More Reasons To Love England

A ten mile walk and a Sunday roast:

Reasons To Love England

In the US, GM foods are a prevalent part of agriculture, flourishing unabated with Monsanto cohorts occupying the government. My homeland, England, has not yet embraced GM foods. There's an experimental crop of oil seed rape growing in Harpenden, just north of London which protesters have promised to set ablaze in coming weeks. Scientists are powerless to stop them and can only beg mercy via the media.

Occupy London (pictured above) freely continues in Finsbury Square, London.

Mercury

So I tend to blather on quite a bit about the importance of eating organic food. However,  I recently went to meet some friends over at the Catskills Conservation Center and discovered something horrible and depressing. The Catskills are "arguably" the biggest repository of mercury in the country. Such is the altitude of the mountainous region, that when clouds of quicksilver disgorgement from power plants in the flat lands of Ohio waft eastwards, they reach the Catskill mountains and are immediately released by precipitation into the groundwater. I'm told that you cannot each a fish from the Pepacton Reservoir and this reservoir is one that supplies the drinking water for the New York City and environs. The clouds of quicksilver are converted by the environment into Methyl mercury which "bioaccumulates" in food webs.

The Catskills are a "mercury hotspot".

Here we are trying to grow organic produce, compost our food, and recycle but it's probably all for naught.

*Sigh*.

There's a Mercury Deposition Forum on May 10th at 6pm at the Photosensualis Gallery on 15 Rock City Road in Woodstock, New York wherein a panel of experts will discuss the effects of mercury pollution on the Catskill region.

They look so gorgeous from afar, too.

Organic Meat

I visited a new farmers' market this morning and thought I might treat myself to some grass fed beef. I eat meat rarely. (So rarely that I could easily be a vegetarian and I think I'm moving in that direction.) So I asked the farmer if he had any and he said he did, but it was "corn finished".  Well, the animal is grass fed, he said, but it's fed corn for the last few months of it's life. I asked him if that would be genetically modified corn.

"Yes, you can't get corn that's not genetically modified," he said. "Have you ever tried to grow corn?"
"Yes."
"Well," he said, ignoring me. "It's impossible to grow organic."

So I put the meat back and told the farmer I would think about it. My point is, how much should I care, if at all? Should I just shrug my shoulders and sigh resignedly that you can't have everything? The farmer told me that he knew the farmer who raised the meat and that the animals had mostly good lives on a pasture. But even finishing an animal on corn can make his organs swell to cope with the grain. And, well, we all know that you can get organic corn.

A reader asked me about so-called "pink slime" a few months ago and for any information about organic meat. So I did some research and it turns out that in order to eat natural meat you need it to be both from a grass fed animal and organic. I must also mention that some grass fed animals graze on land that's been treated with herbicides.

You can also find this information in books by Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry.

Cows should only eat grass. Eating grain damages their digestive systems causing them painful afflictions like excessive gas, severe bloating, organ damage and death. More specifically, it causes the natural bacteria in their gut to obstruct their digestion and they get infections. It also takes them a long time to grow. So farmers who feed their cows grain must administer drugs like antibiotics and give them hormones to make them grow faster.

Organic meat is meat from an animal that has not been given growth hormones or antibiotics, but it must also be grass fed. An animal that has been fed genetically modified alfalfa, for example, is not organic because GM alfalfa has had pesticides or herbicides applied to it.

Genetically modified crops are crops whose genes have been altered so that they resist certain chemicals. In turn, those chemicals are doused all over the crop for the life of the crop. Round-up ready soy is the best known of GM food. It resists the pesticide Round-up and who's to say what this does to the body? If you do Round-up shooters while you're gardening, just ignore me.

In fact, there's so much sneering over "agri-intellectual" bias, I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle. I'm sick of feeling like an idiot in restaurants and at farmer's markets. Do I care too much about the minor details?

My food intake is dwindling to a minimum already, but perhaps it'll just be easier to go vegetarian.

