Roger or Francis? Is Francis the one who caught a fatal chill doing experiments on freezing chickens? Thereby proving that Chicken keeps better than Bacon?
ashv
7 years ago
Now – I’m not an expert in this – but it seems to me that the difference is: Bacon is delicious.
It is bound to be better than Honey Boo-Boo’s family’s recipe for spaghetti. I watched in horror one night. One stick butter. One bottle ketchup. Noodles. But, in far off youth, sophisticated hors-d’oeuvres consisted of celery sticks with Velveeta in them.
Congratulations, ashv. You have just undone ten years and probably $100,000 of successful anorexia therapy.
What a fabulous website. I was particularly fond of the recipe that calls for combining canned spaghetti with canned pork and beans.
Bill Bryson once wrote a funny piece on the food of his childhood, which I loved because it was identical to the food of my own. As he points out, strictly forbidden was any food that formed the staple diet of the world’s peasants. My father would not allow rice, cream cheese, or curry powder in the house.
I was amused when reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters where the socially climbing, desperate-to-rid-herself-of-her-governess-roots Mrs. Gibson forbade her physician husband to eat cheese because it was low class and smelled bad. (He’d sneak it anyway, being an honest man of simple tastes.)
Today cheese is a staple of the fanciest of recipes — back then, it was what farmers ate, I guess.
And apprentices, who had specific amounts written into their articles. I remember a Miss Manners column about a revolt among apprentices over being fed oysters too frequently. Now the revolt would be about chicken nuggets and greasy pizza!
One of the reasons that fish-on-Fridays as penance has been de-emphasized is that fish is no longer significantly less expensive than meat. If I eat lobster and crabcakes on Fridays, I am kind of missing the point.
If you have a spare moment, wander over to the site ashv directed me to about the cuisine of the 50s and 60s. I am already vegetarian, but if I were not, this site would have done the trick. My favorite is a picture of a meat dish captioned, “This is what doctors are looking at when they say, Sew him back up, there’s nothing we can do.”
No she did not. She was describing her own appalled reaction. I believe it was dinner at the home of an in-law of an in-law, 35 or so years back.
She and I were swapping “atrocities Pennsylvania Dutch people commit on the cuisines of other ethnicities” stories. Both of us being of that rather unadaptable but salt of the earth stock.
So…serious question, because I deal with someone on a very personal level who is currently convinced by the tune being played at the local organic, raw, free-range, all-natural, non-GMO, grass-fed, pesticide-free market where a pint of milk costs $12. Is the difference between bacon and processed cheese being “clean” is that God made bacon from pigs, but man made processed cheese from laboratory experiments? Could bacon be clean because it’s actually found to exist in the world without heavy doses of nuclear waste fundamentally transforming it’s molecular structure, and processed cheese is…well…NOT? Is there a place for saying bacon is… Read more »
I have the same issue at home trying to feed a locavore, vegan, non-GMO fusspot who, in addition to being obsessed with kitchen hygiene, is concerned about clean supply lines: was the food harvested by people being properly paid and cared for. I wish I knew the answer to this, but rational argument enhanced by research from highly reputable sources does nothing. And, of course, it must be properly packaged–enough to prevent the food from being contaminated by other shoppers, but not so much as to waste precious natural resources. Let alone the hysteria about sell-by dates Frankly, I think… Read more »
Give me a little time to dig. I found them in my brief foray into agricultural literature on the net. I actually had to stop reading because it was making me not want to eat anything. But I will find these!
Thank you. I’ve seen some statistics that some people have wanted to interpret as links between natural growing methods and food borne illness rates, but those statistics have all used extreme apples to oranges comparisons, e.g. comparing disproportionate ratios of high risk fresh produce items to a conventional baseline buffered by lots of low risk food categories, not accounting for the lower thresholds for recalling disproportionately high end food items, etc. Are you (or is anyone else) aware of any major food borne illness outbreak associated with organic food?
I believe that was considered a factor in the big Chipotle disaster of a year or two back. But I don’t know — more interested parties than I might want to research it, though.
