always better on holiday

The interweb is so quiet. I leave those of you with nothing better to do with a -- pardon the metaphor -- gigantic link dump on the white leather couch of your holiday weekend.

• via sf-j: at first, hyphy didn't sound that great. Then I got drunk.

  so what: I bet your mom smoke rocks too
  make a bucket feel like a benz on the block, fool.

• via fleshbot, when the Flames win, we all win.
• via Tom: A day without Mexicans.
• via Max: nice recovery.
• via an anonymous inter-correspondent: Jan. Guardian story on Monsanto's Nap Hal wheat patent.
• Dan Baum article in Playboy on biotech's deal with the devil.
• Claire Hope Cummings on biopharmed rice.
• The Economist claims that small french farmers don't need subsidies.
• last but not least: I was voting for lisabuymeagoat.com, but indentured daughter is pretty good too.

that was quick

according to a press release:

In a closing statement at a press conference today, Secretary Veneman announced she had directed AMS to rescind its recent statement of clarification and to work with NOSB and the organic industry to reach the best solutions to issues that have been raised in implementing national organic standards. Claiming the agency 'had acted in good faith,'...

5/27: Here's Marian Burros's article.

For what it's worth, this little episode proves once again that the USDA doesn't know what it's doing. Whatever your position on organic food, it is obvious that diluting its standards dilutes the brand. Thus losing money. The job of the AMS is to help people make money. This is why the checkoffs are a waste of money, in addition to being unconstitutional. Also see this open letter to Veneman from NOSB vice chair Jim Riddle.

wed. food

I think the problem with the Chron's rent-a grandma series, dormant since the first episode, may be this: most kids today who grew up with good food appreciated it enough to learn about it from the source. Perhaps we really need a rent a great-grandma project for those of us more than one generation removed from their culinary heritage. I volunteer myself if anyone knows how to make Pennsylvania Dutch food that's not revolting.

Elsewhere in today's Chron, an excellent appreciation of American chop suey, and Kim Severson has more on transfats.

The LA Times is appropriately devoted to farmer's markets this week, but Russ Parsons is a little bit off in his timing: the Royal Blenheim apricot, among others, is already here. In fact, I'm eating one right now. I've been eating peaches -- and not just any peaches -- for 2 weeks. But he makes a good point:

When the gods (or star farmer Art Lange) give us a perfect Arctic Rose white nectarine later this month, let's face it, the only thing some fancy preparation will do is mess it up.

For the time being, I'm witholding judgement on how Julie Powell's writing translates to the Times. Amanda Hesser tackles the simulation in her Balthazar review (her best yet, I think):

In 1997, when Keith McNally opened Balthazar, it seemed to be merely a simulacrum of a turn-of-the-century French brasserie, notable for its museum-quality distressed tiles, faded mirrors and dented and worn zinc bar. But... the place now feels authentically worn, and it is difficult to distinguish between the real faded and the fake faded.

Florence Fabricant does a good job of explaining yeast; Marian Burros reams the USDA a little more.

On the Internet: no matter what delicious things the farmer's market provides, I am almost always greedy for something that is not in season: at the moment, tomatoes. But Clotilde has the answer: tomates confites. Bruce Cole is running scared (from M.F.K. Fischer); his links today include breakfast pho in the Observer and the Anchorage Daily News's excellent how to filet a salmon video. Egullet's International Workshop on Molecular Gastronomy report. Andrea Strong alerts us to chef Tom Kelley's blog of his travels across southeast asia, which combines amazing food with hectic design and occasionally unfortunate prose:

I was half way into Tom Waits� Swordfish Trombone when our bus abruptly stopped.

And don't miss Wade's excellent article on the plight of Vermont Shepherd over at cheese diaries.

Italy publishes new pizza regulations (see slice).

tech.

3 ways to detect GM residue, from JAFC: corn, potatoes, corn and soy. [ACS sub. rec.] Also, 3 interesting articles from Agricultural Economics 30/3 [sub req.]: Chowdhury Mahmoud and Gerald Shively, "Agricultural diversification and integrated pest management in Bangladesh," 187-194; James Gockowski and Michel Ndoumbe, "The adoption of intensive monocrop horticulture in southern Cameroon," 195-202; Antonio Alvarez and Carlos Arias, "Technical efficiency and farm size: a conditional analysis," 241-250. If I ever get my shit together and read them along with that CAP reform article, I might have something interesting to tell you.

SC to hear checkoff case.

knackered

why am I so tired?

CDA + CT + KF = TMT

nice forgery scam [both via clive thompson]

new les Halles? [NYT, 4 plans, none by Andreu]

Jesus, Doug Pappas died. Very smart guy, and he seemed nice too. This was his blog. BP in memoriam.

count the ways

Sorry, were you losing track of how completely incompetent the USDA is? Exhibit 1: mad cow; exhibit 2: organic.

