It's the oldest public relations trick in the book, and we fall for it every time. Usually it's something shiny and new that diverts our attention from more important matters. This time it's dull and has been with us forever. Canada will stop producing the penny. It's given the media something it loves, the opportunity for terrible cliches, a little levity, and perhaps most important, it's something that's easily explained. That's a treat in a budget like this that defers most of the important decisions for months or years. Even the public service unions don't have enough information to justify the anger and anxiety most are feeling
The only argument I'd make against jettisoning the penny is that its very problem, bulk and weight, has made it the most powerful savings tool we have. Everyone talks about the jar of pennies that's on a shelf somewhere, and yes, it's there when we really need it.
As for the rest of the budget. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation and Andrew Coyne hate it, so that signals that it could have been much worse. The CBC has been disproportionately hit which will satisfy many in the government's western support base (support for the CBC really falls off west of Ontario), but the cuts don't bite for another year, and it will up to CBC supporters to make the case that they're too deep. This will have to come from sources other than the usual suspects. This really matters for those of us living in the Maritimes. The media market is dominated by a tiny group of corporate players who would like nothing better than to cut back on news coverage, which does little to improve the bottom line. The CBC at least sets a standard for news coverage others in the market have to recognize. If it deteriorates, so will everyone else's, and we'll all be worse off.
The budget is the single most important statement of a government's intentions, but I think there are other government policies that are more important to primary industries here. The new policy template really began with the critical changes at Statistics Canada. Despite signing an international agreement at the United Nations, Canada will no longer gather information in the prescribed way that assures accuracy. When you don't have solid data to make and judge decisions, then political ideology, wishful thinking, bad assumptions, your gut or truthiness as Stephen Colbert would call it, rule the day. It's a dangerous road we're heading down, with new unnecessary prisons just the beginning. Environmental assessment and protection will be cut back, new trade deals will trump the long history and importance to this region of supply management in dairy, egg, and poultry production, and the role good science should play to guide the future of the fishery will be diminished. The government is really saying, "Just don't give us the facts ma'am."
A little more from one of the smartest political observers in Ottawa, Paul Wells.
Harper’s very political budget
by Paul Wells on Thursday, March 29, 2012
Revolution, ladies and gents! Light the torches! In his December year-end interviews, Stephen Harper used the term “major transformations” a half-dozen times. He made fun of earlier majority prime ministers. They let the bureaucrats put them to sleep! For years! No chance of that happening to Harper. Major transformations, coming right up.
Fast forward to this afternoon. “We will eliminate the penny,” Jim Flaherty told the Commons. It was literally the first new policy measure he announced. “Pennies take up too much space on our dressers at home.”
Now you know why Trudeau and Mulroney and Chrétien were such snoozers. It was the pennies. Weighing them down all day. Cluttering their dressers at night. Pennies wear a guy down. Harper, the Interac Prime Minister, will be fleet of foot, full of vim, and ready for —
— major transformations? No. I don’t have a searchable electronic text of Flaherty’s speech, but I do not see the word “transformation” anywhere in it. The rhetoric is altogether more reassuring. “The reforms we present today are substantial, responsible, and necessary,” he said, and “We will stay on course,” and “We will maintain our consistent, pragmatic, and responsible approach to the economy,” and “We will implement moderate restraint in government spending.”
A decade ago at the National Post, we’d have squeezed a month’s headlines out of the spin war between the Prime Minister and his Finance Minister over how to characterize this budget, because I am here to tell you there is one. “Some of the stuff that’s been out there about ‘major transformations’ may have been a bit off,” a government staffer who does not work at Langevin Block said to me.
Diverging motivation has led to diverging rhetoric. Flaherty needs to calm markets, so he speaks a language of continuity and reassurance. Harper needs to persuade movement conservatives a decade’s work was worth it, so he has become his own loudest cheerleader.
Which one of them is right on the substance of the thing? Both of them. There is no revolution in this budget. Most of the changes it announces have been coming for years and will take years to implement. Some of them are prudent and some less so, but together they add up to a few significant course adjustments. Advantage Flaherty.
Under the surface, however, this is an intensely political budget, perhaps the most interesting since Flaherty’s first in 2006.
The surface calm will serve Harper’s most important strategic objective: avoid nasty surprises so voters can grow more comfortable with the Conservatives over time. Below the surface, this government escalates a dozen of its favourite combats.
