Did you know that the EPA has 18,000 employees?

What is it that they do? And more importantly, why do we still have pollution? That's 360 people per state.

At any rate, the Gray Lady has once again shown why she is an invaluable national treasure.

The article drags a bit in places, but the subject matter is so important I just couldn't stop reading.

A taste:

"Only 1 percent of [China's] 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union."

As always, there's a silver lining: "Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China."

Huh. And I thought it was the parking lot that they call the 405.

Feminism: Helping me to procrastinate talking about my 80 miles in the desert.

Thanks feminism!

This is yet one more fantastic present brought to you by the one and only Andrew Sullivan. I love him more and more all the time. Except for when I disagree with him completely.

It's not the shortest article ever written, but I highly recommend it if you have a few minutes to spare. Come on, you know you do. The article is a reflection piece written by Megan Stack, a writer and bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, looking back on her time spent in Saudi Arabia and her place there as a woman.

What first caught my attention to the piece was the combination of feminism and Andrew's criticism of Starbucks:

"The multinational company acquiesces in and enforces the oppression and segregation of women."

And it is more than a valid point. Would you still shop at a company that served African Americans in the back? What about a company that wouldn't let Jews in the front door? Of course not. The greatest argument for the existence of feminism is the fact that my friends who work at Starbucks will not immediately quit their jobs, and many of you reading will still go and buy a latte there. Of course the issue is not that simple, but stop and let this sink in: we will still go to Starbucks, a company that won't serve half of the population in the same way as the other half. They still do business, and make a profit, in Saudi Arabia. The parallels to Jim Crow, apartheid, and Nazi Germany are more than uncomfortably close. It is both tremendously sad and unbelievably revolting.

And clearly my pleasure at seeing a little Starbucks bashing was anything but secret.

There is a question I must ask myself in this as well. I don't shop at Starbucks or drink their coffee, but am I blameless? If I have chided Starbucks as a company who will gladly look the other way in the face of sexism, is Just Coffee, my coffee company of choice, able to withstand the same scrutiny? Sadly, I believe that the answer is a very complicated "sort of."

Just Coffee, in all honesty, is a company of men. It is not a company of all male employees, but it is a company of all male owners. Why is that? Well, it really boils down to gender roles in Chiapas. Men are the coffee farmers, simple as that. This is not true in all parts of the world (where women farmers greatly outnumber men), but it is true in Chiapas. Women help at times, but are more likely to be found preparing food, caring for children, or working around the house. So even though these women benefit from the higher price and health benefits that come from Just Coffee, they don't really have a voice at the table in terms of voting. They don't really come to the meetings of the directors. That's not to say that they don't have a "presence" (any married person will tell you that's simply not possible), but that's sort of the same argument that is used in the article to say that women don't need to be able to vote in state elections. Not very comforting, I know.

Does this mean that I don't support Just Coffee? Well, no, not at all. I still love the people, the company, the coffee, and the model. Reality, as always, is more complicated than theory. The business of living in Chiapas requires more intentional effort than it does here. More time cooking and cleaning and all of that good stuff. Life is a partnership, and the contributions of women are tremendously important. And in the face of migration, gender lines become more than a little bit blurred. Once again, this is clearly not a simple issue. Ask any feminist about the tension between cultural sensitivity and women's rights and you'll see the blood start to quicken in their veins.

Culture, history, and economics, all embedded with some degree of sexism, have come together to make men the coffee farmers in Chiapas. Is that wrong? Not necessarily. The goal must never be to tell all people what to do, but to increase their ability to make good choices freely. But it would be better if women had more choices, and especially if they had more say. What is my repsonsibility to try and make that more of a reality? I'm not sure about that either. But I think it is important to ask these questions, and to be honest when things make us uncomfortable. I think this issue pales in comparison to Starbucks in Saudi Arabia, but it is by no means a non-issue. It is important, however, to call a good thing a good thing. Starbucks health benefits in the U.S. are a good thing. And Just Coffee is a good thing. But so is honest self-reflection.

Feminism is a great thing.

The desert post and pictures are coming. I promise.