Speaking of the latter, thanks to Ryan at cheese diaries, you can read last Friday's bizarre WSJ cover story on the mass production of organic food here.

moral clarity

When Susan Sontag published her short essay after September eleventh, I was impressed with its clarity, but not so much by the point, which seemed, well, obvious. Only later, after she was reviled for stating the obvious did I realize that maybe it wasn't so obvious after all. I just have this old-fashioned idea that if a statement is self-evidently true, there's not much more to say about it. Since that is apparently no longer the case, we should thank Sontag for once again describing something horrible, the torture at Abu Ghraib:

If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree.

I can hardly wait for the cretins to call her a traitor again. But what we really need to read is what Elaine Scarry has to say:

Torture consists of a primary physical act, the infliction of pain, and a primary verbal act, the interrogation. The verbal act, in turn, consists of two parts, "the question" and "the answer," each with conventional connotations that totally falsify it. "The question" is mistakenly intended to be "the motive"; "the answer" is mistakenly understood to be "the betrayal." The one is an absolution of responsibility, the other a conferring of responsibility; the two together turn the moral responsibility of torture upside down.

I can't believe no one's commissioned anything from her yet.

As long as we're on the topic, which, frankly, I never want to have to think about ever again, let me just mention, in tiny type to indicate my greater than usual disgust, the inanity of the rash of editorials attempting to explain how women could be involved in such horrible acts. What is this, the 'sixties? What kind of moron needs that explained now? What kind of person's first response to these pictures is to panic about the gender of the perpetrators? A particularly disturbing example of the irrelevance of baby-boomer essentialist feminism, I'm afraid.

Update: There is apparently some douchebag named Andrew Sullivan who still hasn't been able to master that little chunk of obviousness. He should sit through the Salon ad and read this interview with Sontag from 10/01. And so should you.

A new way of making plants resist glyphosate [ScienceNOW | Science paper]

also see: a new "eco-friendly" genetics (mainly, apparently, salt tolerance) [Guardian]

Update: also see Richard Manning's article in Wired.

you'll notice I don't eat much mutton

NYT:

Prions, the misfolded proteins that are widely believed to cause brain-wasting diseases, have been found in sheep muscle, scientists announced yesterday - the first time they have been discovered in animal flesh that many humans normally eat.

Relevant because it is frequently -- and desperately -- claimed that prions exist only in "high risk" central nevous system tissue.

Schmeiser loses. I.e., genes are patentable in Canada. See cropchoice

So it's Friday, and you're wondering "where the fuck is the intemperant poorly-written rant about something I don't care about." Sorry, friend, there is no rant, for the simple reason that I was able to enjoy this week's New Yorker in peace. No self-contradictory load of crap to interrupt my reading pleasure, no Denby lurking at the end to spoil the effect. Shit, I even read the fiction this week, which I highly recommend for its, uh, incendiary finale. Even if I'm not quite this happy, the Tomkins piece on the demoiselles' makeover was fun and smart:

Elderfield comes in at least once a week to see how things are going. "Famous pictures start to look like reproductions of themselves," he said. "They are reproduced so often that your memory of them is replaced by the memory of the reproduction. Well, this picture now doesn�t look like any of its reproductions."

This is something that I've tried clumsily to say before, and it's nice to see it expressed so crisply. It is also interesting to watch an idea from the domain of "theory" enter the real world in a meaningful way, which is something James Wood needs to think about:

But none of this can be done, or even attempted, if aesthetics are not a real concern, and if writers' intentions are continually ploughed into ideology.

Of course, he's right, in the sense that there are aesthetic objects (novels, paintings, whatever) that deserve to be considered on their own merits, and that is something that writers are more interested in than others. But the idea that you can separate the "intention" from the ideology is stupid, and I don't see what you'd gain from trying it. It's a false dichotomy. The critic's job is to deal with aesthetics and ideology, which isn't that hard.

Links via Maud and the hag, who also suggests this month's Atlantic story, which begins:

Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.

Fucking tell me about it.

misc.

