@Star, know what? Vegetables aren’t supposed to grow in winter in cold climes, nor in a desert. That’s the way it is. From the beginnings of time, right up until the USA took over the duties of God and Master of the Weather Climate Universe.
When I was a kid, we got citrus in the winter, very little and very expensive any other time, and all imported from parts of the earth that were warm while we were not.
THAT is the way our earth, and our bodies, adapted, were created, whatever you wish. We lived and we were healthier, played more, smarter, thinner and generally a nicer bunch of people. Even the poor and urban.
What fucking HUBRIS we have when the average ass-size in this country is now over 3 foot wide.
Guess what?Ffor all our commercial farming and chemicals saving the world, people are STILL starving and dying, but now they get to die with cancers and immune disorders too. Woot! Woot! What a wonderful trade, well, as long as I get to buy great big, tasteless, yet perfect in color and size, oranges every day of the year. Everyone gets sick, gives money to the docs, can’t eat due to treatments, then die and get skinned then too. We have finally created the perfect society.
Maybe if food became more real, less available and more expensive, 70% of our population wouldn’t be preparing to cost us more money than this country will ever produce again to keep them in pills and doctor visits, surgeries and therapies, and pills, and then, finally, one last whopper of a stay where the fat bastards cost us millions keeping them alive out of hope and no sense of the reality of LIMITED resources and intentional neglect of the ONLY thing we truly own, our own bodies.
The TRUE cost of our cheap, plentiful, ever-more-illness-inducing, food crops is astronomical, and on its own would nearly destroy our children trying to pay for it all. Luckily, for them, it is only one of the bills we are leaving because we refuse to attach and pay fair market for ANYTHING.
I just don’t get the disconnect between the reality of what we have done/allowed and encouraged to happen, and the health of our country, fellow countrymen and future countrymen.
Sure, fuck the universe, we be man and we have to cheap oranges out of season and grown in a freaking desert to ship to a climate that could grow them themselves.
God is laughing his ass off at our folly. Yep cheap food, of questionable nutrition, not-questionable traces and remnants of toxins and poisons, and then costly cancer or fat-related deaths, which in the end costs so much more than if we increased food prices and eliminated thousands of the loopholes that allow the major producers to put questionable/toxic flavorings and additives in their food.
Nope, we NEED poisons on our food, we NEED to have (tasteless, devoid of nutrition) strawberries fresh in the off season, we NEED to be God and disrupt his natural cycles and ways so we can have an overabundance of calories and convenience, and an undersupply of nutrition and health. Food used to be health/medicine. Our foods now are neither. This isn’t a fair trade for big asses.
Yep, we are MAN. WE control the planet, the crops, the skies, the rain, the sun.
And WE are going to blow it all the freak up. Guaranteed. Technology and Science isn’t our savior, it’s our Tower of Babel, and it is going to eventually kill us all. One way or the other.
Might not be the zombie type apocalypse, might even be slow and steady and gaining steam over the decades, through health care and cancers/disease, or from nuclear direct hit, or fallout, or nuke winter, or EMPs, or during dissident roundup, food line standing, you name it.
The way we have created our food supply is already killing us and we ignore and play sheep, again. Wow, just wow. You have nothing if you don’t have your health. If scientists from other planets were to examine our food supply and USDA policies, then our medical records, I would bet everything I own that they would be shaking their heads with pity at our fates. Killing ourselves in the name of stopping hunger.
And we blame Satan, or God, or Muslims, or the FSA for our continued destruction. Priceless.
Oooh, oooh, I know, let’s ask the Government to run and solve it! That’ll work.
