Blowing Off Some Steam

Recently in my neighborhood, the parents became concerned and alarmed when some guys in SUVs seemed to be taking pictures with their cell phones of kids playing. They were not from our neighborhood, and the collective radar spike assumed the very worst. Then reports started trickling in of similar occurrences in other Apex neighborhoods. When the strangers were confronted, they said they were real estate appraisers and took off.


The police were called. Registered sex offenders were accused of being in the neighborhoods. People got very upset. Then today the Raleigh newspaper ran a story about the concerns being unlikely, and that the guys in SUVs probably were real estate appraisers. It turns out that Wake County has hired appraisers and sent them to evaluate homes in Apex for tax purposes.


Ok, so here is where I blow steam. The county is wasting millions of dollars on incomprehensible school busing and student assignment plans, they converted 22 schools to year round and virtually eliminated traditional calendar schools from our community, and they have been shown to be vastly overpaying for land to build more schools. The school board had amassed more than $40 million in a "slush fund." Half the kids in Apex are not allowed to attend school in the town where they live. The school board is appealing a lawsuit verdict that they lost in spite of making prior public commitments to abide by the judge's ruling (wasting more money). And now the county wants to raise our taxes? Exactly what part of this am I supposed to be happy about?


The only community in Wake County that seems to get the shaft more often than Apex is our next door neighbor, New Hill. There are whole blogs that could be devoted just to how unfairly the people of New Hill have been treated. But Apex runs a close second. From the lack of neighborhood schools, the forced conversions to year round, the plan to build the first toll road in North Carolina here, the list just keeps getting longer. There is no way to feel like we get back anything close in services to what we are paying. But pay and pay we do. And it looks like we are about to pay even more.

Blood Sport

Four miles from my house there is an old weather beaten building that looks a lot like many dilapidated barns found across the south. It is a little bit of an odd building, in that it isn't shaped quite like any tobacco barn, hay barn, smokehouse or corn crib that I have ever seen, but it clearly came from a much earlier era when such outbuildings would have been found commonly in our part of North Carolina.


A few months ago I was on an airplane sitting next to a gentleman who was almost my father's age. We were flying back from Denver, and you could just tell this guy had a lot on his mind. I won't divulge his private business, but I learned on the flight that his father owned the property that old building was on, and he grew up on the farm that contained it. It put his mind at ease to talk a while with me, and he shared a lot of stories about this area. Including the story of that old building.


It turns out that the building was once a saloon. He shared with me that he has in his possession an old handbill advertising the sorts of activities that once were provided there as amusements for the locals. Of course the saloon was a place for men to gather to drink the corn liquor that Carolinians distilled--and continue to do so--around these parts. It also was a gambling hall where card games, dice games, and horse races were wagered on. And it was a place that advertised cockfights. The handbill was dated August 1826.


Blood sports of course are a part of our past that most of us would rather not remember, and kids have been largely taught until recently that those sorts of things happened a long time ago. The fact that the University of South Carolina mascot is the Gamecocks is seen as mostly an anachronism, at best. If we are sometimes embarrassed by these sorts of things, polite southerners will simply turn the conversation to another topic. More irritated ones will complain about all the damn Yankees moving down here and get riled up. Some will just get quiet and wait for the subject to drift on to something else.


The Michael Vick situation has thrown the entire issue of blood sport back on the table in an undeniable way. Vick was born in a part of Virginia not too far from where I live, and a part of Virginia my ancestors came to from England almost 400 years ago. There are places in the woods and swamps of the Southern Atlantic coast where you can imagine some attitudes and practices surviving that go back that far. The ones we are proud of get displayed for tourists, or celebrated in our cuisine. Others we are less open about.


I don't know if you have ever killed a living thing, but when you grow up on a farm like I did once, there are times when that part of the cycle of life and death become part of your experience. One thing I learned as a child is that when the time comes to kill a living thing, for instance a yearling pig or a steer, or a chicken that will become supper, there is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. The right way always had to do with humanely and quickly dispatching the matter at hand. And to do it for a good reason. I can tell you from personal experience, it is not a simple thing to take the life of a living animal.