Andrew Pollack on Biotech malaise in the Times, the Economist estimates benefit-to-cost ratio of agbiotech at between 14.3 and 79.3 "by some measures"; and it appears that my plea [you can just skip to the last sentence] has been answered by S�an Rickard, "CAP reform, competitiveness and sustainability," Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture84/8, (2004), 745-75; abstract:

Franz Fischler has recently published his proposals for (further) reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In summary they amount to an attempt to achieve an agricultural industry that is not only more competitive and profitable but also ecologically and environmentally sustainable. For Franz Fischler, sustainability is defined as more than the effective conservation and regeneration of natural resources; it also involves sustaining the presumed contribution of farming to rural development. This latter objective is the focus of the newly introduced second pillar of the CAP and can be interpreted as an attempt to arrest the steady decline in the number of smaller-sized farm businesses. Franz Fischler has pointed to the widespread support for these three objectives across EU populations and, subject to WTO constraints on trade distorting policies, the right of every society to choose its own agricultural policy. However, the analysis of the reform's objectives contained in this paper is that they form an irreconcilable trinity and ultimately policy makers will have to choose between a competitive industry and the protection of smaller farm businesses. This paper argues that in reality there is no choice. Globalisation will both drive and demand a more productive and competitive food chain in order to meet the demands of rising affluence and a burgeoning world population. It also argues that the industrialisation of farming is not automatically in conflict with the conservation and regeneration of natural resources.

analysis later.

weird science

Nanobacteria? Are you kidding me? [New Scientist]

Where the cod are:

It's a rule every weekend angler knows: Throw back the small fish. It helps the population survive long term. Right?

Wrong. Mounting evidence suggests that by harvesting only the biggest fish - or biggest mammals, for that matter - mankind is unwittingly forcing many species to evolve rapidly. This process, called "contemporary evolution," isn't taking place over centuries. It's on a fast track that can happen within a few decades.

gone. [CS Monitor; 4/29 Nature article and commentary]

perfect

Even if you're only slightly interested in baseball, this is pretty amazing:

9IP 0H 0R 0ER 0BB 13K

wed. food

In LA, Russ Parsons gets around to Fergus Henderson -- he convinced me, at least, to try the tails; Barbara Hansen helpfully explains what to do with nopales; David Shaw ponders the futility of an American Michelin.

SF: The Chron goes shopping at the alleged elitist Ferry Plaza Market [not the farmer's market]; reports on the salmon shortage; and, oddly, also has a nopales story.

Mastering the obvious in NY: Bittman realizes vegetarian food can be good; Hesser quotes Wylie Dufresne: "I don't believe that if you put a tablecloth on the table and you put on a jacket and a tie, the food is going to taste better"; and Prial realizes that wine costs too much:

In some ways, the high cost of wine is a problem we have made for ourselves: we take wine too seriously. We are hung up on vintages, appellations, grape varieties and, in the upper reaches of wine fanaticism, the specific vineyards from which the grapes were gathered. There is a place for all this intensity; serious wine enthusiasts have every right to take their wines seriously. But for everyday drinking it is unnecessary.

None of these are exactly earth-shattering, but it is nice to see them in the Times. Also, Johnny Apple goes through the asparagus motions in Germany (no mention of our own Hadley grass.

Other things: The excellent Clotilde Dusoulier, of Chocolate and Zucchini, goes to Madrid -- it is always interesting to watch the French eat other cuisines, and her descriptions will make you very, very hungry; Do you know what it's made of? Carbs. And do you know what it tasted like? Delicious. I just read the not-so-new-anymore Steingarten [the Irving Penn/Nicole Kidman issue], and discovered that he is a judge on a new, American, Iron Chef, which, he claims, doesn't suck. I know this happened a month ago, but give me a break, I was out of the country. Anyway, you better TiVo it. This time, only a week too late: check out Andrea Strong's buzz on the weird Beard awards.

I mean, no one should be surprised that our foreign policy is dictated by wackjob fundamentalist freakshows, but there's something about Elliot Abrams actually meeting with them about the Gaza strip that's even more disturbing than you can imagine [Voice via Tom Paine]. If you can handle it, check out Frontline and this piece of shit.

Environmental persistance of Chronic Wasting Disease agents [CDC via CIDRAP]

progress:

It is coming-- it must come -- it will come. The difficult labor of bolstering up the present effete government will soon be too expensive to the Western nations, and Europe will find it necessary to divide the dominions of the Sultan, and the haughty Turk will have a Christian for his lord and master, and Christians for governors, magistrates, and police-officers. Then the terrible higher law of which we have spoken will have no power in the land.

Harper's finally wakes up and leverages its archives -- this from 1856. Such a good idea I'm almost tempted to pay them for the print ed. But then I'd have to read it.

update: related? [via the mac]

Organic farmers will want to take a look at the Rodale Institute's New Farm site, which is full of interesting information. Farmers and consumers alike will enjoy the USDA's attempt to explain asymmetric price spreads in the meat market. And gardeners will be amused by Michael Pollan's difficulties adjusting to zone 9 [warning: contains unfortunate use of the word "grok" as a verb].

The FAO basically announced its support for biotech crops today, while carefully pointing out some of the problems.

Also, Japanese scientists have managed to engineer a plant that needs less nitrogen, which is a good idea [PNAS early edition | ScienceNOW]

things you don't care about, part 2

The context of no context.