Working Out

While working out yesterday, I pulled a muscle in my back. I felt it wrench like strained fabric and immediately dropped the weights with a desperate sigh. So I'm taking some time off to heal and it's quite astounding what can be achieved when you're not spending good quality time dreading your workout. Hitherto my days were spent intermittently debating with myself on whether I could be bothered after a long day and then feeling guilty when I didn't. Life's hard enough without this kind of worry. The daily anticipation was a blight on my nerves.


First of all, by eliminating your weekend workout you can start drinking earlier in the day. The great brain really does adapt quickly. I mean, in a matter of minutes after rolling around on the floor wondering if the injury was merely a strain, I was outside with a glass of wine watching my husband fix his tractor. "Welcome to the great outdoors!" He said, smiling. (I spend a lot of time at my laptop.) I really hadn't taken much convincing to be honest. When he caught me moaning quietly with my legs up in the air, he said softly: "that's it. No more working out for a few days".


"Oh no," I thought. And then, "hm, it's Saturday afternoon. Glass of wine?"


I have put out my back before and I accomplished this evil deed by getting up from a chair. The pain came gradually and by the afternoon I was on the floor unable to move, so I wasn't going to take a chance this week.


Sacrifices have to be made; for example, there's no need to guzzle mounds of pasta when you'll rise the next morning to a nice cup of tea instead of a five-mile run. I can't put on my socks or bend over to pick things up but I can still exercise my thighs by crouching down instead. Raking leaves really does work your abs and you can actually think up ideas when you don't have to count your reps!


It had been some time since I cleaned and when you're cleaning in such a slow deliberate manner, so as not to make any sudden movements, you have more time to think about intriguing matters like the dust inside the fridge. How does that happen in an enclosed space?


It's really easy to become obsessed with working out and it's tempting to continually be upping the ante. Before you know it, you're hurting yourself in horrible ways, slogging through the pain and living only to get your exercise out of the way. It suddenly got Too Big To Fail. Friends tell me that they "tend to work through their injuries" meaning they'll continue to exercise even while injured. The doctor once told my husband that the best thing you can do with your body is walk briskly for 15 minutes a day. Any other exercise is just wearing down your body more quickly. I'm beginning to think that pounding away day in and day out will make me old and crippled before my time.


I discovered Jillian Michaels about five years ago and nobody's ever seen my six pack. I'm now able to strangle someone with my thighs, but at what price? When will I ever need to kick someone in the head?


I work out at home to these DVDs by a bookshelf and while I'm crunching away at my solar plexus, I puff sweatily and wistfully at books thinking, "maybe I'll read some more Dickens" or "I must finally read Freakonomics". I want to read Nausea, not be nauseated. 


A bad back stalls the passing of time and for the remainder of the day, I slowly meandered through a few humble chores with a bottle of wine, ate some cheese and followed my husband around the farm like a lost duckling. Now that's living.

Organic Products

People ask me what organic body and facial products I use, so here are the details. I use Desert Essence hair and body products which are all paraben free. I use the coconut lotion and coconut hair conditioner. Because their shampoo's a bit heavy for me, I use Mrs Meyer's hand soap to wash my hair. Yes, it's hand soap, but soap is soap: don't pay $20 when you can pay $3.99. For my face, I use green clay to wash and rose water and glycerin to moisturise.

Don't be afraid of green clay if you have dry skin. I have sensitive skin and I mix green clay powder with water, use it like soap on my face and neck and immediately wash it off. The result is much milder than the effect of ordinary soap but as effective.

Parabens, to quote Consciously Frugal, are "another thing to get freaked out about". Quite. According to The Breast Cancer Fund:

Measurable concentrations of six different parabens have been identified in biopsy samples from breast tumors (Darbre, 2004). The particular parabens were found in relative concentrations that closely parallel their use in the synthesis of cosmetic products (Rastogi, 1995).