This government being what it is, if you’re looking for a fight, check under “charities.” And indeed: Recently, concerns have been raised that some charities may not be respecting the rules regarding political activities,” the budget document says. “There have also been calls for greater public transparency related to the political activities of charities, including the extent to which they may be funded by foreign sources.”
You see what they’re doing there?
Recall Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver’s Jan. 9 open letter on the Northern Gateway pipeline project. He wrote that “environmental and other radical groups” use “funding from foreign special interest groups” to kill Canadian resource development. Stopping those groups, Oliver wrote, is “an urgent matter of Canada’s national interest.”
And now this measure. Who has raised concerns about political activities and foreign funding by charities? Ethical Oil and its affiliated Our Decision campaign, run by Conservatives with close ties to Harper’s government. Now, Ethical Oil isn’t a charity. Doesn’t claim to be. Tides Canada does. It takes money from outside Canada (environmentalism being a global movement and all) and spends it on political advocacy to oppose oil sands and pipeline projects. This budget announces measures to make those activities harder.
This is not my theory. It was cheerfully explained to me by a government staffer in the budget lockup. The Kneecap Tides Canada Provision (my name, not Finance’s), incidentally, is tucked away at the end of Chapter 4, “Sustainable Social Programs and a Secure Retirement.”
Our antennae thus attuned, what else can we find? Most of it comes in the cuts. Their scale is not large. Even with the cuts factored in, program spending will be 6% higher in 2014-15 than today. But what gets cut?
Recall that in 2006 Harper tried to appoint Encana chairman Gwyn Morgan as head of a public appointments review committee. The opposition blocked the appointment because Morgan’s pretty conservative. Harper, furious, said he would simply appoint nobody to the post until the Conservatives won a majority. Now they have it. So what are they doing? “Eliminating the Public Appointments Commission Secretariat,” which (as Greg Weston of the CBC has reported) has sat in offices for years to support a commissioner who was never appointed. Why is the government doing the opposite of what Harper said in 2006? “The Government has significantly strengthened the rigour and accessibility of the public appointments system over the past five years,” the budget says with an admirably straight face.
In 2006 Laureen Harper stayed at the residence of Canada’s then-ambassador to France, Claude Laverdure. She did not like what she saw. Way too fancy. Word spread throughout Canada’s diplomatic network: don’t show off when somebody from the government comes to visit. Hide the good china. Too late: The goverment will “sell some official residences abroad and move to smaller ones, generating capital revenue of $80 million.”
The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, run by Jim Flaherty’s former chief of staff, a Mulroney-era Progressive Conservative named David McLaughlin, will be shut down. NRTEE has in effect been a sort of Parliamentary Budget Officer of environment-related pains in the government’s ass, releasing report after report about the gap between the government’s promises on greenhouse-gas reduction and the reality. So it’s dead. “A mature and expanded community of environmental policy stakeholders has demonstrated the capacity to provide analysis and policy advice for the Government of Canada,” the budget document says, in my favourite sentence ever. Like who? Like Tides Canada. See above.
The NRTEE closure, at least, is announced and, kind of, explained. Not so for the First Nations Statistical Institute, which is essentially Statistics Canada (ding ding ding) for aboriginal populations. Or, rather, was. A chart in Annex 1 shows the FNSI will have its budget cut by $5 million in 2013-14. I asked a Treasury Board guy how much its current budget is. He looked in the Estimates. “$5 million,” he said. Buh-bye.
Katimavik is cancelled, basically to soften Justin Trudeau up before Patrick Brazeau cuts into him on Saturday night.
If you’ve never heard of the Advanced Leadership Program at the Canada School of Public Service before, that’s because you haven’t been watching Sun TV. Brian Lilley went off on them for a couple of weeks earlier this year, because they “train bureaucrats to become better bureaucrats.” It’s a program for director-general and assistant-deputy-minister level bureaucrats who are on track to become deputy ministers and maybe, one day, Clerk of the Privy Council. They travel to other countries and compare notes with foreign colleagues. Gravy train! Gone. Annual savings, $6.6 million.
Shutting down Assisted Human Reproduction Canada is a direct result of a 2010 Supreme Court decision and will be largely uncontroversial, but one suspects some social-conservative groups will be glad just because of the name of the thing.
This is the Harper government playing offence on a bunch of fronts. It is playing defence too.