High Fructose Corn Syrup Will Never Taste As Sweet to Me Again

So this is a little hat tip to something that I've been obsessing over lately and even discussing with some of my friends (hello Evangelical Environmental Network!). While working down here on the border I have become (even more) fascinated by the interconnectedness of our world. I have spent so much time this year thinking about the ways in which migration, economics, agriculture, the environment, etc. are all linked to one another. And this great article, written by Michael Pollan, talks about just that.

To try and cut down on the length of this post (and therefore increase your likelihood of reading it) I'm going to do this in two parts. I'm pasting the article below for your reading pleasure (it can also be found right here in a more legal setting). A few days from now (give or take) I'm going to be writing a little follow-up piece with some further thoughts and a few more links to make this conversation more interesting.

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: April 22, 2007
The New York Times Magazine

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person's wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods — dairy, meat, fish and produce — line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

As a rule, processed foods are more "energy dense" than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them "junk." Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world's food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That's because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a nation faced with what its surgeon general has called "an epidemic" of obesity would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing the production of high-fructose corn syrup. But such is the perversity of the farm bill: the nation's agricultural policies operate at cross-purposes with its public-health objectives. And the subsidies are only part of the problem. The farm bill helps determine what sort of food your children will have for lunch in school tomorrow. The school-lunch program began at a time when the public-health problem of America's children was undernourishment, so feeding surplus agricultural commodities to kids seemed like a win-win strategy. Today the problem is overnutrition, but a school lunch lady trying to prepare healthful fresh food is apt to get dinged by U.S.D.A. inspectors for failing to serve enough calories; if she dishes up a lunch that includes chicken nuggets and Tater Tots, however, the inspector smiles and the reimbursements flow. The farm bill essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to overproduce.

To speak of the farm bill's influence on the American food system does not begin to describe its full impact — on the environment, on global poverty, even on immigration. By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities — or to the United States. The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s. (More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico's eaters as well as its farmers.) You can't fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural agriculture in Mexico.

And though we don't ordinarily think of the farm bill in these terms, few pieces of legislation have as profound an impact on the American landscape and environment. Americans may tell themselves they don't have a national land-use policy, that the market by and large decides what happens on private property in America, but that's not exactly true. The smorgasbord of incentives and disincentives built into the farm bill helps decide what happens on nearly half of the private land in America: whether it will be farmed or left wild, whether it will be managed to maximize productivity (and therefore doused with chemicals) or to promote environmental stewardship. The health of the American soil, the purity of its water, the biodiversity and the very look of its landscape owe in no small part to impenetrable titles, programs and formulae buried deep in the farm bill.

Given all this, you would think the farm-bill debate would engage the nation's political passions every five years, but that hasn't been the case. If the quintennial antidrama of the "farm bill debate" holds true to form this year, a handful of farm-state legislators will thrash out the mind-numbing details behind closed doors, with virtually nobody else, either in Congress or in the media, paying much attention. Why? Because most of us assume that, true to its name, the farm bill is about "farming," an increasingly quaint activity that involves no one we know and in which few of us think we have a stake. This leaves our own representatives free to ignore the farm bill, to treat it as a parochial piece of legislation affecting a handful of their Midwestern colleagues. Since we aren't paying attention, they pay no political price for trading, or even selling, their farm-bill votes. The fact that the bill is deeply encrusted with incomprehensible jargon and prehensile programs dating back to the 1930s makes it almost impossible for the average legislator to understand the bill should he or she try to, much less the average citizen. It's doubtful this is an accident.

But there are signs this year will be different. The public-health community has come to recognize it can't hope to address obesity and diabetes without addressing the farm bill. The environmental community recognizes that as long as we have a farm bill that promotes chemical and feedlot agriculture, clean water will remain a pipe dream. The development community has woken up to the fact that global poverty can't be fought without confronting the ways the farm bill depresses world crop prices. They got a boost from a 2004 ruling by the World Trade Organization that U.S. cotton subsidies are illegal; most observers think that challenges to similar subsidies for corn, soy, wheat or rice would also prevail.