In my earlier rant about Kirk Varnedoe, I called his approach to art anti-intellectual. This was imprecise. Gopnik wrote, lazily, that Varnedoe was exciting because of his unwillingness to consider the context of an artwork. [That this is simply untrue is proven by the High & Low show the two collaborated on]. It is, I am willing to admit, important for art historians to be able to do this, to look at an artwork however defined as a purely aesthetic object sui generis, and nothing more. However, regardless of claims to the contrary, modernist criticism at least since Greenberg has not limited itself to this (ulimately rather boring) operation, but has in fact needed to grasp at the straw of visual context, in the form of the traditional genealogy of style and schools, and a succession of geniuses who transcend the work of their predecessors. This kind of contextualizing is both obvious and necessary, and it was Gopnik's denial of its existence that was particularly irritating. It is also worth noting that the Hegelian triumphalism of such narratives is a pesuasive argument for a stiff dose of the theory Gopnik dismisses so casually.

It gets worse. The anti-intellectualism metastasizes into the desire to stop the analysis there, as if the total context of the object's production is irrelevant. No matter that no one really does this, especially Gopnik, whose feeble attempts to connect "art" and "society" are all too familiar. This affectation is partly a product of abstraction, which seems to defy contextualization, and also of the analysis of contemporary art, which seems to require none. But its inherent absurdity is revealed when applied to less obvious objects, as in Peter Schjeldahl's review of the Met's Byzantium show in the latest New Yorker, which begins inauspiciously with his astonishment at this

sentiment from Constantinople's grand duke, Loukas Notaras: 'It would be better to see the turban of the Turks in the center of the City than the Latin mitre.'

He is forced to explain away his confusion by reference to a "vast blind spot in common historical knowledge," by which he means, simply, "I have no idea what I am looking at." His solution, sensibly, is to summarize the historical information he gleaned from the catalog, but he has nothing to say about the art. Highlights include further astonishment at the size of the catalog's bibliography -- 34 pages! and in small type -- and the "exciting revelation... that Byzantine decay fuelled the Renaissance."

The point isn't to single out Schjeldahl, who is not a horrible critic, for his ignorance, however shocking it may be. The point is that ignorance precludes analysis. If you don't know what you're talking about, you can have nothing to say. And knowing what you're talking about, if you want to look at anything more difficult than Frank Stella, requires a consideration of the context, which is to say history. To deny this is dumb. But to do a shitty job of it while attacking the idea that you need to do it the first place, that is anti-intellectual and reactionary, and it pisses me off.

related Byatt review:

She can't help reminding us that she is far more erudite than most of us... but that really doesn't matter...

This is clearly going to get worse before it gets better. No, wait: it's only going to get worse.

Things you don't care about, part 1

Like Richard II, India's election is a good precedent -- disaffected underclass throws out fundamentalist pigs.

Also, sports: I've noticed that the every time the Sharks win, the A's lose. Personally, I'm happy for the latter to tread water at .500 for the next couple weeks. And Chris Simon is starting to piss me off.

the day after

The problem with the Chron's dedicated wine section, split off from the food and published on Thursday, is that you never read it. But that would be a mistake. First of all, you will miss Janet Fletcher's excellent cheese column, which this week resorts to an Outkast reference to describe the joys of Stracchino, here called Crescenza. And you might miss Mike Weiss's 39-part series on a bottle of wine. And if you're getting married, they tasted 48 bubblies to see how they went with wedding cake.

Even if we're late, Sauté Wed. is even later, conveniently, so that I can second Bruce's recommendation of the Fatted Calf mortadella that I am eating now.

wed. food

The Chron's article on the prickleback features the must-read story of the Sicilian eel-man, and this important fennel foraging tip:

Select fennel away from automobile fumes and the path of dogs.

Also, local Beard award winners [Full list here].

NY: Entertaining interview with Mimi Sheraton closes with an unsubtle topical passage:

"Well, whether they're right or not, which means they agree with me," she began wryly, "food writers in general devote too much space to chefs' philosophies. They're not Picasso, after all � this is supper. So I don't want to hear about a chef's intentions," she said, savoring the last bite of her palmier. "Call me when it's good."

Amanda, unperturbed, turns in a workmanlike review of a midtown Mexican [her Mr. Latte reading the other day was apparently uneventful]. New Yorkers will also want to see New York on the NYC offal invasion, and today is City Harvest's skip lunch fight hunger day (I know we're a little late on this one, but you can just skip dinner instead).