At the end of 2010 the Ignatieff Liberals started talking about a government that was spending more on “jets, jails and corporate tax cuts” than on Canadian families. This discourse, which was being advanced with unusual discipline and patience by Ignatieff, Scott Brison and Ralph Goodale, rattled the Conservatives because for the first time the Liberals were making a credible case that the government’s head was in clouds far removed from the preoccupations of working families. But by spring of 2011, the Liberals were back complaining about contempt-of-Parliament, the sort of thing that interests people who have never voted Conservative. The results of that change of Liberal strategy will be familiar to everyone.
But the New Democrats are more diligent on economic critiques than the Liberals have been, and the attack, once formulated, could return.
So this budget contains no new large tax cuts for corporations or anyone else. It contains one fascinating new adjective, committing the government to acquiring an “affordable” replacement for the CF-18 fighter fleet. And it points out that the Government has not built a single new prison since 2006 and has no intention of building any new prisons.”
This story has concentrated on the fine print because Colleagues Geddes and McMahon are bringing you the top-line numbers, and because with this government you really do need to read the fine print. But a word about those top-line numbers:
Departed Colleague Coyne used to point out how total spending would balloon between one year’s projections and the next. Stealth inflation of spending, and so on. But that’s no longer happening.
The 2009 budget projected that direct program expenses — the money the feds spend on programs and not on transfers to people or to provinces and territories — would total $121.8 billion in 2013-2014. Today’s budget projects only $113.7 in direct program expenses for 2013-14. Total program expenses — direct plus transfers — for 2013-2014 were projected at $254 billion in 2009. Today’s budget puts the number at $249 billion.
The government is holding the line, and in fact trimming it ever so slightly. Its long-term plan has always been to constrain the ability of any future government to create big new programs in areas of provincial jurisdiction like health, education or social services. I use a few names for this strategy, including “flat-tire federalism.” The 2008-09 economic uproar blew Harper off track. But he’s back.
I know I'm wandering away from food these days but bear with me. I can't stop thinking about how convoluted today's story on Senator Mike Duffy's speculating that Atlantic Canadian refineries could get cheaper oil from Canadian sources, making all of us happier and more secure.
"Refineries in Atlantic Canada should get the opportunity to process cheaper oil from Alberta, says P.E.I. Senator Mike Duffy."
I wish it were true, but it isn't.
The politics of this probably started with a question from Peter Mansbridge to Prime Minister Harper in an interview a couple of months ago. It was just after the Keystone XL pipeline had been turned down by the Obama administration (that's changed again as well and is important to the story), and Harper was concerned that Canada had become too dependent on U.S. buyers. (Hello China) Mansbridge asked why it is that Eastern Canadian refineries are still buying from South American and Middle East producers, when Alberta had increasing amounts of tar sands crude to sell. Harper's response? "That's a good question Peter." That's a pretty thoughtful answer when you think about it. He could have said "Well Peter Alberta went through years of taking an artificially low price after the dastardly Pierre Trudeau brought in the National Energy Program. It took Brian Mulroney to set things right by killing the policy and ensuring that Alberta producers got the world price no matter who they are selling too. That's the market at work and that's how it should be. If private businesses want to bring Alberta crude East, they'll decide to do this by themselves. The Federal Government certainly isn't going to get involved. That happened once and it won't happen again." But he didn't say that, and now here comes Mike Duffy (who's been helping us somewhat lazy/government dependent Maritimers understand the wisdom of Stephen Harper) making the case for Alberta oil coming East. Something is afoot, but I don't think it has anything to do with refineries here getting cheaper oil.
The missing point (and it brings us back to Obama's announcement last week to promote the Southern half of the Keystone XL pipeline from Oklahoma to Gulf refineries) was made on an excellent segment of the CBC program The Current a few weeks ago. Fortunately Jim Brown (who made his start here at CBC Charlottetown) was guest hosting. He normally does the Calgary morning show and has a good handle on the oil and gas industry. Brown had a panel of knowledgeable oil industry types talking about the Obama's original denial of the Keystone XL project. These analysts made an extraordinary point: that Alberta producers were taking a discount on their oil (less than world price) because of a pipeline supply bottleneck in Oklahoma that can't move oil quickly enough to refineries in the Gulf and on the East Coast. That's why they want to see the Keystone project go ahead, and that's what Obama is trying to do by promoting the Southern part of the project.
This brings me back to Senator Duffy's comments reported on CBC today. Alberta oil is cheaper than the world price not because its Canadian (Trudeau's National Energy Program is long gone, unless Tom Mulcair wins the next election) but because of the oldest story in the book: too much supply in that Oklahoma terminal. If this supply bottleneck isn't resolved, or the Keystone XL pipeline doesn't get built, then Alberta producers would look to Eastern Canada precisely because they COULD charge the higher world price.