Wasn’t the Chipotle outbreak related to meat? I’m pretty sure none of the meat Chipotle sells is organic. It may to a significant extent be regionally sourced and raised with some standards above minimum legal standards (i.e. above plain conventional meat, although most brands of meat and poultry advertise some marginal, more-than-minimum-legal-standards), but that’s poor grounds for indicting actual organic practices. Most notably, I’m sure the pork and poultry Chipotle sells is raised on entirely conventional feed (i.e. zero organically grown feed.) Granted, lots of people and businesses want to play up the organic/pseudo-organic image, and Chipotle certainly falls in… Read more »
Reading up just a little on the Chipotle food poisoning cases, it seems most of the problems were never traced to any particular ingredient (and therefore not to any particular farms). In any case, I didn’t find any evidence of any link between the Chipotle food poisoning outbreaks and organic agriculture (and despite the misleading marketing, there aren’t many links between anything Chipotle serves and actual organic agriculture.)
I’ll start with some comments on that last link since you mentioned it particularly. First of all, that E coli outbreak wasn’t associated with meat but rather with sprouts. Although there was initial speculation about connections to local cattle farming, wikipedia’s entry on that outbreak says, “According to the head of the national E. coli lab at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, the strain responsible for the outbreak has been circulating in Germany for 10 years, and in humans not cattle. He said it is likely to have gotten into food via human feces.” The “farm” that produced… Read more »
One can be super knowledgeable about farming and have very strong beliefs about which ways of farming are good or bad, good to embrace or avoid, beliefs which very much inform one’s food choices, all without being a fusspot, especially if one lets one’s own beliefs inform one’s own decisions and respectfully lets other people make their own decisions (including how to serve any others eating at his table), and especially (but not only) on “supply line” questions that don’t affect the eater anyway. One can similarly have strong beliefs about medicine and still pick up a prescription for a… Read more »
I think you are right, and not every legitimate concern or belief about food is a sign of being weird or a pain in the neck. But I would add one point to your first sentence as it applies to my own Special Snowflake: Young adults with strong food principles should not expect their benefactors to pay the added costs these principles may impose. Or, to put it brutally, if only Whole Foods is pure enough for you, get a job and buy your own groceries! I did a little reading on GMO tech and factory farming a couple of… Read more »
I should have added, however, that when I undertake responsibility for feeding people, I recognize an obligation to make healthy choices. With my daughter, I am not willing to pay three times more for Whole Foods soy milk, so that if she requires this, she needs to pay for it herself. On the other hand, if I am feeding her little more than chicken nuggets and potato chips, the responsibility shifts back to me because I am failing in an obligation I have freely assumed. And, of course, if she were a minor child, that responsibility becomes enormous. I have… Read more »
The answer is simple but difficult.
Set a reasonable food budget and let her do her own shopping and cooking. If it was an older son, then he should eat whatever foods he buys himself. This way they can be as fussy as they want and it won’t be a burden on others.
The answer is simple but difficult. Set a reasonable budget for food, and let her do her own shopping and cooking. That way, her idiosyncrasies will be carried only by herself. Amazing how quickly the importance of it all will fade away. If it was an older son, he should pay for his own food.
I reckon it comes down to realising that plenty of things that aren’t a sin are still pretty bad ideas.
Specifically in terms of food, I’d say there’s a big difference between seeking quality and seeking ritual purity. We buy grass-fed milk and meat, but it’s because we think it’s better for us, not because it makes us better.