And then there are the eaters, people like you and me, increasingly concerned, if not restive, about the quality of the food on offer in America. A grass-roots social movement is gathering around food issues today, and while it is still somewhat inchoate, the manifestations are everywhere: in local efforts to get vending machines out of the schools and to improve school lunch; in local campaigns to fight feedlots and to force food companies to better the lives of animals in agriculture; in the spectacular growth of the market for organic food and the revival of local food systems. In great and growing numbers, people are voting with their forks for a different sort of food system. But as powerful as the food consumer is — it was that consumer, after all, who built a $15 billion organic-food industry and more than doubled the number of farmer's markets in the last few years — voting with our forks can advance reform only so far. It can't, for example, change the fact that the system is rigged to make the most unhealthful calories in the marketplace the only ones the poor can afford. To change that, people will have to vote with their votes as well — which is to say, they will have to wade into the muddy political waters of agricultural policy.

Doing so starts with the recognition that the "farm bill" is a misnomer; in truth, it is a food bill and so needs to be rewritten with the interests of eaters placed first. Yes, there are eaters who think it in their interest that food just be as cheap as possible, no matter how poor the quality. But there are many more who recognize the real cost of artificially cheap food — to their health, to the land, to the animals, to the public purse. At a minimum, these eaters want a bill that aligns agricultural policy with our public-health and environmental values, one with incentives to produce food cleanly, sustainably and humanely. Eaters want a bill that makes the most healthful calories in the supermarket competitive with the least healthful ones. Eaters want a bill that feeds schoolchildren fresh food from local farms rather than processed surplus commodities from far away. Enlightened eaters also recognize their dependence on farmers, which is why they would support a bill that guarantees the people who raise our food not subsidies but fair prices. Why? Because they prefer to live in a country that can still produce its own food and doesn't hurt the world's farmers by dumping its surplus crops on their markets.

The devil is in the details, no doubt. Simply eliminating support for farmers won't solve these problems; overproduction has afflicted agriculture since long before modern subsidies. It will take some imaginative policy making to figure out how to encourage farmers to focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for food processors and on rebuilding local food economies, which the current farm bill hobbles. But the guiding principle behind an eater's farm bill could not be more straightforward: it's one that changes the rules of the game so as to promote the quality of our food (and farming) over and above its quantity.

Such changes are radical only by the standards of past farm bills, which have faithfully reflected the priorities of the agribusiness interests that wrote them. One of these years, the eaters of America are going to demand a place at the table, and we will have the political debate over food policy we need and deserve. This could prove to be that year: the year when the farm bill became a food bill, and the eaters at last had their say.


Michael Pollan, a contributing writer, is the Knight professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is "The Omnivore's Dilemma."

(In the photo: Michael Pollan in all his glory)

After all, one good turn deserves another

Yesterday I received a message on the facebook from Jen Huang, a student at one of the Claremont Colleges:

Hey! I wrote about you for my research, I know.. this is kinda creepy, but
not really! Read the blog and you'll see... you might find this interesting,
that's why I chose to send you a message instead of just posting it....
ciao!

I also received a link to her account right here on blogspot.

Her most recent entry seems to be the latest in a new series that she is writing about the facebook, or, more specifically, about the way people use the facebook to express themselves and relate to others.

See if you can guess who she's talking about here:

During my research I also tried to self-analyze a random profile
within three degrees of separation. I found a Pomona male, recently graduated
from Colorado. Declared single, liberal and heterosexual, he seemed active on
facebook and did not have many privacy settings. The first thing I noticed was
his religious view. He claimed that Jesus was Jewish, but didn't understand what
that made him. My first reaction: He was a Christian who had found out the truth
about Jesus and perhaps made the connection that all Christians were actually
Jewish.

Moving on, this man also seemed fairly active among his friends,
writing on walls, adding friends etc. He also claimed that he was currently in
Mexico, a traveller perhaps? He also had a blog on blog spot (oops, hope he
doesn't see this) and enjoys smuggling live animals and speaking spanish (ah,
now it all makes sense). In his "about me" he revealed that he was working close
to border patrol but I admit I could not tell if he was pro or con. I noticed
that he used the word "underbelly": A good word, in my opinion, a tad eccentric,
literary, and descriptive. I liked this guy! The Women's Studies major cinched
it, I had officially, without this man's knowledge added him to my mental "good
people" list.

To be quite honest I find some of her analysis more than a little baffling. At times I think it could even be called sloppy. Most of all I think it is just woefully incomplete. She didn't even talk about my quote, the content of my wall posts, or the music/books/films I like. What's with that?