I'd love to see Alberta oil flow East. It would assure Canadians (as Duffy says) of a supply from a very reliable source. That's becoming even more important as conflicts escalate in the Middle East, and China and India continue to demand more oil. I just don't see any way short of government intervention that would allow Alberta oil to come East at a discount. It won't happen, so let's not pretend that it will.
When I first started working for the CBC back in the 1970's there was an actual teletype machine in the newsroom that would bang out stories from a handful of news agencies like Canadian Press and Reuters. It's where the phrase "rip and read" comes from. Only broadcasters and newspapers could afford to own and operate these big clumsy machines. It will sound quaint and old-fashioned now, but people actually had to listen to newscasts or buy a newspaper to know what was going on.. Needless to say times have changed. The challenge now is to sort through the avalanche of information and opinion we have access to, and perhaps even more importantly, make sure we're not just going to sites we agree with, but willing to be challenged.
One of things I look for (and try to provide from time to time in this blog) is context. It's a fiction the news business tries to create that dozens of "new" things happen every day. Sure there are stories like the Toulouse gunman, fires, murders, and accidents that come and go (and at some point in every newsroom get deemed "good stories" no matter how grizzly the outcome), because these events really are news and will always be so. Reporters hate to admit this, but when important good/bad stuff is happening their jobs are so much easier and fulfilling. That's where the glee and excitement comes from when there's a big snowfall and roads and schools are closed, the broadcasters know they have something of value for their viewers and listeners which isn't always the case.
It's those ongoing stories, or tiny events than can cause so much trouble. Promos, headlines, even intros are often juiced up to give stories the same sense of urgency the really important stuff deserves. The risk with this, of not allowing for some degree of proportion, is the "crying wolf" dilemma. What do you say when something really important IS happening? CBC generally avoids this but we've all seen the Fox and CNN hyperbole (satirized beautifully on the Daily Show). For the sake of being open-minded, I've even sat through news programs on Sun TV. I did hear things I wouldn't anywhere else. I don't mean that as a compliment.
I think what's missing in so much of the news is context. That takes time (the one thing no one has anymore) to both gather the information, and to report it. The two minute (minute-fifteen in radio) strait-jacket usually isn't enough (not every story needs this, but many do).
A couple of examples of what context can bring to a story. Think about this week's reports and commentaries about Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank. A former vice-president and trader Greg Smith resigned and went public saying the company's ethics and values had been lost, that all Goldman cares about is profits, that it often called its client "muppets". This didn't come as a big surprise to anyone who's been following this story, but look at what context can do to create greater understanding of the underlying issues. This is from the blog of Robert Reich, a former Bill Clinton cabinet member:
" If Mr. Smith believes such disregard of investors is unique to Goldman, he doesn’t know the rest of Wall Street. In the late 1920s, National City Bank, which eventually would become Citigroup, repackaged bad Latin American debt as new securities which it then sold to investors no less gullible than Goldman Sachs’s. After the Great Crash of 1929, National City’s top executives helped themselves to the bank’s remaining assets as interest-free loans while their investors and depositors were left with pieces of paper worth a tiny fraction of what they paid for them. The problem isn’t excessive greed. If you took the greed out of Wall Street all you’d have left is pavement. The problem is endemic abuse of power and trust."
We've also been hearing that the federal government is thinking about changing the so called "fleet separation" policy when it comes to licensing fishermen, to make the industry more "profitable and efficient.". Guardian columnist Al Holman gave important context to this story in a clever way, using fictional characters at a Charlottetown bar, making the point that only real fishermen can get licenses now because otherwise they would slowly be controlled by people with deeper pockets.
"For instance, back in the early and middle of the last century, the Myrick family, from Boston, pretty well owned the fishery in Tignish. They owned the fish plant that bought the fish, they owned a store that supplied a lot of the fishermen, the owned some of the boats, and they owned a lot of the houses down at Tignish Run. Myrick's Shore they called it. The rents for the houses and boats, and the credit for the gear and food bought in the store, was paid off with the fish and the lobsters the fishermen brought to the Myrick's plant, at a price set by the Myricks. There was little cash involved. It was mostly chits and credit."
"If catches were down, the fishermen would fall behind in their payments and it wasn't long before the Myricks pretty well owned them, too," said Hat. "Not all of them, but a good number. They didn't starve, but they sure as hell didn't prosper. And it wasn't just the Myricks, there were families throughout Atlantic Canada with similar operations."