Because he’s not talking about what you might decide is bad for you, or otherwise best eschewed, but about what you should form moral principles about. I might decide that eating XYZ is bad for me and best avoided, and I might even think that Mrs. Jellyby would be better off not eating XYZ as well. But when I start judging Mrs. Jellyby as being a certain kind of sinner for eating XYZ, I’m declaring XYZ unclean contra scripture. Having a calm conversation about the perils of soda with people to whose judgment you are giving respect is applying your… Read more »
Why would he have to make a counter-suggestion to such an extreme inference? IOW, why would he need to make that suggestion in order for you to think he doesn’t want to “throw out all farming questions from consideration altogether”? You are assuming he’s a Christian thinker and not a dunce, right? :-) I would want more context for the quote — if he’s talking about eating what is set before him by others, I have no qualms. That’s straight out of scripture — you eat with thanksgiving and don’t ask questions. If he is saying that there could possibly… Read more »
Jane, when I put Doug’s various comments about food (as opposed to farming) together, I form a mental impression that may be unfair to him. Is it possible that Doug has a Chestertonian, CS Lewis-type appreciation of the pleasures of dining (hearty eating amid convivial companions) that might form a principle against asceticism (or against being a party pooper who nibbles on a lettuce leaf while others are eating as if stuffing logs into a wood chipper)? Just as my own tendency to ascetic eating disqualifies me from knowing the difference between just right and too little, is it possible… Read more »
One strange thing I would see about that is that Wendell Berry absolutely shares that appreciation of the pleasures of dining, and it comes up frequently in his books. Yet Pastor Wilson has roundly mocked Berry and considers his positions on this very issue anathema. Which leads me to believe “take pleasure in your food” isn’t their point of disconnect. As WDH just pointed out, a consistent theme of Pastor Wilson’s writing, at least on his blog,is that it is careful to skirt any serious critique of the American consumer or the corporations and industrial mindset that encourages such consumption… Read more »
Jonathan, I think you were right on the money with that comment. I think it was very much to the point and I very much agree. However, I would take issue with your concluding characterization of Berry (although I wouldn’t dispute the validity of the point if you were to use other potential examples, especially those Wilson would probably call “crunchy cons”.) I don’t think it’s fair to call Berry “extremely family-oriented,” traditional, or conservative. There might have been an argument for that 20+ years ago, but even then he wasn’t (judging by what he’s said about himself and his… Read more »
I think Berry is certainly extremely family-oriented, traditional, and conservative. I think someone can be all three of those things without being a Christian. As far as whether Berry is a Christian or not, his words can certainly be interpreted differently by different people. From what I can tell from his writings, he clearly believes in God, he clearly believes that God is the Creator and created the world for goodness, he clearly focuses on the Bible to develop his ideas about God, he reads scripture a lot, he is unclear on whether the Bible is inerrant or Christianity is… Read more »
Wilson wouldn’t necessarily have to make a “counter-suggestion” at all. Lots of things people say about farming in all sorts of contexts would coincidentally also provide counter-evidence to my interpretation of Wilson. Yes, I assume he’s a Christian thinker, and I think he’s not unlike a whole lot of other American Christians in that his thinking has avoided points of conflict with the idols of American consumerism. Of course, Wilson has confronted other idols, but his writing on food and farming is glaringly absent any assertion that he’s willing to give personal consideration to any farming questions whatsoever. But it’s… Read more »
Except that his writings show otherwise. He repeatedly critiqued people for their very actions even if they were unassociated with such moral principles, even when they had not made any such judgments about other people being “sinners”.
I agree that it is not our job to be anyone’s food police. But there are issues I struggle with. I had a diabetic friend who was hospitalized with kidney disease. She was very angry with me for refusing to smuggle in her favorite snack foods. Was there any element of sin in her willingness to risk her recovery by disobeying her diet plan? Are we sinful when we choose indulgence in overeating when we know specifically, not theoretically, that we are risking serious illness? Isn’t there room for a moral principle there? I accept that when I smoke, I… Read more »
Doesn’t strike me as particularly huge. Having bad taste or being picky are just personality differences. Obsession with food purity is a real problem in many of our communities.
If we’re going to equate “natural” with “clean” then I don’t think bacon and process cheese can be put in different bins! Both bacon and process cheese are products of quite a lot of poking around by mankind. Yes, process cheese is produced in industrial-sized batches, engineered by food scientists and chemists that tinker with every last detail of seasoning, preservatives, texture…But bacon is quite processed as well. It’s not naturally occurring; you have to cure and maybe smoke the pork to make it into bacon. And as scary-sounding as the preservatives and emulsifiers in process cheese can be, the… Read more »
I wondered if anyone would take a stab at my use of methylchloroisothiazolinone in the last post. I am not a chemist and have no idea what that is, but it’s on the ingredient list of nearly every bottle of shampoo I’ve used. (No comments on why I’m reading shampoo bottles in the shower!) Don’t know why I ended up committing that particular $5 word to memory, but at least now, after 20-some odd years, I’ve come up with a chance to use it. :-)
It’s a preservative. Keeps the microscopic beasties (certain bacteria, mold, yeast etc.) out of shampoo, which I assume without it, would turn into a slimy menagerie in the warm, moist shower ecosystem. I guess that’s why the phrase “oh, the shampoo is gone bad!” isn’t often spoken?
It’s also a lovely example of how the systematic names of chemicals are made like German words—stick a much of other words together! (methyl-chloro-iso-thiazolin-one)
Here are some other reports that focus to some degree on additional aspects of the case. I was a bit suspicious of the sources, but all the main details keep seeming to check out everywhere. The lawsuits are rolling in and now that the system has finally been broken through after years of work, they’re all getting decided against DuPont. If DuPont was willing to go THIS far for 50 years with THIS much evidence that they were doing this to people, how many other chemical-producing corporations have made it some degree in this direction with one of the other… Read more »
That’s just one I pulled up at random because I had read it recently.
