn’t mean there is no effort on the part of Western elites to put the peasants on a strict diet.

Most by now have seen reports that Dutch officials are closing as many as 3,000 farms in the Netherlands, the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural products by value even though it’s only slightly larger than Maryland, to comply with crackpot European Union carbon dioxide emissions rules. It’s possible that eventually more than 11,000 farms will be shut down, and 17,600 forced to sharply cut their livestock numbers.

On our side of the Atlantic, the malefactors are also busy. Just the News is reporting that the Environmental Protection Agency is quietly quadrupling the regulatory cost of carbon emissions in a new war on fossil fuels, which is, of course, also a war on the food supply.

“If you think about the fact that they would impose this damage factor, let’s say on farmers, because it applies to fertilizer,” Louisiana Solicitor General Liz Murill said on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “Fertilizer emits nitrous oxide. So fertilizer is a big contributor. If every family farmer now is going to have to pay more to obtain fertilizer to fertilize crops that feed us, well, what’s that going to do to the price of food?”

It’s going to make the cost of food skyrocket, you say?  It already is!  And forget the “family farmer” comment; it’s going to make the costs of big corporate farming operations skyrocket, too, and those big operations are responsible for an ever-increasing share of our modern food production.

Are these mere coincidences, entirely unrelated, isolated events?

Could be. But …

  • U.S. farmers are convinced that “government meddling threatens their livelihoods and the nation’s food security.”
  • “Unrealistic green-energy policies in Europe – and the Biden administration’s hostility to U.S. energy production – are worsening energy shortages,” writes James Meigs in City Journal “With energy prices soaring, food production and distribution will suffer.”
  • Global skunks are promoting bugs as an alternative to the foods we enjoy, which is an implicit way of saying “you can eat insects, as unpalatable as they are, or you can go hungry – it’s almost time to choose.”
  • The White House has added agricultural land to the federal Conservation Reserve Program, encouraging farmers to leave their land fallow. It’s part, says essayist John Mac Ghlionn, writing in the Washington Times, “of a broader, government-wide push to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Interestingly, the Biden administration’s goal is very similar to the Dutch government’s goal.”
  • Canadian boy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has proposed rules that will “decimate Canadian farming.” 
  • “Even as food shortages intensify, governments, including the Biden administration, are cracking down harder on agricultural production,” the Epoch Times reports. “While the attacks on agriculture and related industries look different in different nations, many experts say it’s a coordinated global policy being promoted by the U.N., the World Economic Forum (WEF), the European Union, and other international forces determined to transform civilization.”
  • “The Biden administration has engaged in an omni-directional assault on our food production system,” says the Heartland Institute.

All of these are features, not bugs; it’s impossible to see them any other way.  I would normally rather attribute such actions as these to stupidity or incompetence rather than malevolence, but these policies are too widespread, too well coordinated, too similar across national boundaries for them to be the result of morons.

Several proponents of these wrecking-ball policies have noted outright that the goal is to remove capitalism as an economic system from the developed world, and they sure seem to be heading in that direction; but the end results of these policies, global famine, would seem to fit the Green agenda in other ways as well.

But here’s where I think the Greens lose their way:  The end result of this kind of thinking won’t end the way they think it will, with the survivors being a bunch of urban lotus-eaters enjoying their vegan lunches with some nice imported tea.  The folks who get through this will be the rural folks who can have a truck garden in their yard and can go out and shoot a deer (or moose) when they need protein.

And those folks – myself among them – are generally pretty fond of free markets.  You know – capitalism.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

Food just keeps getting more expensive.  Here’s a tidbit from this story:

We asked CNN readers how inflation has impacted their eating habits, and many mentioned dining out less often, buying less meat and giving up splurges. Some said they are very worried about the future.

Food prices have spiked 11.4% over the past year, the largest annual increase since May 1979, according to data released in mid-September by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Grocery prices jumped 13.5% and restaurant menu prices increased 8% in that period.

Even burgers cost more these days.