Also, find this information on the FDA website.

Time to rid them from your life, ladies and gents.

Disclaimer: Desert Essence's PR company is a new client of my husband and I recently received a couple of bags of this stuff free because they changed their packaging. However, I was buying it regularly for years beforehand and will buy the hair products when my stash runs out. I have actually run out of the shower gel and am now using Dr. Bronner's because it lasts so much longer. However, I do find Dr Bronner's makes my skin drier, so I'll go back to Desert Essence after I've finished this bottle. It's a good thing to alternate anyway.

Occupy Wall Street

This month I interviewed Sarah Leonard of Dissent Magazine on her coverage of Occupy Wall Street. Here's the transcript.

ON this day, the 12th March, 1933 - 79 years ago - President Roosevelt gave his first "fireside chat" radio broadcast - just 8 days after his inauguration - telling the American people to keep faith with their country and their banking system, and asking them to leave their money in the bank where it would be kept safe.

A message that resonates to this day as the OCCUPY movement continues. On today's show we will hear from an observer of the Occupy movement that has been the subject of polarizing debate since it started in 2011.

Thus today's show is called: The Economy of banking: "peacefully stepping out of line".

Coincidentally, on this day three years earlier in 1930, Mahatma Gandhi and his followers began a 200-mile march to the salt beds of Jalalpur to campaign against British tax on salt beginning the fight for Indian independence from Great Britain.

Here's the beginning, the first few minutes, of FDR's fireside chat.

[FDR'S FIRESIDE CHATS are also available free on iTunes]

JNU: That was the first few minutes of FDR's fireside chat on this day 79 years ago on 1933. My guest today is Sarah Leonard, co-author of Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America published by Verso Books and associate editor of Dissent Magazine.

Sarah, welcome to the show, thank you for joining me.

SL: Thank you for having me.

JNU: How long have you been writing for Dissent Magazine Sarah?

SL: About a couple of years now.

JNU: And how did you get into that?

SL: I came to Dissent originally as a student. There are very few magazines or publications of any sort in this country that take socialism seriously. It's not the most mainstream political opinion to occupy. Dissent has occupied that space very creatively for decades, since 1954.

JNU: And how long have you been covering the Occupy movement?

SL: Since its first day of occupation, September 17^th.

JNU: Did you decide to do that personally or was it something you wanted to cover for the magazine?

SL: A little bit of both. As someone who writes and works in left politics, I would think it would be important for anyone who does that to be there. Personally, I went because I knew people involved and also because as someone on the left in NY you try and go and support these things. I had no idea at the time it was going to be significantly bigger than every other similar rally that I've been to.

JNU: When did the movement begin?

SL: September 17th was the first date of occupation. Organizing for it began over the summer and I was not involved in that. But it began with a series of much smaller general assemblies and in groups.

JNU: When was the seed sown?

SL: It depends a little on who you ask, but a lot of the people who were involved in planning the so-called Bloomberg bill which was a much smaller occupation outside city hall protesting the mayor's austerity budget. That was earlier in the summer and a lot of people came out of that with new ideas and from looking at what had happened in Spain and what had happened in Greece.

JNU: What are the most popular misconceptions about the movement? I know a bunch of Republicans who deride the protesters, saying they should "go back to work" and "stop asking for handouts". What should we say to these people?

SL: First of all, it's a common misconception that everyone there is jobless. Not only are there people with jobs, there are people with many jobs because apparently having one job does not support a family in this country. It's true that working minimum wage, you will be vastly overworked with no time. Furthermore, there is 8.3% unemployment today I believe. It was higher when the protest started and that number disguises everyone who has given up looking for work; it doesn't count them. So we have high unemployment; so when they say they should go back to work, I'm not sure what jobs they are talking about. Furthermore, there were a lot of young people at the protests and youth unemployment is the highest recorded since they started recording that number. Malcolm Harris wrote a great piece about this in the New Inquiry and I believe that number has been recorded since the forties so it doesn't include the depression, but enormous unemployment.