The same can be said about the on-going battle over the future of the Canadian Wheat Board, and supply management in dairy.. Looked at strictly in today's terms they look over regulated and bureaucratic. History tells us something different, that both were created with great controversy, and only because pure market forces were doing nothing but putting farmers out of business, and threatening the future of rural economies.
The television all-news channels like to say they're telling us what's happening "right now!!!" We get facts and information, we worry and fret about the latest calamity, but are we any more wise about what's really happening in the world.
My friend Rob Patterson keeps a close eye on diet and health. He presented in his blog a breathtakingly strait-forward piece by a well known heart surgeon Dwight Lundell on the dangers of processed food, and the benefits of eating the kind of meals those of us in our 60's (and older) grew up with (back when we peeled potatoes and carrots, baked pies and cakes, and used butter). And a rare hopeful story out of Greece. People have started buying food directly from farmers and are saving a lot of money. Two good reasons to start looking around for opportunities to buy locally, eating a little lower on the food chain, and getting our hands dirty in the kitchen. Kraft, General Foods, and their brethren will survive without you, and you might survive a little longer without them.
Dr. Dwight Lundell
We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is. I freely admit to being wrong. As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries, today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact.
I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labelled "opinion makers." Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol.
The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice.
It Is Not Working!
These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated.
The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences.
Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before.
Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year.
Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes. Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended. It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped.
Inflammation is not complicated -- it is quite simply your body's natural defence to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin or virus. The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your body from these bacterial and viral invaders. However, if we chronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process,a condition occurs called chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial.
What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body? Well, smokers perhaps, but at least they made that choice willfully.
The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream diet that is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels. This repeated injury creates chronic inflammation leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity.
Let me repeat that: The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet recommended for years by mainstream medicine.
What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods.
Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.
Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall. Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation.
While we savor the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond alarmingly as if a foreign invader arrived declaring war. Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed with omega-6 oils for long shelf life have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been slowly poisoning everyone.
How does eating a simple sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you sick?
Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.
When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.
What does all this have to do with inflammation? Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.
While you may not be able to see it, rest assured it is there. I saw it in over 5,000 surgical patients spanning 25 years who all shared one common denominator -- inflammation in their arteries.
Let's get back to the sweet roll. That innocent looking goody not only contains sugars, it is baked in one of many omega-6 oils such as soybean. Chips and fries are soaked in soybean oil; processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6's are essential -they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell -- they must be in the correct balance with omega-3's.
If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation.
Today's mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That's a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today's food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.
To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and finally, Alzheimer's disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated.
There is no escaping the fact that the more we consume prepared and processed foods, the more we trip the inflammation switch little by little each day. The human body cannot process, nor was it designed to consume, foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.
There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such as colorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation- causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them.
One tablespoon of corn oil contains 7,280 mg of omega-6; soybean contains 6,940 mg. Instead, use olive oil or butter from grass-fed beef.
Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6 and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly healthy oils labelled polyunsaturated. Forget the "science" that has been drummed into your head for decades. The science that saturated fat alone causes heart disease is non-existent. The science that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol is also very weak. Since we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, the concern about saturated fat is even more absurd today.
The cholesterol theory led to the no-fat, low-fat recommendations that in turn created the very foods now causing an epidemic of inflammation. Mainstream medicine made a terrible mistake when it advised people to avoid saturated fat in favor of foods high in omega-6 fats. We now have an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.
What you can do is choose whole foods your grandmother served and not those your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients from fresh unprocessed food, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet.
Greek customers buy potatoes direct from the farmers in Thessaloniki. Photograph: Sakis Mitrolidis/AFP/Getty Images
There's some dispute about where and when it all started, but Christos Kamenides, genial professor of agricultural marketing at the University of Thessaloniki, is pretty confident he and his students have made sure it's not about to stop any time soon.
What's sure is that the so-called potato movement, through which thousands of tonnes of potatoes and other agricultural produce – including, hopefully, next month, Easter lamb – are being sold directly to consumers by their producers, is taking off across Greece.
"It's because everyone benefits," said Kamenides, standing in a clearing in the woods above Thessaloniki in front of one 25-tonne truck of potatoes, another of onions, and smaller vans of rice and olives. "Consumers gets good-quality food for a third of the price they would normally pay, and the producers get their money straight away."