Mrs. Animal and I are, through dint of hard work, still liquid enough to enjoy our traditional Saturday afternoon luncheon at a lodge up north of here.  But their prices have increased as well, maybe even more so, as everything here that can’t be grown locally has to come up by ship or rail.  Plenty of Alaskans grow much of their own food, supplemented with local fish and game.  But most urban Americans don’t have that option.

This is something that the GOP, if they aren’t stupid, should be hammering home until November.  But note that qualifier; you’ll rarely see a group of people so adept at seizing defeat from the jaws of victory.

With that said…

On To the Links!

People keep correcting President Biden because he’s senile and doesn’t know what he’s doing from one moment to the next.

What happens when Dems abandon a city to crime.

I’m just going to leave this here:

The economy was booming until Democrats took over.

If so, I predict massive non-compliance.

This guy gets it.

Honestly, California has been the butt of America’s jokes for a while now.

Who is really in charge in the Imperial City?

Probably not.

Could climate lockdowns be a thing?

The red wave may be a thing in Europe, too.

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Liz.

Yeah, we’ve known this for some time.

Mother Jones finds an acorn.

Probably because pollsters are blowing it again in 2022.

This Week’s Idiots:

The Nation’s Herman Schwartz is an idiot.

What’s left unsaid here is that these idiots are lying to their employers, which is grounds for immediate termination.

MSNBC’s “host and super-sleuth” Mehdi Hasan is an idiot.

MSNBC’s Dean Obeidallah (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

MSNBC’s Hayes Brown (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.  And this makes it twice, in one week.  Clearly Hayes Brown is setting the standard for stupid.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid is an idiot.  (I’m sensing a pattern here.)

CNN’s Fredreka Schouten is an idiot.

Robert Reich (Repeat Offender Alert) is still a sawed-off runt, and an idiot.

Donna Brazile is an idiot.

Time’s Andrew Whitehead is an idiot.

Stupid NY vs. stupid NJ.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

Thomas Dolby had a few interesting tunes in the early Eighties, and managed to make some fun music videos to go along with them.  My favorite bit of his work was She Blinded Me With Science, from the 1982 album The Golden Age of Wireless.  Interestingly, the video features one Magnus Alfred Pyke, OBE FRSE FRIC, as the “scientist” in the piece – and Mr. Pyke was actually a nutritional scientist and advisor to the UK government.  Pyke was criticized by some for ‘trivializing’ science by playing this role, but did it anyway.

It’s a fun song and a fun vid, anyway.  Enjoy.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

I like Lauren Southern.  She’s sharp, she’s savvy, and her looks certainly don’t hurt her any.  But recently, she released a video where she questions ‘veganism’ with a staffer of hers, and she leaves the best rebuttal just laying on the table.  Here’s the video:

Early on, the vegan crew member claims he follows his diet due to a libertarian principle – the non-aggression principle.  That’s a canard – the NAP involves dealing with other people, and all it states that it is incorrect to initiate the use of force, but not to respond to it with force in kind.

But that’s not the point.  The staffer makes the inevitable vegan assertion that his diet causes ‘less harm’ than a diet that includes meat, i.e. Ms. Southern’s diet.  Given this assertion, I would respond as follows:

“All right.  Let’s examine your assertion.  You are claiming your diet causes less harm to animals than mine.  OK.  So your diet has a level of harm to animals involved – let’s call that value A.  My diet likewise has a level of harm to animals – let’s call that value B.  Now you are asserting that A<B.  To establish this, you have to produce values for A and B.  And, you have to include all sources of harm, including animals killed in the processes of growing, harvesting and transporting your food.  So, go.  Show your work.”

That rarely fails to leave the ‘ethical’ vegans stuttering.

And so…

On To the Links!

Feed the world…  breadfruit?  Yeah, I’ll stick with cheeseburgers.

Har har har!

Cripple Fight!

Germany is committing national suicide.

The bill always comes due.

This headline is a massive understatement.

I love a happy ending.

No shit, Sherlock.

Bill Maher keeps making these warnings to the Left, and is increasingly going unheeded.

Robert Stacy McCain on ‘good’ schools.

DeSantis 2024!

Maybe we will be able to dump Murkowski.

Are they any good to eat?