LA: the fleecing menu; Russ Parsons explains wild salmon (with sidebar on fisherman's marketing coops); David Shaw mocks wine writers; for the record, my favorite abuses of the genre were a red Hermitage "redolent of pencil shavings, wet underbrush, and hung meat," later called an "umami bomb," and a Châteauneuf-du-Pape that had something to do with a redhead naked on a tractor. But see Florida Jim's excellent counterpoint on eGullet.

science

Continuing with yesterday's theme, scientists have just noticed that huge chunks of so-called junk DNA are absolutely identical in human, rat, mouse, dog and chicken genomes, which means that they can't possibly be junk. Surprise! [Science abstract | BBC story]

Also, scientists at Simplot, the huge potato processor, have figured out how to modify the potato genome without using Agrobacterium. [Or so they say -- it seems to me that that they use it but manage to get rid of the offending DNA before producing the plants]. Regardless, this is very cool -- no markers means no Cauliflower Mosaic Virus, among other things. Rommens, et al., "Crop Improvement through Modification of the Plant's Own Genome," Plant Physiology 135 (May 2004), pp. 421-431. Abstract:

Plant genetic engineering has, until now, relied on the incorporation of foreign DNA into plant genomes. Public concern about the extent to which transgenic crops differ from their traditionally bred counterparts has resulted in molecular strategies and gene choices that limit, but not eliminate, the introduction of foreign DNA. Here, we demonstrate that a plant-derived (P-) DNA fragment can be used to replace the universally employed Agrobacterium transfer (T-) DNA. Marker-free P-DNAs are transferred to plant cell nuclei together with conventional T-DNAs carrying a selectable marker gene. By subsequently linking a positive selection for temporary marker gene expression to a negative selection against marker gene integration, 29% of derived regeneration events contain P-DNA insertions but lack any copies of the T-DNA. Further refinements are accomplished by employing -mutated virD2 and isopentenyl transferase cytokinin genes to impair T-DNA integration and select against backbone integration, respectively. The presented methods are used to produce hundreds of marker-free and backbone-free potato (Solanum tuberosum) plants displaying reduced expression of a tuber-specific polyphenol oxidase gene in potato. The modified plants represent the first example of genetically engineered plants that only contain native DNA.

USA Today discusses GM foods in the pipeline, including another GM wheat from Syngenta, allegedly due to come out in 2007.

santayana

There's scapegoats and then there's scapegoats (not that these guys don't deserve what's coming to them), but for once, we're rooting for history to repeat itself.

wheat

An interesting fallacy creeps into Justin Gillis's otherwise typically excellent Post article about the Monsanto wheat disaster:

But genetic alterations that benefit farmers alone might not be enough to overcome marketplace resistance, he said, adding that companies need to develop genetic alterations that could benefit millers and consumers.

Of course, he is talking to the National Association of Wheat Growers CEO. In fact, of course, the only one who benefits from RR wheat is Monsanto. See Andrew Pollack's Times article:

While Monsanto said Roundup Ready wheat could increase yields 5 percent to 15 percent, some farmers said that weed control was not as big a problem in wheat.

[and 5-15%=no more than the price premium and technology fee].

... and corn
A new paper -- Chilcutt and Tabashnik, "Contamination of refuges by Bacillus thuringiensis toxin genes from transgenic maize," PNAS early edition, 5/8 [abstract] -- shows that the conventional crop refuges (the FDA requires farmers to plant these around their GM corn in order to limit the development of resistance to the toxin in target pests) contain low levels of the Bt toxin -- thus creating ideal evolutionary conditions for those pests to develop resistance to the Bt toxin. [also see the beeb]

I have to say: are you fucking kidding me? It's 2004 and we just figured this out? I encourage you to contemplate the scale of other blindingly-obvious-in-retropsect problems we don't know about yet.

Christ, speaking of fish in a barrel.

kill yr. idols

Much as I love shooting fish in barrels, I like to think I prefer the former craftier than Adam Gopnik. It just seems unsporting. Cheneyish, even. But his latest, on the death of Kirk Varnedoe, his teacher, friend, co-author, and son's-godfather, is, in places, startlingly well-written. My target isn't Gopnik, but his idol Varnedoe: let us hope that the heroic age of american art history passes with him. We have enough anti-intellectualism without being showered with it from our intellectuals:

[H]e had come to believe that in art history description was all the theory you needed; if you could describe what was there, and what it meant (to the painter, to his time, to you), you didn't need a deeper supporting theory. Art wasn't meaningful because, after you looked at it, someone explained it; art explained itself by being there to look at.

How one explains what an artist "means" "to his time" without recourse to "theory" is not explained; nor, for that matter, is why Varnedoe's mediation of the aesthetic object is somehow purer than, say, Rosalind Krauss's. But beyond the essential stupidity of the argument, such as it is, there is a hint of something more disturbing: like he's afraid someone's going to say he throws like a girl if he gets caught reading a book. It's not just misogyny -- though the "virility" and "muscular criticism" of Varnedoe and his motorcyle/football Williams cohort are invariably insisted on. There is a fear that talking about art is somehow effeminate, or at least suspicious and elitist.