This is much worse. And if DuPont was willing to do this, when it was SO obviously bad, imagine who else has been doing what with the 60,000 unregulated chemicals out there.
If you read that NYT article about what DuPont was doing, and what penalties they faced for it, then follow it up by what happened to this woman, the ramifications are truly disturbing.
Is this our bacon thread?
Does it seen strange that bacon goes so well with pancakes and maple syrup? The strangeness won’t stop me though.
Bacon, is there anything it can’t do?
http://jpegy.com/images/uploads/2013/06/tumblr_molztiZOYC1r6gwmko1_500.jpg
Roger or Francis? Is Francis the one who caught a fatal chill doing experiments on freezing chickens? Thereby proving that Chicken keeps better than Bacon?
Now – I’m not an expert in this – but it seems to me that the difference is: Bacon is delicious.
I generally prefer higher quality cheeses, but you actually can’t beat Velveeta for homemade Mac and Cheese. Now that’s delicious.
It is bound to be better than Honey Boo-Boo’s family’s recipe for spaghetti. I watched in horror one night. One stick butter. One bottle ketchup. Noodles. But, in far off youth, sophisticated hors-d’oeuvres consisted of celery sticks with Velveeta in them.
Are you familiar with James Lileks’ Gallery Of Regrettable Food?
The American midcentury culture was more than a little odd.
http://lileks.com/institute/gallery/meat/9.html
Congratulations, ashv. You have just undone ten years and probably $100,000 of successful anorexia therapy.
What a fabulous website. I was particularly fond of the recipe that calls for combining canned spaghetti with canned pork and beans.
Bill Bryson once wrote a funny piece on the food of his childhood, which I loved because it was identical to the food of my own. As he points out, strictly forbidden was any food that formed the staple diet of the world’s peasants. My father would not allow rice, cream cheese, or curry powder in the house.
I was amused when reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters where the socially climbing, desperate-to-rid-herself-of-her-governess-roots Mrs. Gibson forbade her physician husband to eat cheese because it was low class and smelled bad. (He’d sneak it anyway, being an honest man of simple tastes.)
Today cheese is a staple of the fanciest of recipes — back then, it was what farmers ate, I guess.
And apprentices, who had specific amounts written into their articles. I remember a Miss Manners column about a revolt among apprentices over being fed oysters too frequently. Now the revolt would be about chicken nuggets and greasy pizza!
One of the reasons that fish-on-Fridays as penance has been de-emphasized is that fish is no longer significantly less expensive than meat. If I eat lobster and crabcakes on Fridays, I am kind of missing the point.
I heard of a family recipe for spaghetti that involved…
tomato soup.
I can still hardly believe it, but a trustworthy person swears she partook of the meal herself.
Did she like it?
If you have a spare moment, wander over to the site ashv directed me to about the cuisine of the 50s and 60s. I am already vegetarian, but if I were not, this site would have done the trick. My favorite is a picture of a meat dish captioned, “This is what doctors are looking at when they say, Sew him back up, there’s nothing we can do.”
It wasn’t the meat dishes that broke me down. I was OK until I saw coffee Jell-O.
No she did not. She was describing her own appalled reaction. I believe it was dinner at the home of an in-law of an in-law, 35 or so years back.
She and I were swapping “atrocities Pennsylvania Dutch people commit on the cuisines of other ethnicities” stories. Both of us being of that rather unadaptable but salt of the earth stock.
Jane, if you like Mac and Cheese, you should try making Rack of Spam.
Cheese and pasta equates to disgustingly flavored meat scraps? I think not.
Just because one is not a food snob one should not be imputed with a love for eating garbage. ;-)
shudder
So…serious question, because I deal with someone on a very personal level who is currently convinced by the tune being played at the local organic, raw, free-range, all-natural, non-GMO, grass-fed, pesticide-free market where a pint of milk costs $12. Is the difference between bacon and processed cheese being “clean” is that God made bacon from pigs, but man made processed cheese from laboratory experiments? Could bacon be clean because it’s actually found to exist in the world without heavy doses of nuclear waste fundamentally transforming it’s molecular structure, and processed cheese is…well…NOT? Is there a place for saying bacon is… Read more »
I have the same issue at home trying to feed a locavore, vegan, non-GMO fusspot who, in addition to being obsessed with kitchen hygiene, is concerned about clean supply lines: was the food harvested by people being properly paid and cared for. I wish I knew the answer to this, but rational argument enhanced by research from highly reputable sources does nothing. And, of course, it must be properly packaged–enough to prevent the food from being contaminated by other shoppers, but not so much as to waste precious natural resources. Let alone the hysteria about sell-by dates Frankly, I think… Read more »
Re: manure.