Two million.  In one year.

This Week’s Idiots:

Lindsey Graham is fucking up.

Politico’s Jack Shafer is an idiot.

The NY Times’ Farhad Manjoo is an idiot.

The Nation’s Elie Mystal (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.  And this week he doubles down on idiocy.

The Nation’s Jeet Heer (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

Alexandria Occasional Cortex has been and remains an idiot.

MSNBC’s Nayyera Haq is an idiot.

The Denver City Council are all idiots.

USAT’s Jill Lawrence is an idiot.

The Grio’s Olayemi Olurin is an idiot.

The “Park Slope Panthers” are apparently all idiots.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

Back in the early Eighties, the genre of “tech-rock” began to surface, inspired by acts like Devo and the Talking Heads.  I didn’t much care for Devo, as they struck me as kind of a one-trick pony.  I did kind of enjoy the Talking Heads, though.

Their 1983 album Speaking in Tongues was pretty good, and my favorite of that disk was the single Burning Down the House.  There was, of course, a typically early-Eighties music video to go along with the song, and here it is – enjoy.

Animal’s Daily Food Shortages News

Farm life has its advantages.

Yes, you read that right.  Food shortages.  In the United States.  We were once the most prosperous nation on the planet, and now we may be facing food shortages.  Excerpt:

Farmers and ranchers across the country are struggling with spiking production costs. From diesel fuel to fertilizer, everything they need to produce crops is much more expensive, and farmers are warning that food shortages and even higher prices are on the horizon.

“Right now we are in a crisis in America as it relates to farmers,” John Boyd, Jr., of the National Black Farmers Association, told Sean Hannity on Fox News. “We are facing an all-time high in diesel fuel.”

Americans are feeling the pinch of gas prices and the rising costs of essential goods like food and other necessities.

Inflation is at a 40-year high, and farming is one industry that’s being hit especially hard. The higher costs of farming will further impact the food supply over the next few months, and even years, since crops take time to plant, grow and harvest.

Fuel and fertilizer are costing farmers more money. The national average for diesel fuel is $5.81 per gallon, but a year ago, that was only $3.23. This means a farmer is now up to about $870 to fill a tractor with a 150 gallon gas tank – much more than last year’s price of $484.

Adding to the high costs are supply chain problems. Russia is the largest exporter of fertilizer, and many of the natural resources needed to make the product come from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, so the conflict in that region has increased costs and made supplies more challenging to come by.

“Sustainable” farming.

An April report from Barron’s noted that the costs of certain fertilizer ingredients have almost doubled since last year. Some farmers are concerned that the costs of inputs could rise as much as 40% this year and another 20% or higher into 2023.

Upshot of all this is simple:  What food you will be able to buy will be more expensive.  I’m sure glad we have plenty of edible critters hereabouts.

So, my advice to all True Believers is simple:  Stock up, to what extent you can.  If you have a big freezer and can afford to fill it (or even run it) do so.  Ours will being filled up with fish and game this summer and fall.  If you have a Costco or Sam’s Club membership, bulk rice and beans, sealed in food-grade containers, will last a long time.  If you have room, till up a garden plot.

After WW2, my grandma, tired of running a big vegetable garden during the Depression and then a Victory garden during the war, announced that henceforth she would buy vegetables at the grocery and would grow only flowers, which she did, for the rest of her life.  It’s kind of sad, now, that much of the country may be running those small-plot gardens again, just to get enough to eat.  I hope it doesn’t get that bad – but given the current crop of nitwits, buncombe artists, grifters and nincompoops in the Imperial City just now, I’m afraid it might.

Animal’s Daily Veggie MRE News

Yr. obdt. 1991

Before we start, check out the ending of my current series over at Glibertarians!  If you haven’t, read the whole series.

A fellow veteran and buddy of mine directed my attention to the other day to this, the veggie omelet MRE, which apparently came out after my time, but that looks… disgusting.  Excerpt:

A newly declassified report alleges that the infamous vegetable and cheese omelet MRE was not accidentally spawned in a wet market, but was intentionally created in a laboratory to advance “gain-of-function” research into the development of even shittier field rations.