Football is of course a rhetorical strategy to distance the man from such dark implications. It's funny, though: High & Low, the show Gopnik curated with Varndoe at the MoMA, wanted to reconcile "art" with the culture of the masses, but it was notorious for its stilted vision of the process as a one-way street, in which artistic geniuses would occasionally appropriate a chunk of the aesthetic garbage that surrounded them. [Hard to believe, but this was at least a slightly revolutionary proposition back then, at least at the MoMA]. It was a kind of faux-populism that exposed a certain contempt for the masses. The football thing strikes the same sour note when Gopnik starts off with this Varnedoe quote:

If you're going to spend your life coaching football, you have to be smart enough to do it well, and dumb enough to think it matters.

[Except, as we all know, this is actually a (garbled) Eugene McCarthy quote.] The bizarre three-way point ends up like this: football, i.e., mass culture, is for dumb people, but it will serve as convenient cover for me to talk about art, while insisting that talking about other people talking about art is a perversion.

Furthermore.

Monsanto bails on Roundup Ready wheat [via cropchoice].

at night, all swans are black

Some guys at Monsanto got so freaked out by Traavik's research in the Phillipines [2nd item] on potential human health effects of Bt pollen that they recklessly published an un-peer-reviewed paper on AgBioView, possibly threatening the continued existence of civilization, in order to refute him. E. Sachs, et al., "Survival and Activity of Cauliflower Mosaic Virus Promoter in Mammalian Systems is Nothing New," link forthcoming. Note the beautiful strategy: whenever someone brings up a problem with the technology, they say, "but we've known about that for years". [cf. Ninagate, on the alleged precision of the engineering process for more of the same]. Now, in this case, it seems likely to me that the Cauliflower Mosaic virus, commonly engineered into GM crops, is not going to cause human health problems, but that's not the point.

Also note this title: Esther Badosa, et al., "Lack of detection of ampicillin resistance gene transfer from Bt176 transgenic corn to culturable bacteria under field conditions," FEMS Microbiology Ecology 48/2 (May 2004), 169-178, which in fact revealed shitloads (perhaps literally) of resistant bacteria, but was unable to detect any statistical difference between transgenic and conventional fields. And lets just say that their discussion of their methodology's limitations is not comprehensive:

As in other studies on horizontal gene transfer, the present work has several limitations, such as the insufficient sensitivity of the microbiological and molecular techniques available, the lack of detection of DNA fragments smaller than the spanned by the primer sets used in PCR and the selective nature of cultivation methods.

Which is fine: they don't make any unreasonable claims. What is funny is that someone sent this cite, without even its abstract, into AgBioView with the implication that it demonstrated the absence of horizontal gene transfer. It does not.

Also, NOAA says that farmed is wild [ScienceNOW], which should not surprise you.

roundup

Horticultural biotech in California

Yet another numbingly boring pro-biotech "editorial" from the usual suspects. Here's a hint, douchebags: when your argument fails, try something new. Repeating the same bullshit with increasing stridency is not going to convince anyone. At least try to make the same bullshit sound more reasonable, as in this attack on organic food from the Guardian.

FAO consultation on environmental effects of GM crops, and working paper [pdf] on biotech and biodiversity.

SD biopharm company hits the skids, and sells out to someone with an intelligent idea

Biolex, like Epicyte, is focused on so-called bio-pharming, the manufacture of monoclonal antibodies and other biological therapeutics in plants. But Biolex uses a genetically altered aquatic plant grown indoors in a secure facility, avoiding some of the concerns about outdoor cross-contamination with traditional field crops that have haunted the industry.

Also, Tivo is becoming annoying thanks to the networks. Not that I would ever watch Friends. But don't even get me started about sports.

Alan Guebert gets the Final Word

If you base your policies on bad science, corporate greed, hubris and -- OK, let's take the gloves off -- lies, then it's nobody's fault but your own when the policy crashes and burns.

And USDA's mad cow policy crashed and burned -- again -- this week.

so apparently there are these quiz things on the internet that tell you things about yourself...
What Kind of Drunk Are You?
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey, via the hag

misc.

Interesting attempt to estimate the value of field and ditch margins in agricultural land: Reija Hietala-Koivu, et al., "Loss of biodiversity and its social cost in an agricultural landscape," Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 103, 75-83.

Report on the FAO's livestock biodiversity project.