Michael Vick is about to plead guilty to some federal charges associated with the blood sport of dogfighting. I watched earlier this week on ESPN as some athletes and personalities tried to rally around Vick, and other commentators engaged in our modern version of blood sport, called public humiliation by 24 hour media scrutiny. But one thing that really caught my attention was an unspoken undertone suggesting that Vick was being treated unfairly in all of this, pointing out that he didn't kill any people, downplaying the cruelty involved, and subtly laying the race card out there. Not overtly, but in a way that is still real.


I don't know what sentence will be handed down by the court system, but I do know that dogfighting involves gambling. And gambling is something that professional sports across the board sit up and notice. And it makes me remember the particular case of Art Schlichter. A lot of people may not remember Schlichter, but he wore the number 10 and played for the Ohio State Buckeyes back in the day. He was the last quarterback to play for Woody Hayes, and was drafted fourth in the NFL in the same quarterback class as Jim Kelly and John Elway, by the Indianapolis Colts. Schlichter was, on the football field, one of the great college football quarterbacks of all time. A lot of people believed that he was the best of the quarterbacks to come out in that fabled quarterback class. But Schlichter had a gambling problem. Ultimately, he was sent to prison, and his life was ruined. Not to mention his football career.


I don't know what will happen to Vick, but no one should assume that whatever happens has anything to do with race. In life, there are consequences for certain behaviors. Even quarterbacks who can do amazing things on the football field can cross the line. And when it comes to blood sports like dogfighting and cockfighting, there is no way to be involved in those behaviors today that our society will accept. If careers can be lost over gambling, I see no reason they can't be lost over senseless cruelty.

Abundant Miracles

Every day in the United States, 299,398,484 Americans eat an average of three meals per day. That is, assuming the U.S. Census Bureau estimate of the population of the country is reasonably accurate. Multiply that out and we can imagine that 898,195,452 meals are consumed most days in the U.S. Of course, there are some people who don't get to eat three meals a day, but that population estimate is also from the year 2000, so between the variances and allowances for error in estimation, the 898 million number is probably pretty close.


That is a lot of food. I thought about that today as I fought the drought to keep my tomato plants alive, and thought about the work that went into growing the food we ate for dinner. Our trip on Saturday to visit the Farmer's Markets was productive, but the Apex market (being new) didn't have too much to offer yet. We bought some Mango-peach butter from an interesting vendor, even though that particular item violated the point of trying to buy local goods. We grow a lot of things in NC, but Mangoes are not among them. Then headed over to Carrboro to hit that well-established market.


There we bought new potatoes, shelled purple hull peas, locally produced pork chops, a few slicing tomatoes, a watermelon and a mess of green beans. Of course we had to stop at the lemonade stand, visit the potters, and generally browse around too. We paid $4.00 for a pint of shelled fresh purple hull peas from a woman who had brought 120 pints to market. That is a tremendous amount of labor; purple hull peas are not very large, and the number of pea pods someone would have to shell to make 120 pints is hard to fathom. And for her efforts, she took home less than $500. We also paid about $4.00 for the potatoes we bought. The potato growing season in North Carolina lasts about 90-110 days. A single plant will produce maybe 8-15 potatoes. These have to be dug up out of the ground, which without mechanical assistance, means back-breaking work.


There are several miracles in all of this for me. First, the amazing fact that we are able to produce or import and then deliver 898 million meals in the U.S. every day, given how really hard it is to grow the food, and the small number of people actually involved in food production. The second miracle to me is that we can get that food shipped where it needs to go, most of the time, safely and in time for it to be enjoyed. My tomato plants with enough water can make a lot of tomatoes all at once, and without enough water, can leave me with days between good ripe tomatoes to eat. Of course, with a large enough garden I could always find something ripe to eat, but crops can come in all at once with lean patches between. But every time you go to the store, you can find almost whatever you want to find. The delivery system we have developed is nothing short of amazing.


The final miracle to me is that food in the United States is, actually, amazingly cheap given what it actually took to make that food and get it to the consumer for those 898 million meals enjoyed here today. If you doubt that, try contemplating two ideas: being responsible for growing or producing your own food, and going without. For most of us, both of those alternatives would be unacceptable. And the vast majority of the population wouldn't have a clue about how to start growing and producing their own food if they absolutely had to do it.