The report from the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases rejects the long-accepted wet-market theory, and instead concludes that the dreaded “vomelet,” which has spawned tens of thousands of disability claims, was first developed at the Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center, in Natick, Mass.

“Conventional wisdom from the CDC, WHO and other respected health entities have traced the origin of the vegetable omelet MRE to recombinant DNA from a farmer’s market frequented by the strippers who work along Victory Drive outside Fort Benning,” the USAMRIID paper’s unnamed authors wrote. “However, it now appears that the omelet was, in fact, created by our very own Natick Army Labs to spur breakthroughs into even more MRE menus that look and taste like someone took a dump in a pouch.”

Image from article.

All I can say is, yuck.

I never saw one of these; as I said, I think they came along after my time.  I did hang around long enough to see some of the newer packs with the little Tabasco bottles in them, which made some of the entrees…  edible.  Sort of.

It’s important to note that the Chicken Ala King wasn’t terrible, and the chocolate fudge cookies that came in some packs were good enough to be pretty valuable trade items.  But for the most part…  Well, MREs would keep you alive, but you would have to find your happiness someplace else.

Hopefully the Army is improving these damn things.  But, the Army being the Army – somewhat – I’m skeptical.

Animal’s Daily Starving Nork News

South Korea, on the other hand, is looking pretty healthy.

This just in concerning the famous Stalinist state ruled by a stunted gargoyle with bad hair from a long line of stunted gargoyles with bad hair (and no, I’m not talking about Chicago.)  North Korea is in the throes of another (predictable) famine.  Excerpt:

Someone needs to get ahold of North Korea’s leaders and bring them to an American grocery store. That country closed its border with China — also communist of course — during COVID and is now deep in the throes of famine. Maybe this explains even Kim’s mysterious weight loss.

North Korea is ordering citizens to start producing their own food to prepare for a long-term food shortage that could last for three years, but ordinary people say that the government is shirking its responsibility, sources in the country told RFA.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimated in a recent report that North Korea would be short about 860,000 tons of food this year, about two months of normal demand.

RFA reported in April that authorities were warning residents to prepare for economic difficulties as bad as the 1994-1998 famine which killed millions by some estimates, but experts said that the situation was dire, but nothing like the 1990s.

The U.S. and many western countries experienced temporary supply chain issues as consequences of the COVID lockdowns, but we have rebounded. We’re dealing with inflation but not starvation. On most days the shelves on our grocery stores are full and we can get anything we can afford. Even our so-called “food deserts” aren’t so disastrous that the government is telling people to start growing our own food or we’ll starve.

It doesn’t have to be the way it is in North Korea. Communism is to blame, first and last. It doesn’t work, it never has, and it never will. North Korea’s cousins to the south are struggling through another round of COVID but they’re capitalist. They’re not starving.

But they will be.

There’s no good way out of this for the North Korean people.  They are starved, uneducated, ill-used, and disarmed.  China won’t intervene.  South Korea isn’t too interested in taking on the Nork military, who will probably start slinging NBC weapons around wildly.

And if the regime topples from within – well, desperate madmen with nukes, what could possibly go wrong?

I’m guessing here, but I’d say the next ten years will tell the tale.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

On Saturday afternoon last, I was out on my deck with an ice-cold beer and a fine cigar, enjoying a fine, sunny Sustina Valley afternoon.  After a bit, I heard a motorcycle stop on the road out in front of the property. Then I heard someone’s voice calling to something, and heard him crashing into the brush. So I went down to see what was going on.  The motorcycle rider had seen this guy, whose left wing was broken.  Near as we could figure, he had made to drop on some prey critter and had clipped the power line.

One of the neighbors came along, said they had a big dip net and a wire kennel. So they went and got it, then motorcycle guy and I managed to get the bird calmed down, into the net and then into the kennel. Meanwhile, the neighbors made some phone calls, and found they could take him down to Houston to the rehab center.

So off he went. Motorcycle guy and I both petted him on the head and told him everything was going to be OK.

And I really, really feel like I personally helped America.