You can go to the 99% Tumbler website where people recorded their stories about why they were part of the 99% and you'll see across the board, it's a very diverse group and people say more or less: "I played by the rules and it turned out that the rules were not made for me". And so, "asking for handouts": the banks certainly got handouts. These people are asking for survival. They don't have health care.

JNU: That was my problem. They bailed out the banks, but they did not bail out the people. Students are spending thousands of dollars on college and they're not really guaranteed to have a job.

SL: Right and I think that many people have been told that to have a job or a good job, you must go to college and there was a time when that was not bad advice. Currently, it's brutally difficult to get a job coming out of college and even harder to come out of college without a huge debt burden and that's trapped a lot of people and certainly a lot of people who were on the Tumbler and who were in the occupations.

JNU: You can't really get a decent job without a college degree these days.

SL: Or a good one, it turns out.

JNU: If you don't have a degree you're basically ruined. Nobody's even going to take you seriously.

SL: It depends on the type of work you're looking for, but it remains important. But it comes with this enormous burden that we're no longer guaranteed to be able pay off.

JNU: So nobody at Occupy is asking for handouts. Many people have three jobs. I know someone who currently occupies Boston who has a thriving jewelry business: a single mother who's making it on her own and she is not asking for handouts. That's not what anybody is asking for.

So what are the main objectives of the Occupy movement?

SL: I would say central to the movement has been the realization that democracy, as we hope it to be, cannot exist in the face of mass inequality economically. Especially after citizens united, the campaign finance ruling, it's very obvious that the wealthy - and by that I mean large corporations - more or less purchase legislation and everybody else is barely hanging on and their needs are not being met by the political system at all.

And so I think in addition to people needing basic needs to be met: employment, health care, reduction of student debt burden which is really holding people back, people are saying that American democracy simply cannot bear this inequality. We will not have democracy if we cannot fix the economy. That's been a really core preoccupation of the movement.

JNU: And banking law too. The game seems to be weighed against us when large companies can basically lobby governments and people can't.

SL: Yes, that is certainly a problem. Money flooding into the political system right now and the average person does not have the resources to fight against that and reclaim their representation. It's incredibly difficult right now.

JNU: Yes, it's almost like if you don't have money, you're not really that important in the world.

SL: Yes, I would say that is exactly the message being sent by the political system right now.

JNU: What sort of people are occupiers?

SL: It really does appear that all types of people are Occupiers. It sounds a little optimistic and a little idealistic to say that "I went down to Zuccotti Park and I saw America there" but it's true. It was really lovely in a way. It was tragic because it means that the economic crisis has struck all kinds of people, but the unity there was really quite beautiful. Certainly students were there and unemployed people were there. A lot of people who just believe that what's going on with banks is unfair. Reading through the tumbler website is really heartbreaking. I've choked up reading it because the litany of very human problems that have put them in permanent debit - things like a mental health problem, a sick parent or a sick child - these are problems that any family can deal with and they're the things that because we don't have universal health care for example, instead of being taken care of, push people into poverty.

JNU: There are also certain banking regulations that they are against too. They want to change certain laws stopping speculation. I recently read that 25% of the price of oil is speculation and it shouldn't be allowed. Some of the prices of oil are controlled by factoring in a future war. Prices being controlled and the price of food is rising so people are not able to eat properly in today's economy.

SL: People are focused on the type of regulation we need. It has been all about deregulation for the last few decades. The forthcoming issue of Dissent Magazine will be about this problem of food so look for that.

JNU: And that's what people who deride the protesters don't understand. There are banking regulations that they want to change. They have a serious and good message. It's not just asking for handouts.

SL: I would even reject on some level the languages of "handouts or not handouts". In any country there are things that the citizens decide what they owe one another. And often that is "we all pay into a system that allows all of us to have healthcare because we believe in our country no one should be without health care. That wouldn't be considered a handout and I wouldn't consider it a handout. It's a real fundamental question of what we owe one another. People are rallying to re-establish what it means.