-that last line was sarcasm for the irony and humor impaired.
starfcker
April 8, 2015 1:43 am
TE, that’s a lot to swallow. Let me (gently) poke a few holes in it, just FYI stuff, I know a lot about agriculture. You have oranges sort of backwards. Oranges have always been a winter/spring crop. Any orange you ate as a child came from south/central florida, or more likely, south/central california. Florida grew more juice oranges, primarily valencias, and california grew more eating oranges, primarily navels.
starfcker
April 8, 2015 1:49 am
We, in the last 25 years, have begun importing a majority of concentrated juice from brazil, and to a lesser extent fresh oranges. Fresh vegetables in the winter months came from the same areas. We didn’t import much in the way of fresh perishables from anywhere, available transportation wasn’t fast or cheap enough. We grew it all here. We fed ourselves.
starfcker
April 8, 2015 2:02 am
The waistline killer is corn. Earl butz, nixon’s ag sec, ran a program to cut the average families food budget in half, using the crop we can (and do) grow the most of, corn. Don’t want to get fat? Don’t eat processed foods. Limit starches. Most taste issues come from picking fruit early, before it is ripe. Prolonging shelf life and limiting handling damage comes at the expense of flavor.
starfcker
April 8, 2015 2:07 am
Want to eat better tasting produce? Go on line and figure out when american crops ripen. Or just do what I do, buy what looks freshest. It usually is. And whatever is in season is usually the least expensive.
starfcker
April 8, 2015 5:44 am
Just like magic, kevin williamson offers up a nice article on NRO this morning with a solution to california’s water woes. Stop dumping it in the ocean? No. Cap and trade!!! Who could have seen that coming? Way to go kev, you earned that bonus today, at the cost of your integrity.
Westcoaster
April 8, 2015 8:33 pm
I have a huge Orange tree, a Lemon tree (more like a huge bush) and a huge Tangelo tree right in my backyard. All of them are loaded right now and I’ve already given all my neighbors a couple of bags full. I have a sprinkler/bubbler system for our bushes but the trees aren’t on it. I manually water them a couple of times a week for just a few minutes.
TE
April 8, 2015 8:47 pm
@Star, that is what I said. When I was pregnant with my son, I craved oranges day and night from practically the day I conceived. I conceived on Memorial Day Weekend, there were no oranges until October-ish, THAT was normal. My husband eats a bag of them a week year round. 75% of them are crap tasting. I ate orange Popsicles and drank orange Kool-Aid (with REAL sugar from sugar cane), because orange juice immediately made me hurl until my Grandma went to Florida and brought me back a HUGE basket of citrus and other fresh fruits. Oh the joy!
ps- concentrated, or ANY, not whole fruit juice is JUST as harmful to your health/fat stores/liver as sugar of any other kind including corn. Yes it has “nutrients” (which, btw, are barely absorbed without real fat eaten with it, probably why coconuts and citrus grow in the same climates), but it still immediately sets off a metabolic bomb in your body. Dramatically increases your blood sugar, forces your liver and pancreas to deal with the unneeded and excess sugars, and we have let the big commercial food processors and ag companies to convince us this is healthy.
I could go on, and do, about real health all day. Concentrated juice is barely one notch better than soda pop. But damn, feels good to pretend otherwise and then wonder why you can’t starve enough, because you’re eating “healthy” yet still sick and fat. Not you personally, but “you” the general, lied to, public.
@Westcoast, small gardening wastes no where near the fresh water that massive commercial farms use. Nor do you use the energy. Just think what Sunkist has to burn to harvest those crops to turn into juice. Ridiculous.
I really think that is the true key to creating a sustainable, non-harmful, life. We aren’t going to do it, but it would work.
And please look into getting yourself some protection for those trees from the starving hoards when Walmart goes dark. I’m thinking I’ll sharpen the ends of our steel poles (having the shop available to salvage would be awesome), and create a huge barrier around my food/crops. It would serve to slow them down long enough for me trusty shots to pick them off.
Happy fantasies about the end of life as we know it. A girl’s gotta try and find the silver lining.
starfcker
April 9, 2015 1:25 am
TE, one last note. I don’t think agriculture ever ‘wastes’ water. Yes, some practices are better than others, no question. Still, agriculture truly is magic. Free, always available sunlight plus water, the most common thing on the planet, plus common nutrients and the result is food. Big farms feed more people than small farms, they are not intrinsically bad.