He probably won’t fly again, they almost never do once a wing’s broken, but if not, he’ll have a comfortable career as an ambassador bird for the Matanuska-Sustina Borough schools, teaching kids about raptors.

Just another weekend in Alaska.

And so…

On To the Links!

Lumber prices are skyrocketing.  Because supply chains are a thing, and the Imperial and local governments have wrecked them with the Moo Goo Gai Panic.

Ninth Circuit panel lifts ban on ghost gun blueprints.

Why do the big nuts rise to the top of the bowl?  Metaphor for government?

Begun, the pizza wars have.

Well, I’m glad that’s solved.

Cancer may have been more common way back when than we thought.

Well, here’s one of President Biden(‘s handlers).  Plenty of folks are wondering who is pulling the old fool’s strings, and here’s one of them.

No, Biden Doesn’t Have a Mandate to Remake America.  No shit.  They lost seats in the House, barely maintaining control, and managed a 50-50 tie in the Senate – only technically a majority because Heels-Up Harris holds the tie-breaking vote.  Dems got roundly trounced at the state level.  That, True Believers, does not a mandate make.

Speaking of, it looks the the $4T spending plan proposed by President Biden(‘s handlers) will be going into the trash, where it belongs.  We hope.

Racist!  President Biden(‘s handlers) impose racist travel ban on India.  I mean, travel bans were racist when Trump did them, right?  Sauce for the goose, baby.

Texas mulls over Constitutional Carry.   Predictable pants-shitting from legacy media ensues, even through several states already have this (including our own Alaska) and somehow the predictions of bodies lining the streets haven’t come to pass.

Do you want real racism?  Because this is how you get real racism.

Hypocrisy, thy name is John Kerry.  What an asshole.

April gun sales continue to shatter records.  Good.

So, where is everybody?

It’s probably a little too late for that.

This Week’s Idiots:

Man, it’s a bumper crop of idiocy this week.

Newsweek‘s Meggie Abendschein is an idiot.

Vox‘s German Lopez is an idiot.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

These people are idiots.

John Podesta is an idiot.

Salon‘s Jon Skolnik is an idiot.

CNN’s Clay Cane is an idiot.

Stupid people demand stupid shit.

The New York Times‘ Charles Blow always was and remains an idiot.

Salon’s Chauncey DeVega is an idiot.

Time‘s D. Markovits is an idiot.

Robert Reich is still an idiot.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

Music is a great vehicle for conveying emotion.  Nobody can dispute this.  And the love song is, of course, a great example of that principle.

But love songs are not all created equal.  In my not-so-humble opinion, the best love song ever written can only be Charlie Rich’s Behind Closed Doors.  Here, have a listen:

Rule Five GMO Friday

I stumbled across this earlier in the week, and found it an interesting read; turns out folks who oppose GMO crops are the least well-informed as to what GMO technology actually is.  Color me surprised.  Excerpts, with my comments, follow:

A 2019 study, in fact, found that as opposition to GM technology  increased, scientific knowledge about genetics and GMOs decreased, but self-assessment increased. GMO opponents think they know the most, but in fact they know the least.  Other studies show that consumers have generally low scientific knowledge about GMOs. There is also evidence that fixing the knowledge deficit, for some people, can reduce their opposition to GMOs (at least temporarily). We clearly need more research, and also different people oppose GMOs for different reasons, but at least there is a huge knowledge deficit here and reducing it may help.

It‘s no secret that we have done a shitty job of general science education in this country for several generations.  Just listen to any politician whining that we should “listen to science,” or that “science says this,” or “science will win!”  Science isn’t an ideology and it isn’t some magical entity that makes pronouncements; science is a tool, a method for examining data and arriving at theories to explain that data.

It’s also important to note that the term “theory” as used in the scientific method is not the same as in general parlance. Isaac Asimov astutely pointed out that most people use the term as though “…it were something you dreamed up after being drunk all weekend.”  But the proper definition is this:  A coherent group of propositions formulated to explain a group of facts or phenomena in the natural world and repeatedly confirmed through experiment or observation.

Repeatedly confirmed.  Remember that.