JNU: When I started reading the book, I was surprised at the joy in the book and felt ashamed that I had been swayed by the media's focus which was on the violence. What do you think about the portrayal in the media liberal and conservative?

SL: Well it was a very joyful scene. I think social movements can be really beautiful things because you have a lot of people drawn out of their daily life working on something they really believe in so you get the best part of everybody working together. In the media, the big networks - if you take CNN - that's a profit making enterprise. They're looking for good product. They're looking for good story. Occupy had a good narrative. There was a lot of tension; there was a lot of surprise but a lot of good. But it also meant that the coverage was centered around climactic events and those often would involve some level of police violence. There's a common misconception in the media that the protest was violent and it was not. I remember seeing people sitting down and chanting: "this is a non violent protest" and being dragged away by the police.

JNU: Isn't that ironic?

SL: That was not really portrayed fairly, I thought. Very conservative media like Fox News was predictably hysterical and would call the protesters fascist, communist, pot-smoking hippies, as if you could be those things simultaneously. The liberal media was problematic in a different way in that it tended to be a bit condescending and would question whether these people had any right to speak if they didn't really know about banking. As if you need to know how a credit default swap works to know that you've gotten screwed by your bank. They really seemed to have forgotten that there are politics outside of straightforward electoral politics. There's "movement politics" and there always has been.

JNU: In the book, there's much mention of anarchists present at the protests in the book. And Republicans (/libertarians) are vehemently against the Occupy Movement. What is the difference between an anarchist and a libertarian?

SL: There were some libertarians involved with Occupy, but not a lot of Republicans. There's something of a split in the American right and there has been for a long time, between Republicans under whom government has actually grown by means of war and very hard-core libertarians who believe in deregulation and deconstruction of the government. Well, in both camps [anarchists and libertarians] you have a strong opposition to large institutions: institutions that they regard as necessarily oppressive and anti-democratic and essentially repressing our freedom.

JNU: My next questions is: Communism has failed and so has capitalism, which keeps repeating its mistakes periodically, sometimes in the name of "progress". If the Occupy movement succeeds, what will America look like politically, geopolitically?

SL: One of the reasons the movement didn't have demands written down was definitely *not* because the protesters did not agree exactly what the country should look like or what policies should be instituted. But it's safe to say people agree on more equality, more democracy. I think that means certain kinds of very serious banking regulation and we talked about redefining what we owe one another. That would be naturally reflected in things like reduction of debt. Straightforward reduction of debt for students who were told that they had to go to college to participate in the economy would be very reasonable. I think that health care would be very reasonable. You could also think in a more utopian way about the deeper ways in which we democratize the economy. There's a history on the left of discussing ways in which the workplace could be democratized. Workers could have a stake in what they're producing.

Also, movements don't necessarily have to end. Remaining engaged is extraordinarily important. We looking at a new kind of economy, a so-called flexible economy. Up and down the hierarchy and the spectrum, workers are not organized the way they used to be. The major challenge moving forward is how you organize this vicarious labor. How do you make voices heard for a long time and not just for a minute? That's the country we want to see: making people's voices heard.

JNU: And how are they doing? How are they making their voice heard? You mentioned a tumbler website earlier. What's the URL of that?

SL: You can google the 99% Tumbler. We also wrote about it in the Occupy Gazette. I've no doubt the problems described in the Tumbler have not been alleviated since September. There is a fair bit of organizing going on, however, in different places: certainly in New York and Oakland. Around May 1st there's been a call for a general strike. A general strike in the original meaning can't be done, because that would mean every laborer strikes and that's not going to happen. I think what will happen is a very big protest and it's hard to know what that will look like. But organizing for that has given people cause to work together and continue to organize and think about next steps for spring. I think it's going to re-emerge in the spring.