So, the next time you meet a farmer, I'd challenge you to say a word of thanks. I don't know how he or she will take it, but lord knows, we owe them one.

The Real Question

The life cycle analysis that the economists in New Zealand did was useful and cautionary, and from a certain point of view it was a really important set of questions to ask. For those not following the most recent discussion, read previous posts and comments to catch up. But the research question may well have been the wrong question, from a global warming concerns perspective. Their analysis looked at the total carbon footprint of a meal of lamb imported into the United Kingdom from New Zealand vs. eating a locally produced English lamb. That might be very defensible from a research design perspective--comparing a total life cycle for two highly similar if not identical products. The problem may be, however, that both meals have too much of an impact.

What if the real question isn't which of these two lambs has the lower carbon footprint, but is actually a different question? What if the question is, what is the best constellation of food choices I can make to have the least negative impact on the planet? For consumers in the UK, the answer might be grass fed beef, free range chickens, and vegetables from France, for instance. I don't know if that is what the answer would be, but I do think that is a better way to frame the issue. It would be pretty difficult to build a website that lets people put in their location, answer a few questions, and then get recommendations on how to structure your food choices so that they were as least harmful as possible. But it should be relatively easy to calculate an average carbon footprint for categories of foods, that people can refer to. Someone may have even done it.

Of course, eating is also about a lot of things, and calculating the carbon footprint of your meal on top of the fat content, calories, Weight Watchers points, and such, just kind of ruins the fun of it all. Tomorrow morning I'm planning on checking out the new Farmer's Market, and just savoring it without too much angst.

Wishing It Were Simple

Richard raised a really good question in response to my last post, and drew my attention to the Lincoln University analysis of the concept of "food miles." If you want to dig into the issue for yourself, look at his comment in the previous post and follow the URLs. It is important to note that the study was done by economists in New Zealand who were motivated, in part, to defend Kiwi (as in from New Zealand) producers whose primary markets are in Europe--not exactly local, in other words. But the question is valid, and just because something is locally produced does not automatically mean it has a lower carbon footprint. And of course, how you count carbon footprints and food miles depends entirely on which factors are included--and excluded-- from the analysis. I've never met anyone as clever at manipulating variables in a computer model as an economist, and you really do have to look hard at the assumptions being used.


There are other reasons to buy local, however, besides simply wanting to fight global warming and lower the carbon footprint of your meal. Today I attended a summit on agriculture and food safety from the farm to the fork sponsored by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. I learned something there today that I frankly was stunned to find out, until I reflected on it further. We are, as a country, now importing more food than we are exporting. The last time food imports merely equalled our exports was 2003. And the trend is rapidly heading toward a day when the United States will be as dependent on foreign countries to produce our basic food stuffs as we are on foreign oil producers. That is staggering to me. And the single largest exporter of food products into the U.S. today is China.


It would be easy to go all xenophobic right at this point, but it truly is sobering to consider what that means. Today only 3% of the U.S. workforce is engaged in food and fiber production, and the average age of farmers in the U.S. is something like 60 years old. We are losing the producers, and that may actually be something we want to think about as a matter of national security. In the past year we have seen melamine added to food additives, antifreeze added to cough syrup and toothpaste, and lead-based paint on toys coming out of China. Less than 1% of imported products are inspected at the border, and less than 1/2% of products are analytically tested for chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics. Whatever you may think about modern industrial agriculture production practices, it is fair to say that foods produced locally in the United States have a better chance of being safer than many of the products coming in from countries that put less of an emphasis on food safety and product integrity than our producers do.


And, if you buy local produce from conscientious (perhaps also organic) farm producers, you may very well buy food with a lower total carbon footprint. That is not necessarily guaranteed, but it is certainly possible. It will also likely be a lot fresher. Something that was still on the vine this morning and bought this afternoon at the Farmer's Market is bound to be fresher than something packed, trucked, flown and moved about all over the globe before you took it home from the grocery store.