Further, adoption of GMOs does, in fact, increase ultimate crop yield. The myth that they don’t is mostly due to the persistent anti-GMO smear campaign, largely funded by the organic industry, but is helped by several layers of confusion on this issue. First, we always have to be cautious when discussing “GMOs” because they are not one thing. Genetic modification is a technology, not an application. Yet anti-GMO propaganda has successfully tied the technology to just one application – use of herbicides. Many opponents still conflate the two in their mind. It is true that the first widely adopted GMO traits were for pest resistance (such as Bt) and herbicide tolerance (specifically glyphosate), and so some opinions are based on this 20 year-old impression of GMOs. But the number and type of GM traits is expanding significantly in recent years, so that impression is out-of-date.

Catch that main point there?  GMO is a technology, and not a new one; we have effectively been genetically modifying agricultural plants and animals for many thousands of years.  We have done it by grafting, by selective breeding, by hybridization and now, by directly modifying, adding or deleting genes.  The tools differ but the process is not new.

For example, C4 rice and wheat could make a huge contribution. Some plants use C3 photosynthetic pathways, while other use C4, which is more efficient. Rice and wheat use C3, but if we can engineer them to use C4 we could get a 50% increase in yield with fewer inputs.

Speaking as a biologist, C4 wheat or rice would be a huge deal.  A 50% increase in yield, it is important to note, means you could produce the same yield on 50% less land.

Recent applications already in the field, that reduce browning and improve drought tolerance, already increase yield. Other GM applications, such as golden rice, improve the nutritional quality of staple crops, reducing malnutrition.

To reinforce this main point – GM is a technology, and we have to judge each application and each GM crop on its own merits. We also have to think about the whole system, not just the crop. When you do it is clear that GM technology is incredibly powerful and useful, and is our best hope for meeting the nutritional needs of the world population while minimizing our carbon and land footprint.

The good news is, that while popular opposition continues (based on demonstrable misinformation), the science is progressing in the background and farmers are adopting GM crops because of their obvious benefits. Farmers are not stupid, nor are they being manipulated. They buy GM seeds because it is to their advantage to do so.

In other words, let the “no-GMO” crowd croak and even boycott, if it makes them feel better.  In the meantime agricultural products will continue to evolve and improve, agriculture the world over will continue to become more efficient, millions who were hungry will be fed, and eventually the deniers will go the way of Ned Lud’s followers.

Animal’s Daily Hot Peppers News

Apparently eating chili peppers cuts your risk of heart disease.  If that’s true, I’ll live forever.  Then again they say every slice of bacon you eat takes a minute off your life; if that was true I’d have died in 1794.  Excerpt:

For many years, chili has been hailed for its therapeutic properties, and now researchers have found that eating chili peppers regularly can cut the risk of death from heart disease and stroke.
Carried out in Italy, where chili is a common ingredient, the study compared the risk of death among 23,000 people, some of whom ate chili and some of whom didn’t.

Participants’ health status and eating habits were monitored over eight years, and researchers found that the risk of dying from a heart attack was 40% lower among those eating chili peppers at least four times per week.

Death from stroke was more than halved, according to results published Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

“An interesting fact is that protection from mortality risk was independent of the type of diet people followed,” said study lead author Marialaura Bonaccio, an epidemiologist at the Mediterranean Neurological Institute (Neuromed).

In other words, someone can follow the healthy Mediterranean diet, someone else can eat less healthily, but for all of them chili pepper has a protective effect,” she said.

That’s good news!

I have a very high tolerance for hot foods, and I regularly test the limits of that tolerance.  I make an awesome chili, although I have to tone it down some for the family; my unadulterated version is known as “Animal’s Thermonuclear Bowel-Basher Chili.”  I love hot food – Mexican, Thai, Indian, you name it.  Spicy food should make your head sweat.

I’ve been fortunate here; plenty of guys lose their tolerance for spicy food as they approach sixty.  But while some people can be said to have cast-iron stomachs, I’ve always been even more fortunate than that; my entire alimentary canal is 316 stainless.

But to find out that hot peppers are even health-enhancing?

Bring on the habaneros!