sastyk
Posts by this author
April 5, 2010
During the period of my life when I was a professional smart-ass (ie, my adolescence), I used to complain to my mother that even the day after she went grocery shopping, there was never any food in the house, only the component ingredients of food. As I teenager I wanted to eat like my peers who…
April 5, 2010
There is still space in my upcoming (starts April 15) Food Storage and Preservation Online class, for those who are interesting. If you've wanted to start preserving or building up a food reserve and have no idea how to start, or perhaps you learned to can once upon a time, but want to explore the…
April 5, 2010
Note: This is a repeat from ye olde blogge, brought about by the barn cleaning we're engaged in.
From December to March or the beginning of April, we simply don't clean out the barn. This sounds as if it might be gross, but it really isn't - we keep layering on bedding, and sufficient carbon keeps…
April 5, 2010
Last Sunday's New York Times had an article about the shortage of slaughterhouses for those raising non-industrial and local meat.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the number of slaughterhouses nationwide declined to 809 in 2008 from 1,211 in 1992, while the number of small…
April 2, 2010
I'm a day late with Nate Hagen's piece, but I just have to link here - it has a beauty and elegance I really admire, and Id do wish him the very best of luck in his new venture. In fact, I'm starting to think that maybe I can cash in too!
OK - here it is in a nutshell - though I used to think the…
April 1, 2010
It is funny, when you interact with people on the internet, you develop a mental image of them - or at least I do. And sometimes people look pretty much like you expect, but sometimes not. I've found this situation to be particularly acute at science blogs, where I rapidly developed strong mental…
March 29, 2010
Passover is a holiday deeply concerned with inclusion - at one point during each seder night, we open our doors and leave them open wide, and call out "let all who are hungry come and eat." One year, teaching Hebrew School to 10 year olds, I asked them what would happen if they called out and a…
March 28, 2010
Half of all food waste in the developed world happens at the consumer end - that is, we throw the food that we've purchased or grown away for some reason or another. It spoiled from mishandling, it gets wasted, or for some other reason goes uneaten. We're rarely conscious of this - just as we are…
March 28, 2010
Chores sounds like such a dreary word, and until I moved to a farm, I would never have believed that I'd have anything positive to say about it. As a kid, I did chores around the house, and while I may have groused less about the dishes and cleaning gutters as an adult, I certainly didn't (and don…
March 25, 2010
I'm not the challenge queen - that title could go to her Crunchiness , with whom you can freeze your buns, change your menstrual supplies and do a host of other moderately sexualized activities for fun and ecological profit or to Chile, who is currently preoccupied with moving house but regularly…
March 25, 2010
It is interesting that young and unemployed (two words that are now virtually synonymous) and highly educated folks are using food stamps to buy high quality food - and taking a lot of heat for it. I can understand the visceral reaction that people have, but I also think it is fascinatingly…
March 25, 2010
I've had a lot of people ask when I was going to run food preservation and storage again, and ta da! I am. I'm doing it as a six week course, run asynchronously online on from April 15 to the end of May. I'll put material up on Thursdays, but you can participate at your leisure.
The class will…
March 24, 2010
Charles Greene and colleagues confirm what the evidence has added up to - that we're probably already too late to avoid crossing major tipping points, and that the scientific consensus has been in error - but not like the right wing wants you to believe. Instead, the compelling evidence for…
March 23, 2010
Simon came in the door calling "Moooooooomm....Moooooommmm!!" It didn't sound like the "someone is bleeding to death" call or the "Isaiah said my hat looked funny and I beaned him one with a rock and he had the temerity to hit me back and it hurt..." cry, each which has a certain urgency too it.…
March 23, 2010
I came back to my computer to find that many of my fellow Sciblings have recently taken up issues of resource depletion from various interesting perspectives - doing my work for me, I guess ;-). It isn't exactly news to most of us that we've been using just about every resource on the planet far…
March 23, 2010
Hi Folks - It has been a week since I hit the wall and took off from the computer, and I'm back, at least sort of. The combination of a lingering illness, exhaustion from trying to finish the book, stress from a book not doing what I wanted to and just way too much time in front of the computer…
March 16, 2010
Hi Folks - I've been under the weather physically and stressed out mentally, overwhelmed by a book that isn't coming together and generally pretty unhappy recently, and I have decided it behooves me to take a vacation from the blog. So no posts for a least a week. I'm talking with my publisher…
March 16, 2010
A new Gallup poll suggests that Americans are less worried about most environmental issues than they have been since Gallup began polling 20 years ago.