@Star, know what? Vegetables aren’t supposed to grow in winter in cold climes, nor in a desert. That’s the way it is. From the beginnings of time, right up until the USA took over the duties of God and Master of the Weather Climate Universe.
When I was a kid, we got citrus in the winter, very little and very expensive any other time, and all imported from parts of the earth that were warm while we were not.
THAT is the way our earth, and our bodies, adapted, were created, whatever you wish. We lived and we were healthier, played more, smarter, thinner and generally a nicer bunch of people. Even the poor and urban.
What fucking HUBRIS we have when the average ass-size in this country is now over 3 foot wide.
Guess what?Ffor all our commercial farming and chemicals saving the world, people are STILL starving and dying, but now they get to die with cancers and immune disorders too. Woot! Woot! What a wonderful trade, well, as long as I get to buy great big, tasteless, yet perfect in color and size, oranges every day of the year. Everyone gets sick, gives money to the docs, can’t eat due to treatments, then die and get skinned then too. We have finally created the perfect society.
Maybe if food became more real, less available and more expensive, 70% of our population wouldn’t be preparing to cost us more money than this country will ever produce again to keep them in pills and doctor visits, surgeries and therapies, and pills, and then, finally, one last whopper of a stay where the fat bastards cost us millions keeping them alive out of hope and no sense of the reality of LIMITED resources and intentional neglect of the ONLY thing we truly own, our own bodies.
The TRUE cost of our cheap, plentiful, ever-more-illness-inducing, food crops is astronomical, and on its own would nearly destroy our children trying to pay for it all. Luckily, for them, it is only one of the bills we are leaving because we refuse to attach and pay fair market for ANYTHING.
I just don’t get the disconnect between the reality of what we have done/allowed and encouraged to happen, and the health of our country, fellow countrymen and future countrymen.
Sure, fuck the universe, we be man and we have to cheap oranges out of season and grown in a freaking desert to ship to a climate that could grow them themselves.
God is laughing his ass off at our folly. Yep cheap food, of questionable nutrition, not-questionable traces and remnants of toxins and poisons, and then costly cancer or fat-related deaths, which in the end costs so much more than if we increased food prices and eliminated thousands of the loopholes that allow the major producers to put questionable/toxic flavorings and additives in their food.
Nope, we NEED poisons on our food, we NEED to have (tasteless, devoid of nutrition) strawberries fresh in the off season, we NEED to be God and disrupt his natural cycles and ways so we can have an overabundance of calories and convenience, and an undersupply of nutrition and health. Food used to be health/medicine. Our foods now are neither. This isn’t a fair trade for big asses.
Yep, we are MAN. WE control the planet, the crops, the skies, the rain, the sun.
And WE are going to blow it all the freak up. Guaranteed. Technology and Science isn’t our savior, it’s our Tower of Babel, and it is going to eventually kill us all. One way or the other.
Might not be the zombie type apocalypse, might even be slow and steady and gaining steam over the decades, through health care and cancers/disease, or from nuclear direct hit, or fallout, or nuke winter, or EMPs, or during dissident roundup, food line standing, you name it.
The way we have created our food supply is already killing us and we ignore and play sheep, again. Wow, just wow. You have nothing if you don’t have your health. If scientists from other planets were to examine our food supply and USDA policies, then our medical records, I would bet everything I own that they would be shaking their heads with pity at our fates. Killing ourselves in the name of stopping hunger.
And we blame Satan, or God, or Muslims, or the FSA for our continued destruction. Priceless.
Oooh, oooh, I know, let’s ask the Government to run and solve it! That’ll work.
-that last line was sarcasm for the irony and humor impaired.