Pew issue on future applications of biotech.

cinco de mayo, or, thanksgiving

It used to be that after travelling somewhere nice, one dreaded returning to the food of the US (excepting the inevitable hamburger craving). The prospect of trading in your mortadella* for baloney is bleak. And I felt the familiar dread creep over me as I enjoyed abbacchio and vignarola** in the colli albani a few hours before boarding my plane. But, while we all know that the situation has improved, it really struck me this time how much it's improved. This is partly a factor of the season -- it's undoubtedly more fun to return to a time of strawberries and asparagus, the first cherries and wild salmon of the year than, say, parsnips (though these are delicious and you should make them more). But it is easy to take the "American food revolution" for granted, or even annoying, and this week, I am very grateful for what it has wrought.

Also, the burrito. Mexican food in general, of course, is now "American" and we are all better off for it -- even if you can't get good pan dulce or jamaica margaritas you can probably find a mediocre yet still delicious burrito. To say nothing of a really good burrito, one of the most glorious foods there is. So on cinco de mayo let us also give thanks to the people of the Mexican diaspora and their foods, whether "authentic" or "americanized".

Which brings me to Bruce Cole's aforementioned essay on mortadella, which contains the following fallacy

We've pretty much ruined every facet of Italian food as it has been Americanized. Pizza in the U.S doesn't even remotely resemble the original. Eggplant parmesan and Fettucini Alfredo?

It is true of course that Californians (and, of course, Chicagoans) have ruined pizza. But so, sadly, have italians outside of Campania, and furthermore -- this is the point -- a real east coast italian-american pizza is as good as (maybe even better than) its neapolitan counterpart. Just different. And even if, for the most part, italian-american "red sauce" cuisine cannot measure up to a roman abbacchio, it is legitimate, and delicious, food. Cf. Lidia. I realize he's talking about Olive Garden, or frozen dinners or something, but it's not a fair comparison.

Here's the thing about authenticity: you can't make an "authentic" abbacchio outside Lazio. Authenticity is by definition a product of its environment. Immigrant cuisines in america are adaptations of inherited tastes to local conditions; hence, just as authentic as anything else. Things get ugly with bad-quality ingredients and undiscerning audiences, and that is why we are thankful for the "american food revolution," which has improved both here.

As long as we're on the topic of things that irritate me, the Times has a few today. Johnny Apple takes his expense account to San Sebastián and produces this sentence:

In this region, unlike many, no gulf of hostility yawns between classical cooks and innovators or grand restaurants and humbler ones.

Is there really a "gulf of hostility" or is this something fabricated by a media in need of column inches, like sportswriters droning on about "clubhouse chemistry"? The taco truck guy is not throwing rocks though some restaurant's window, nor is Bocuse getting medieval on Adrià, except in the pages of your newpaper. Likewise, Hesser writes:

Mr. Gutenbrunner, once seen as a pioneer among chefs, has not been fazed by contemporaries like Ferran Adrià and Thomas Keller. He continues to be a great cook without foam, without powdered kumquat.

Aside from the so-5-years-ago quality of the thought, what exactly is the thought here? Dark forces somewhere insist that you can't be a "great cook" without "foam"? Hesser and Gutenbrunner are brave reactionaries fighting against the tide of trendiness? Please. This is just like the spastic reaction against a reified "deconstructionism" that never existed threating to overwhelm civilization. Let's talk about something real; I don't know, maybe food? Either the schnitzel is good or it isn't. Besides, powdered kumquat sounds like something you might encounter in, say, a Spice Market.

Other highlights include the Chron's genius rent-a-grandma series; David Shaw on foie gras fanaticism, more on why Zagat sucks, Russ Parsons's interesting article about cookbooks and Amazon's Search Inside the Book (from last week), all in the LA Times; fair trade bananas; and a not entirely stupid article on offal by Patrick Keefe in Slate:

Is this irony? Slumming? Or a culinary example of 'The Emperor's New Clothes'?"

Or, Pat, maybe it tastes good.

*Mortadella addendum: so called because traditionally made in a mortar, it is actually an emulsion -- of meat in fat. Thus its deliciousness. I believe I learned this from the Food Network.

** a/k/a/ (approximately) vignole.

Sounds like the untested cow was more than a fuckup:

"Everybody expected a test, and then the word came that there wasn't going to be any test," one source said. "I'm not sure why that decision was made, and I'm not going to speculate about the reasons for it. But I think what USDA is going to find is that the final decision was made up the food chain, and I think a lot of people will be interested in why that decision was made."

Update: Don't you trust them?

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said yesterday it had traced the rendered remains of a Texas cow that should have been tested last week for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and would make sure they are not fed to cattle.