It would help if people would wash their fruit and veg properly before eating it raw.
> The statistics on how many people get ill each year from eating naturally grown foods are appalling.
Are there actually any such statistics?
Give me a little time to dig. I found them in my brief foray into agricultural literature on the net. I actually had to stop reading because it was making me not want to eat anything. But I will find these!
Thank you. I’ve seen some statistics that some people have wanted to interpret as links between natural growing methods and food borne illness rates, but those statistics have all used extreme apples to oranges comparisons, e.g. comparing disproportionate ratios of high risk fresh produce items to a conventional baseline buffered by lots of low risk food categories, not accounting for the lower thresholds for recalling disproportionately high end food items, etc. Are you (or is anyone else) aware of any major food borne illness outbreak associated with organic food?
I believe that was considered a factor in the big Chipotle disaster of a year or two back. But I don’t know — more interested parties than I might want to research it, though.
Wasn’t the Chipotle outbreak related to meat? I’m pretty sure none of the meat Chipotle sells is organic. It may to a significant extent be regionally sourced and raised with some standards above minimum legal standards (i.e. above plain conventional meat, although most brands of meat and poultry advertise some marginal, more-than-minimum-legal-standards), but that’s poor grounds for indicting actual organic practices. Most notably, I’m sure the pork and poultry Chipotle sells is raised on entirely conventional feed (i.e. zero organically grown feed.) Granted, lots of people and businesses want to play up the organic/pseudo-organic image, and Chipotle certainly falls in… Read more »
Well, keep in mind, I’m not arguing anything at all. I just remembered that as a possible instance.
Reading up just a little on the Chipotle food poisoning cases, it seems most of the problems were never traced to any particular ingredient (and therefore not to any particular farms). In any case, I didn’t find any evidence of any link between the Chipotle food poisoning outbreaks and organic agriculture (and despite the misleading marketing, there aren’t many links between anything Chipotle serves and actual organic agriculture.)
I can’t comment on the quality of these reports although I have tried to avoid using obviously, incredibly biased sources such as Monsanto.
https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/04/13/who-study-finds-thousands-of-illnesses-linked-annually-to-organic-foods/
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2016/11/cdc-study-attempts-to-assess-outbreak-risk-from-organic-food/#.WG_lgJImaCQ
http://foodsafety.news21.com/2011/safety/organics/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/21/business/recalls-of-organic-food-on-the-rise-report-says.html
https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/organic/fecal-contamination.php
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/organic-food-has-significantly-higher-contamination-study-finds
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/organic-food-has-significantly-higher-contamination-study-finds
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/07/organic_food_deaths_in_europe_could_have_been_prevented.html
If you are including meat as well as produce, this final link discusses an E.coli outbreak that killed 40 people and sickened 3400 others.
But, I have not evaluated these sites for potential bias, accuracy, or apples to oranges comparisons.
I’ll start with some comments on that last link since you mentioned it particularly. First of all, that E coli outbreak wasn’t associated with meat but rather with sprouts. Although there was initial speculation about connections to local cattle farming, wikipedia’s entry on that outbreak says, “According to the head of the national E. coli lab at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, the strain responsible for the outbreak has been circulating in Germany for 10 years, and in humans not cattle. He said it is likely to have gotten into food via human feces.” The “farm” that produced… Read more »
One can be super knowledgeable about farming and have very strong beliefs about which ways of farming are good or bad, good to embrace or avoid, beliefs which very much inform one’s food choices, all without being a fusspot, especially if one lets one’s own beliefs inform one’s own decisions and respectfully lets other people make their own decisions (including how to serve any others eating at his table), and especially (but not only) on “supply line” questions that don’t affect the eater anyway. One can similarly have strong beliefs about medicine and still pick up a prescription for a… Read more »
I think you are right, and not every legitimate concern or belief about food is a sign of being weird or a pain in the neck. But I would add one point to your first sentence as it applies to my own Special Snowflake: Young adults with strong food principles should not expect their benefactors to pay the added costs these principles may impose. Or, to put it brutally, if only Whole Foods is pure enough for you, get a job and buy your own groceries! I did a little reading on GMO tech and factory farming a couple of… Read more »
I agree completely. Very well said.