Here's my real critique of her analysis:

For starters: My first reaction: He was a Christian who had found out the truth about Jesus and perhaps made the connection that all Christians were actually Jewish.

This, as a logical leap and a rhetorical nightmare, sticks out to me above all of the other faults in her analysis. If I thought that all Christians were actually Jewish, and I were a Christian, wouldn't that lead me to say that I was Jewish? How did my professed ignorance about my own religious views lead Ms. Huang to conclude that I self-identify as a Jew?

Or how about this one: In his "about me" he revealed that he was working close to border patrol but I admit I could not tell if he was pro or con.

The way she describes my "about me" section is both confusing and somewhat misleading. For those of you without keys to the magical world that is the facebook, my "about me" states:

The woman who used to have my job got arrested by the border patrol. Neato. Also, apparently they think we are smuggling people out of our office. These are the people keeping you safe from terrorists.

Now, after careful scrutiny, I can see how Ms. Huang might think that I was possibly pleased by the arrest of a former co-worker. Perhaps I received my job because she was arrested? Clearly plausible. But then, right after that, I go on to poke fun at, in a characteristically sarcastic manner, the very same Border Patrol that arrested her.

A pro-Border Patrol reading of me also doesn't really sync with some of her other findings, specifically my major. Nor, I hope, would it contribute to her conclusion that I am a "good [person]".

Ah, a "good [person]," let's end with that one: I had officially, without this man's knowledge added him to my mental "good people" list.

I must say that my first reaction to her appraisal of me was a sense of pride and worth. It is quite evident that, fleeting though it may have been, my positive response to her praise adds a great deal of legitimacy to Ms. Huang's topic of study. Clearly people relate in very real ways to little factoids expressed in binary.

I made a profile on the facebook for my enjoyment and that of my friends. When analyzed by an unknown outside researcher and declared to be "good" I was clearly pleased, although such an analysis, and her resulting approval, were never things that I had sought. Perhaps by not making my profile private she thought that, in some way, I was in fact soliciting those things. I don't know.

I will say that my profile remains open because I seek to live my life, in flesh and on the web, in a transparent manner. This stems from my "religious" beliefs. The way I have identified them on the facebook is a tongue-and-cheek representation of a very real ambiguity in my life. Jesus, to his death, was a Jew (King of the Jews, if you want to be picky). I am, any way you look at it, a gentile. So what does my belief that Jesus, the very same Jesus who lived his life as a Jew, in faith and ethnicity, walked back out of the tomb, make me? For the sake of identifying with a larger body, I guess it would be Christian. But Christian is a word that, to our knowledge, Jesus himself never used. So there you go.

After her analysis of me, Jen finishes her post this way: I suddenly went back to my profile to skim it over. Was it okay? Did it have wit? Would I come off as a good person. I couldn't tell.

Well Jen, I won't attempt to analyze you. And not just because your own profile is blocked from my view.

I will say that I find your own religious views amusing in a "where have I heard that before/feminist/"culture wars"/abstinence vs. sex-education" sort of way. If I thought really hard about them vis-a-vis your professed conservatism I'm not sure what conclusions I would draw. You might be a lovely person, but I won't try to make that call on such slight pieces of information as could be gleaned from even the most bloated of profiles. No offense, but I'd rather know you better, as a real person (albeit through the computer), or not at all. Too many anonymous faces on the internet.

Hopefully you take my critique of your analysis for what it is: the inability of a Pomona grad to let one analysis stand without another staring right back in its face. Should you continue your project I hope that you will give other people's accounts a more thoughtful scrutiny than you gave mine. And I hope you take this post of mine with more than a grain of salt. I will say that I have had several good laughs about the entire thing, been able to put off a whole morning of statistical analysis, and forget that someone in Mexico I barely know still has my credit card. Plus I got to do a little academic deconstruction. And coming from the Claremont Colleges you know that's how we like to get down.

p.s.- Do any of you guys remember this amazing website? So weird.

p.p.s.- I think it's time to update my profile.

That's Unfortunate

In honor of the new Super Wal-Mart and Sam's Club Discount Warehouse being put up in Longmont:



Yeah, the picture is real.

I also just learned that Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in Mexico. The takeover continues.