"Americans are less worried about each of eight specific environmental problems than they were a year ago, and on all but global warming and…
March 15, 2010
Reaching the hellacious end-of-book period where I do nothing but merge endlessly with my computer. Thus, low on new content. So you can read this stuff instead.
First, check out "Little House in the Ghetto" which will be going on my blogroll just as soon as I figure out how to change my blogroll…
March 14, 2010
After all that work, you'll want to plant good seeds. Glenn Beck approved seeds, ideally. Well, Stephen Colbert is right on board, aware that in a disaster, we'll all want raddichio. He's even started his own crisis herb garden, because, "I may be ready for a world where the streets run with…
March 14, 2010
First of all, may I ask which New York Times editor was responsible for permitting the coinage "femivore" to pass into language. Talk about illiterate (linguistically a "femivore" would be someone who ate women) and uneuphonious - yes, yes, I get that you want to get a Michael Pollan reference in…
March 12, 2010
First of all, I present to you, the cover for my new book (not yet finished, but it will be really soon) forthcoming this fall. I didn't think it was possible that they could come up with something prettier than the cover for Independence Days (which you can see on the sidebar), but I think they…
March 12, 2010
The Miami-Herald is reporting today that food stamp use has more than doubled among Floridians in the last three years:
More than 2.5 million Floridians are on food stamps, up from three years ago where 1.2 million residents received assistance.
That's according to records kept by the Department of…
March 12, 2010
Note: It hasn't happened yet here, although we heard them down the hill in the valley yesterday. But we seem to be having an early spring, even though we've still got more than a foot of snow to melt off. I wrote this last year, and though the precise circumstances are different, the need for…
March 11, 2010
In an American Chemical Society paper, "Forecasting World Crude Oil Production Using Multicyclic Hubbert Model" authors Ibrahim Sami Nashawi, Adel Malallah and Mohammed Al-Bisharah propose:
Even though forecasting should be handled with extreme caution, it is always desirable to look ahead as far…
March 11, 2010
I'm back from my northeast travels - I had a great time at both NOFA and NESEA, and am slowly recovering from a glazed state of sleep deprivation to something sort of coherent enough to finish the book (3 weeks to go!). But I'm still sleepy and tired, so to remind you that Pi day is coming, I…
March 8, 2010
I'm not going to be beating PZ Myers any time soon on readership, Dr. Isis in hot shoes or Comrade Physioprof in elegantly phrased obscenity, but I think I've found something that this blog can kick fellow-science blogger patootie at - the baking of awesome pies. After all, how many of those…
March 7, 2010
Real Climate has an analysis of the methane release paper up, which is at least partly reassuring - partly.
CO2 is plenty to be frightened of, while methane is frosting on the cake. Imagine you are in a Toyota on the highway at 60 miles per hour approaching stopped traffic, and you find that the…
March 4, 2010
I haven't had a chance to read the original paper - I'm getting ready to head out of town and probably won't get to it until next week, but I just got a press release from U Alaska Fairbanks about a recent paper in this month's issue of Science that suggests that we've got bigger methane problems…
March 4, 2010
Well, I'm headed off for my weekend away - I'll be at NOFA NH on Saturday giving the keynote and at the NESEA Building Energy Public Forum Panel on Tuesday night. Posting will be intermittent while I'm gone, but I figure I'd leave you all with a laugh at my expense.
Eric had a horrible moment the…