TE, that’s a lot to swallow. Let me (gently) poke a few holes in it, just FYI stuff, I know a lot about agriculture. You have oranges sort of backwards. Oranges have always been a winter/spring crop. Any orange you ate as a child came from south/central florida, or more likely, south/central california. Florida grew more juice oranges, primarily valencias, and california grew more eating oranges, primarily navels.
We, in the last 25 years, have begun importing a majority of concentrated juice from brazil, and to a lesser extent fresh oranges. Fresh vegetables in the winter months came from the same areas. We didn’t import much in the way of fresh perishables from anywhere, available transportation wasn’t fast or cheap enough. We grew it all here. We fed ourselves.
The waistline killer is corn. Earl butz, nixon’s ag sec, ran a program to cut the average families food budget in half, using the crop we can (and do) grow the most of, corn. Don’t want to get fat? Don’t eat processed foods. Limit starches. Most taste issues come from picking fruit early, before it is ripe. Prolonging shelf life and limiting handling damage comes at the expense of flavor.
Want to eat better tasting produce? Go on line and figure out when american crops ripen. Or just do what I do, buy what looks freshest. It usually is. And whatever is in season is usually the least expensive.
Just like magic, kevin williamson offers up a nice article on NRO this morning with a solution to california’s water woes. Stop dumping it in the ocean? No. Cap and trade!!! Who could have seen that coming? Way to go kev, you earned that bonus today, at the cost of your integrity.
I have a huge Orange tree, a Lemon tree (more like a huge bush) and a huge Tangelo tree right in my backyard. All of them are loaded right now and I’ve already given all my neighbors a couple of bags full. I have a sprinkler/bubbler system for our bushes but the trees aren’t on it. I manually water them a couple of times a week for just a few minutes.
@Star, that is what I said. When I was pregnant with my son, I craved oranges day and night from practically the day I conceived. I conceived on Memorial Day Weekend, there were no oranges until October-ish, THAT was normal. My husband eats a bag of them a week year round. 75% of them are crap tasting. I ate orange Popsicles and drank orange Kool-Aid (with REAL sugar from sugar cane), because orange juice immediately made me hurl until my Grandma went to Florida and brought me back a HUGE basket of citrus and other fresh fruits. Oh the joy!
ps- concentrated, or ANY, not whole fruit juice is JUST as harmful to your health/fat stores/liver as sugar of any other kind including corn. Yes it has “nutrients” (which, btw, are barely absorbed without real fat eaten with it, probably why coconuts and citrus grow in the same climates), but it still immediately sets off a metabolic bomb in your body. Dramatically increases your blood sugar, forces your liver and pancreas to deal with the unneeded and excess sugars, and we have let the big commercial food processors and ag companies to convince us this is healthy.
I could go on, and do, about real health all day. Concentrated juice is barely one notch better than soda pop. But damn, feels good to pretend otherwise and then wonder why you can’t starve enough, because you’re eating “healthy” yet still sick and fat. Not you personally, but “you” the general, lied to, public.
@Westcoast, small gardening wastes no where near the fresh water that massive commercial farms use. Nor do you use the energy. Just think what Sunkist has to burn to harvest those crops to turn into juice. Ridiculous.
I really think that is the true key to creating a sustainable, non-harmful, life. We aren’t going to do it, but it would work.
And please look into getting yourself some protection for those trees from the starving hoards when Walmart goes dark. I’m thinking I’ll sharpen the ends of our steel poles (having the shop available to salvage would be awesome), and create a huge barrier around my food/crops. It would serve to slow them down long enough for me trusty shots to pick them off.
Happy fantasies about the end of life as we know it. A girl’s gotta try and find the silver lining.
TE, one last note. I don’t think agriculture ever ‘wastes’ water. Yes, some practices are better than others, no question. Still, agriculture truly is magic. Free, always available sunlight plus water, the most common thing on the planet, plus common nutrients and the result is food. Big farms feed more people than small farms, they are not intrinsically bad.