JNU: There's purposely no hierarchy in the movement. How does a movement without a leader organize?

SL: The media tends to treat the movement as if it has no leaders; therefore it's not organized. The media desperately wants leaders to interview to hold up as examples. It makes it much easier to cover the protest if you can point to two or three leaders. The method of the General Assembly and the "spokes council" has been dominant which means in the GA decisions are made by consensus rather than voting. The spokes council is small working groups and they report back to the center, like spokes. This idea of "horizontalism", whether or not you believe in an entire society structured in that way, has been very important for the occupations because we are protesting a system in which people are not heard and here's a system where everyone can be heard.

JNU: And talking of being heard. I love the microphone system. Can you describe that for the listeners?

SL: The human mic became dominant in the New York GA because the city forbade any kind of voice amplification system: no megaphones and no speakers. In order to convey a message in the park, the person in the middle would say a sentence and the next layer of people would shout it back to the layer of people behind them and those people would shout it back to the next layer of people behind. It made an echo in the park. It made [all the speakers] be very concise. People had to rethink what they spoke because you couldn't say, "well, you know, I also think..." because 10 layers of people would have to repeat that. It was fascinating.

JNU: That's the sort of thing you don't hear about in the media. The human mic, the help, there was a lot of help. There was some free legal aid; there were people bringing food and translation services. It was wonderful.

JNU: Where can we find the constitution of Occupy Wall Street written by the GA?

SL: There's a declaration that was approved by the General Assembly and translated into several languages that you can find on NYCGA.net. There's no written constitution but there is an entire archive of meeting minutes and the declaration itself.

JNU: Is there anything I should have asked you but haven't, Sarah? Is there anything else we need to know about the Occupy movement?

SL: It's always a little odd to be talking about it as a movement and of course, what I always told people when the park was still populated was to go down there. I would strongly encourage people to go down and talk to people there on May 1st to go to whatever gathering is happening near them and talk to people. A lot of the misconceptions come from watching it on television where the media pick the most sensational things [about the movement], the most sensational people and the most sensational confrontations with the police. It isn't like that, by and large. A lot of people were afraid to down because of all the reporting about the police. There's no reason to be afraid to go down. It only becomes representative by people going down and joining.

JNU: I think that was the idea in the media: to stop people going down there by telling people how dangerous it is. It wasn't really. It was very peaceful, joyful with a great sense of community. There are all sorts of off shoots, for example, the farmers went down there to talk about food. You've probably covered that in Dissent Magazine in this quarter's food issue perhaps, no?

SL: Yes and we actually have pictures of some of the posters they made for "Occupy Big Food" and they are really quite beautiful. Currently, down near Zuccotti - and you can find information for this on the GA website - they're serving lunch in the park every day in March. They are having teach-ins. People can go down for little seminars to learn about parts of the banking systems. Occupy SEC is doing a number of events about understanding the SEC and understanding parts of the banking system that seem mysterious to people. In the same way as the FDR's fireside chats you played earlier were supposed to allow people to participate in the recovery of the country by making sure they understood what had happened: that's sort of being done by people themselves here. You're seeing seminars on all these topics that haven't been explained to the average citizen at all and they are quite complex but not too complex for citizens to understand.

JNU: Where are those seminars taking place?

SL: For a while they were meeting in the Atrium, which is a public space nearby. Go on the GA website to see where they are listed.

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Progress with Meat & Antibiotics

The case for eating grass fed meat from the New York Times this week. If I can't eat grass fed meat, I don't eat meat at all.

Drinking in New York City

Sweet vermouth on tap at Amor Y Amargo on the Lower East Side in New York City. My pal, food critic Linnea Covington, whose life's work has been rubbing off on me most agreeably since I interviewed her for my radio show, lured me away for gastronomic excursions and plied me with free alcohol. 'Tis true that I did not require much encouragement. So here it is: the best vermouth I've ever tasted.