Also, Mukherjee, et al., "Preharvest Evaluation of Coliforms, Escherichia coli, Salmonella, and Escherichia coli O157:H7 in Organic and Conventional Produce Grown by Minnesota Farmers," Journal of Food Protection 67/5, 894-900. Abstract:

Microbiological analyses of fresh fruits and vegetables produced by organic and conventional farmers in Minnesota were conducted to determine the coliform count and the prevalence of Escherichia coli, Salmonella, and E. coli O157:H7. A total of 476 and 129 produce samples were collected from 32 organic and 8 conventional farms, respectively. The samples included tomatoes, leafy greens, lettuce, green peppers, cabbage, cucumbers, broccoli, strawberries, apples, and seven other types of produce. The numbers of fruits and vegetables was influenced by their availability at participating farms and varied from 11 strawberry samples to 108 tomato samples. Among the organic farms, eight were certified by accredited agencies and the rest reported the use of organic practices. All organic farms used aged or composted animal manure as fertilizer. The average coliform counts in both organic and conventional produce were 2.9 log most probable number per g. The percentages of E. coli-positive samples in conventional and organic produce were 1.6 and 9.7%, respectively. However, the E. coli prevalence in certified organic produce was 4.3%, a level not statistically different from that in conventional samples. Organic lettuce had the largest prevalence of E. coli (22.4%) compared with other produce types. Organic samples from farms that used manure or compost aged less than 12 months had a prevalence of E. coli 19 times greater than that of farms that used older materials. Serotype O157:H7 was not detected in any produce samples, but Salmonella was isolated from one organic lettuce and one organic green pepper. These results provide the first microbiological assessment of organic fruits and vegetables at the farm level.

jet lag

somehow, I failed to actually post this yesterday (i.e., tuesday):

Michael Pollan, as usual, nails it:

Mexico's industrial farmers now produce fruits and vegetables for American tables year-round. It's absurd for a country like Mexico � whose people are often hungry � to use its best land to grow produce for a country where food is so abundant that its people are obese � but under free trade, it makes economic sense.

In other news, the USDA is already fucking up its new ineffective BSE testing protocol.

return to "civilization"

Internet-less for the last fortnight, I've been blissfully unaware of the world's apparently accelerating progress towards hell in a handbasket -- though a stray Economist back issue on the plane reminded me that it's not just "us": the EU and the WTO are eating it. More apocalyptically, I can hardly bear to read about the torture, obviously only the tip of the quagmire iceberg.

But, thankfully, I have missed most of that, so I will stick to the usual subjects here, drawing your attention to this Economist article on bioprospecting/industrial biotechnology, and Jim Barnett's lastest on Ann Veneman's mad cow lies about her red herring Harvard study. Also, North Dakota may get a ballot measure on GM wheat.

Not that you asked, but in lieu of the internet, I was able to read an actual book: History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape, by Emilio Sereni [bio, review]. Not that I imagine you are particularly interested in this book, or what I think about it, but:

There is an interesting contradiction at the heart of Sereni's thought: he celebrates the march of progress, in the form of an increasingly rationalized agriculture and its attendant productivity increases, even when these obviously cause 1) the proletarianization of the agricultural workforce; 2) the pauperization of the mass of already impoverished peasants, who are converted, in his words, into "surplus population". #1 is, obviously, the source of the contradiction, which is inherent (I would argue) in the technological teleology of marxism: progress, at whatever cost, is desireable, in order to create the revolutionary classes. My problem with this is, first of all, that it doesn't necessarily work: e.g., Sereni argues quite unconvincingly that the proletariat should be credited with the dramatic rationalization of Emilian agriculture around the turn of the century. More to the point, though, is that it is not entirely clear what is so good about this kind of progress. One questions how the "surplus population" -- allegedly created by the absence of such rationalization in Italy's south -- would have benefitted by conversion into a wage labor force, except by thereby acquiring a class consciousness (which Sereni anyway shows that managed to do without the benefit of northern-style industrialization). Instead of explaining how industrialized agriculture would have worked in the south (which it wouldn't anyway, for technical reasons), he ends up demonstrating how botched defeudalization induced the concentration of agricultural landholding (i.e., the precondition for industrial agriculture), which nevertheless went nowhere for social-cultural reasons.

But his data actually imply, contrary to his argument, that a rational allocation of land on small scale could have been economically successful, and would have avoided making an entire population "surplus." (He also ignores the idea of quality entirely, which is understandable, but not, I would argue, a variable that we really want to exclude).

Now whether or not this is "true" I have no idea -- the data do not really permit a conclusion one way or another, and his methodology is, shall we say, quirky. How it would play out in the very different conditions of the Po plain -- his proletarian poster child -- is another question. But these are questions that should be asked, and I do not understand why they aren't. Sereni's perspective is clouded by his odd fetish of squareness (seriously) as a criterion of agricultural rationality; an approach with obvious limitations in the geography of Italy. But the idea of a non-industrial agriculture is elsewhere, maybe everywhere, dismissed without analysis, and that is something that it desperately needs.