Before you decide I'm a raving anti-globalization lunatic, I have to admit that nothing about our modern food chain is simple, and I also worry about foreign producers. Last year I was in Guatemala, and I was really surprised to find out how hard it is to get a decent cup of coffee there. I was expecting (naively) that if you travel to the source, you will find amazing blends you can't get in the U.S. What I learned was that their best coffee was grown purely for export to Europe and the U.S. The locals are even having to mount a cultural campaign to teach Guatemalans about coffee and how to brew a good cup of coffee. When I saw the poverty and other social conditions there, of course my desire was to see their producers be able to grow a product and earn a living from it. As long as it is done fairly and safely, I do believe part of what America has to do to be good world citizens is to buy goods from overseas producers. I am just worried that we must do more to support our own producers, for lots of reasons, than we are doing today. And I do count my food miles a lot more straightforwardly than some economists might.

Local Feast

I mentioned recently that we had watched the DVD of "An Inconvenient Truth." We also learned recently that in the United States, the average meal travels 1,200 miles from where it starts to wind up on your plate. Do that 3 times a day for 365 days per year, and multiply by the population of the United States, and you realize that the simple act of eating contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

So, we decided to see how much we could do to buy local food, to reduce the carbon footprint of our meals. On Sunday evening we had an entirely local food feast, using ingredients either grown in our back yard or purchased at the Carrboro Farmer's Market. We grilled bratwursts, red onions and green and red bell peppers, made a homemade slaw, ate some homegrown tomatoes from our garden, and I baked bread. Okay, I will admit that the flour and yeast used to make the bread dough were not locally produced, but the finished product came out of our oven and to the table. Tonight we did not do quite as well, but still ate chef's salads made with locally grown lettuce, homegrown tomatoes, and topped with locally produced boiled eggs and grilled chicken strips using chickens raised here in North Carolina, and a salad dressing made in our kitchen. Of course, the blood orange and dried cranberries in the salad, and the feta cheese, were not local products, but most of the meal didn't travel all that far to become our dinner.

When it comes to local Farmer's Markets, our routine has been to visit the big farmer's market in Raleigh or the one we like best in Carrboro (near Chapel Hill). But each one of those trips is about a twenty to thirty minute drive from Apex. Next Saturday, we are pleased that Apex will be opening a Farmer's Market. I'll probably take my digital camera down and shoot some pictures of it for the blog next week. We are trying to moderate our expectations given that this will be the first weekend for this market, but we are hoping people turn out to support the farmers and producers who choose to set up stands in Apex. We are hoping to limit our trips to the other markets to once a month each, and make a regular habit of hitting the new one here in town. I'll let you know how it goes.

A Sad Day

Discovery team to cease operations at season's end
Associated Press
Updated: August 10, 2007, 6:37 PM ET

AUSTIN, Texas -- The Lance Armstrong era in cycling is over.
Citing fractious leadership in the sport, constant doping allegations and the struggles of finding a new sponsor, Armstrong and the owners of his former Discovery Channel team said Friday the squad will disband after this season.


Armstrong said it was the perfect time to go out on top: Discovery's Alberto Contador of Spain won the team's eighth Tour de France title in nine years last month. "It's a sad day for cycling. Certainly a sad day for American cycling," Armstrong said. "We're proud of our record."


The decision shuts down the sport's only elite professional team based in the United States. Armstrong retired from riding in 2005 but remained a visible co-owner of the team operated by Tailwind Sports.


Discovery announced in February it would not sponsor the team beyond this year. Team General Manager Bill Stapleton acknowledged difficulty securing new sponsorship with the sport under the constant pressure of doping allegations.


"It's not an environment right now that's conducive to a lot of investment," Stapleton said, adding the team was in talks with several potential sponsors. "This was a difficult decision, not made any easier by our recent Tour de France success."


Armstrong said he believes a sponsor could have been found, but the ownership group decided now was the time to quit. Armstrong can turn his attention to his cancer foundation and politics -- he is hosting a cancer forum with presidential candidates later this month and is a key player behind a $3 billion research initiative in Texas -- and team director Johan Bruyneel is retiring.
"This is not about the lack of a sponsor," Armstrong said. "Right now is a good time to step aside."