I should have added, however, that when I undertake responsibility for feeding people, I recognize an obligation to make healthy choices. With my daughter, I am not willing to pay three times more for Whole Foods soy milk, so that if she requires this, she needs to pay for it herself. On the other hand, if I am feeding her little more than chicken nuggets and potato chips, the responsibility shifts back to me because I am failing in an obligation I have freely assumed. And, of course, if she were a minor child, that responsibility becomes enormous. I have… Read more »
The answer is simple but difficult.
Set a reasonable food budget and let her do her own shopping and cooking. If it was an older son, then he should eat whatever foods he buys himself. This way they can be as fussy as they want and it won’t be a burden on others.
The answer is simple but difficult. Set a reasonable budget for food, and let her do her own shopping and cooking. That way, her idiosyncrasies will be carried only by herself. Amazing how quickly the importance of it all will fade away. If it was an older son, he should pay for his own food.
I reckon it comes down to realising that plenty of things that aren’t a sin are still pretty bad ideas.
Specifically in terms of food, I’d say there’s a big difference between seeking quality and seeking ritual purity. We buy grass-fed milk and meat, but it’s because we think it’s better for us, not because it makes us better.
This is a huge point, and yet Pastor Wilson and those supporting him keep ignoring it every time I bring it up.
Because he’s not talking about what you might decide is bad for you, or otherwise best eschewed, but about what you should form moral principles about. I might decide that eating XYZ is bad for me and best avoided, and I might even think that Mrs. Jellyby would be better off not eating XYZ as well. But when I start judging Mrs. Jellyby as being a certain kind of sinner for eating XYZ, I’m declaring XYZ unclean contra scripture. Having a calm conversation about the perils of soda with people to whose judgment you are giving respect is applying your… Read more »
The trouble I have with that interpretation is what I just said to Christian here:
https://dougwils.com/s7-engaging-the-culture/gratitude-the-sauce.html
As I asked Christian there, has Wilson said anything to suggest that he doesn’t want to throw out all farming questions from consideration altogether?
Why would he have to make a counter-suggestion to such an extreme inference? IOW, why would he need to make that suggestion in order for you to think he doesn’t want to “throw out all farming questions from consideration altogether”? You are assuming he’s a Christian thinker and not a dunce, right? :-) I would want more context for the quote — if he’s talking about eating what is set before him by others, I have no qualms. That’s straight out of scripture — you eat with thanksgiving and don’t ask questions. If he is saying that there could possibly… Read more »
Jane, when I put Doug’s various comments about food (as opposed to farming) together, I form a mental impression that may be unfair to him. Is it possible that Doug has a Chestertonian, CS Lewis-type appreciation of the pleasures of dining (hearty eating amid convivial companions) that might form a principle against asceticism (or against being a party pooper who nibbles on a lettuce leaf while others are eating as if stuffing logs into a wood chipper)? Just as my own tendency to ascetic eating disqualifies me from knowing the difference between just right and too little, is it possible… Read more »
One strange thing I would see about that is that Wendell Berry absolutely shares that appreciation of the pleasures of dining, and it comes up frequently in his books. Yet Pastor Wilson has roundly mocked Berry and considers his positions on this very issue anathema. Which leads me to believe “take pleasure in your food” isn’t their point of disconnect. As WDH just pointed out, a consistent theme of Pastor Wilson’s writing, at least on his blog,is that it is careful to skirt any serious critique of the American consumer or the corporations and industrial mindset that encourages such consumption… Read more »
Jonathan, I think you were right on the money with that comment. I think it was very much to the point and I very much agree. However, I would take issue with your concluding characterization of Berry (although I wouldn’t dispute the validity of the point if you were to use other potential examples, especially those Wilson would probably call “crunchy cons”.) I don’t think it’s fair to call Berry “extremely family-oriented,” traditional, or conservative. There might have been an argument for that 20+ years ago, but even then he wasn’t (judging by what he’s said about himself and his… Read more »
I think Berry is certainly extremely family-oriented, traditional, and conservative. I think someone can be all three of those things without being a Christian. As far as whether Berry is a Christian or not, his words can certainly be interpreted differently by different people. From what I can tell from his writings, he clearly believes in God, he clearly believes that God is the Creator and created the world for goodness, he clearly focuses on the Bible to develop his ideas about God, he reads scripture a lot, he is unclear on whether the Bible is inerrant or Christianity is… Read more »
Wilson wouldn’t necessarily have to make a “counter-suggestion” at all. Lots of things people say about farming in all sorts of contexts would coincidentally also provide counter-evidence to my interpretation of Wilson. Yes, I assume he’s a Christian thinker, and I think he’s not unlike a whole lot of other American Christians in that his thinking has avoided points of conflict with the idols of American consumerism. Of course, Wilson has confronted other idols, but his writing on food and farming is glaringly absent any assertion that he’s willing to give personal consideration to any farming questions whatsoever. But it’s… Read more »
Except that his writings show otherwise. He repeatedly critiqued people for their very actions even if they were unassociated with such moral principles, even when they had not made any such judgments about other people being “sinners”.