The team was a dominant force in cycling for nearly a decade. Armstrong won the first of his record seven consecutive Tour de France titles in 1999 racing under the U.S. Postal Service banner. The team built cycling's top lineup as Armstrong and his lieutenants powered their way through France and maintained that dominance when Contador won the Tour and American teammate Levi Leipheimer finished third.


Discovery will still ride in this year's Tour of Spain and the Tour of Missouri, but the shutdown means Contador, Leipheimer and the 25 other riders must find new teams for 2008.
"They leave with the Discovery stamp," Bruyneel said. "I'm sure they will be very wanted."
Contador has been dogged by recent doping allegations, and on Friday denied again taking performance-enhancing drugs and any involvement in the Operation Puerto investigation.
"I've never committed a doping offense. I've never been involved in any act of doping," Contador said. "My promise against doping is absolute."


Although he never failed a drug test, Armstrong has been forced several times in recent years to deny repeated allegations that he use banned substances during his career. Discovery also signed top Italian rider Ivan Basso in 2006 but was later forced to drop him when he was caught up in the Spanish blood-doping investigation. "We had our share of controversies," Armstrong said before ticking off a list of team victories over the years. "And not one positive [drug] test."


Bruyneel oversaw each of the team's eight Tour victories. "I'm going to miss the staff, riders and the excitement of the races, but not all the infighting between the teams. This team has become my family and it is very sad to think that we will not be together next season," he said.


Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press

Random Thoughts from Last Week

This week I'm just going to write in a stream of consciousness way about some random thoughts that are rolling around in my head, based on things I saw or learned last week. I finally watched Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" this weekend. My wife and I had been meaning to watch it for months, but somehow never got around to it. Now we watched it (the whole family), plus the special features, and we were really impressed. It is a haunting film in many ways, and I find myself thinking about different elements of the film and the issues it raises, now two days after we watched it. I'm certainly concerned about the effects of carbon emissions on the global environment, and I would ask anyone who hasn't seen the film yet to do so. It was extremely well done.


On Saturday I had to get the Highlander inspected, and I had another amusing encounter with a mechanic who is still new to dealing with hybrid vehicles. I left the keys in the ignition, and the vehicle registration on the dash, and went to wait in the lobby while the mechanic headed out to take the SUV into the bay for inspection. A couple of minutes later he was honking the horn for me to come out. He was overturning the ignition trying to get it to crank, which of course in a hybrid initially is silent. I explained to him about the gas and electric motors, assured him it was actually running, and he could move it once he put it into drive. He cautiously reached for the gear shift lever, looking all the world like he thought it might blow up or electrocute him at any moment. Halfway through the inspection he came into the lobby and asked "What kind of mileage are you getting with this thing?" Later, he mostly wanted to know whether I thought it could pull a boat. I told him it should be able to with the towing package, depending on the size of the boat, since it gives V-8 power. He was still scratching his head when I drove off, but seemed genuinely interested.


On the food front, I read an interesting study this week in the Journal of Food Protection about the natural antimicrobial action of various liquids. It was a study conducted in Spain, where identical volumes of several liquids were inoculated with identical amounts of several known pathogenic bacteria, and sampled several times to see whether the liquids were sustaining growth or killing the bacteria. The liquids tested included several fruit juices, milk, Coca-cola, olive oil, vinegar, beer (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic), and red and white wines. In there experiments, none of the fruit juices, milk, yogurt, or coca-cola inhibited bacterial growth significantly. Vinegar killed the pathogens, but so did olive oil and the wines. Beer did not have a noticeable antimicrobial effect. But it made me wonder if the noted health benefits of the Mediterranean Diet could be, in part, due to the antimicrobial action of wine and olive oil against bacteria like salmonella, shigella, campylobacter, listeria, and E. coli. Interesting to ponder, anyway.


Finally, I noticed that North Carolina Senate Bill 948 failed to win approval in the North Carolina legislature before the legislative session ended. So, for now, it remains illegal in North Carolina to sell raw milk for human consumption.