I agree that it is not our job to be anyone’s food police. But there are issues I struggle with. I had a diabetic friend who was hospitalized with kidney disease. She was very angry with me for refusing to smuggle in her favorite snack foods. Was there any element of sin in her willingness to risk her recovery by disobeying her diet plan? Are we sinful when we choose indulgence in overeating when we know specifically, not theoretically, that we are risking serious illness? Isn’t there room for a moral principle there? I accept that when I smoke, I… Read more »
Doesn’t strike me as particularly huge. Having bad taste or being picky are just personality differences. Obsession with food purity is a real problem in many of our communities.
If we’re going to equate “natural” with “clean” then I don’t think bacon and process cheese can be put in different bins! Both bacon and process cheese are products of quite a lot of poking around by mankind. Yes, process cheese is produced in industrial-sized batches, engineered by food scientists and chemists that tinker with every last detail of seasoning, preservatives, texture…But bacon is quite processed as well. It’s not naturally occurring; you have to cure and maybe smoke the pork to make it into bacon. And as scary-sounding as the preservatives and emulsifiers in process cheese can be, the… Read more »
I wondered if anyone would take a stab at my use of methylchloroisothiazolinone in the last post. I am not a chemist and have no idea what that is, but it’s on the ingredient list of nearly every bottle of shampoo I’ve used. (No comments on why I’m reading shampoo bottles in the shower!) Don’t know why I ended up committing that particular $5 word to memory, but at least now, after 20-some odd years, I’ve come up with a chance to use it. :-)
It’s a preservative. Keeps the microscopic beasties (certain bacteria, mold, yeast etc.) out of shampoo, which I assume without it, would turn into a slimy menagerie in the warm, moist shower ecosystem. I guess that’s why the phrase “oh, the shampoo is gone bad!” isn’t often spoken?
It’s also a lovely example of how the systematic names of chemicals are made like German words—stick a much of other words together! (methyl-chloro-iso-thiazolin-one)
Rhubarb Barbara
This is how languages break under pressure.
Here’s something to think seriously about when it comes to chemicals in our food and bodies:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-duponts-worst-nightmare.html
Here are some other reports that focus to some degree on additional aspects of the case. I was a bit suspicious of the sources, but all the main details keep seeming to check out everywhere. The lawsuits are rolling in and now that the system has finally been broken through after years of work, they’re all getting decided against DuPont. If DuPont was willing to go THIS far for 50 years with THIS much evidence that they were doing this to people, how many other chemical-producing corporations have made it some degree in this direction with one of the other… Read more »
And benzene too:
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijfs/2015/545640/
Not like there aren’t a hundred chemicals that are going to be found to have effects like Benzene and fluorochemicals soon enough.
This is a great article. I had no idea that average daily exposure to benzene from just breathing is so high—much higher than exposure to it in food.
People used to use benzene as an aftershave. Ugh.
That’s just one I pulled up at random because I had read it recently.
This is much worse. And if DuPont was willing to do this, when it was SO obviously bad, imagine who else has been doing what with the 60,000 unregulated chemicals out there.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-duponts-worst-nightmare.html?_r=0
If you read that NYT article about what DuPont was doing, and what penalties they faced for it, then follow it up by what happened to this woman, the ramifications are truly disturbing.
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/25/did-the-epa-prosecute-and-jail-a-mississippi-lab-owner-because-of-her-activism/