As devised by Kamenides and his students, it's a simple system. Their brainwave was to involve Greece's local municipalities, lending the movement a degree of both organisation and official encouragement that it might otherwise have lacked.
So: a town hall announces a sale. Locals sign up for what they want to buy. The town hall then tells Kamenides the quantity required and he and his students call local farmers to see who can supply it. They show up with the requisite amount of produce at the appointed place and time, meet their consumers, and the deal is done.
The direct sales are immensely popular. One organised last month by volunteers in Katerini, south of Thessaloniki, last month saw an online offer of 24 tonnes of potatoes sell out within four days, with 534 families pre-ordering.
"Today," said Kamenides, "we have one truck here, and two in another municipality up the road. Tomorrow we have a sale with four trucks – that's 100 tonnes of potatoes, straight from the producer to the consumer, with nobody in the middle pushing up prices."
The movement, said Elisabet Tsitsopoulou, one of the women queuing up to buy, is "extremely important. Salaries here are so low now, and still falling, but the price of everything seems to stay just as high as it ever was. This is much cheaper, much less than half price."
Tsitsopoulou bought five 25kg bags of potatoes for her family and her neighbours. "The other advantage," she said, "is that you can see the quality and where the produce comes from. With supermarkets, you can never really be sure. It's just a brilliant system."
The producers are equally delighted. Apostolos Kasapis said the principal benefit for him was that "I get paid straight away. The profit is not very high, just a bit above the production cost, but I get the money immediately, which in this crisis is very important."
Kasapis said wholesale buyers sometimes take "a year to pay their suppliers. Sometimes, they don't pay at all. In my village alone, the farmers are owed more than €500,000. So for us, what satisfies us most with this system is that we have regained our power over the middlemen, who have been squeezing us and profiting unfairly from everyone now for years."
The potatoes generally fetch 25-30 cents a kilo at direct sales, 5-10 cents more than cost and far cheaper than the 60-70 cents they typically sell for in supermarkets. If they have unsold produce sitting in barns and warehouses, farmers sometimes accept cost price; even that is better than the 10-12 cents routinely offered by wholesalers.
Encouraged by the success of the movement, which has been enthusiastically taken up by local mayors, Kamenides said he was working on a broader scheme for unified co-operatives involving both producers and consumers.
This could eventually provide a new economic model for the buying and selling of essential foodstuffs in Greece; several economists have suggested such schemes may prove an important way of breaking the "cycle of crisis" on which the country appears to have embarked.
For the moment, though, the potato movement is typical of the new and inventive ways Greeks are finding to help themselves and each other in the country's fifth straight year of recession, with unemployment soaring to over 21% and more than half of all young people out of work. Even the minimum wage is about to be cut from €750 (about £620) a month to just €500.
Few are immune from the effects. This weekend's sale above Thessaloniki drew a colleague of Kamenides, an associate professor of physics from the university. "My salary used to be €33,000 a year. Last year it was €22,000, with many more taxes to pay," she said.
"That's a very big cut, and it's all the harder to deal with because your family budget is established over time; you take on commitments to match your income. If I can save €20 on two sacks of potatoes, that's worth having."
Returned to PEI to find my basement had badly flooded with above zero temps, and heavy rain. Three days of cleaning up soggy cardboard boxes, sorting through their contents, and trips to the "Waste Disposal Site" and everything is back to normal, whatever that is. Lesson? My judgement that there was no need to set up the sump pump because there was so little snow on the ground, and I'd be back before mid-March was worse than wrong. Stupid comes to mind.
I can't think of two more contrasting takes on Alberta's oil sands than this editorial by the old CBC Curmudgeon Rex Murphy, and an emotional and stunning presentation by photographer Garth Lenz. It's really a religious divide between the two, totally contrasting world views, certainly different values. It is tricky benefiting from living in a wealthy country yet denouncing the very means that create that wealth, but surely preventing catastrophic climate change, maintaining clean air and water has value to humans too.
Oil sands are a triumph for the human ‘environment’
March 17, 2012
Rex Murphy
I’m lucky to be going to Fort McMurray, Alta. this weekend with colleagues from CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup. I have a great wish to see what the green Jeremiahs deem to be the greatest blot on the visage of Mother Gaia, and to meet some of the soulless folk who work there. After all, environmentalists might ask: Who would take a job on a site that threatens the destiny of the planet, except people whose souls have been bought off with oil-company lucre?
Outside Fort McMurray, it is impossible to escape the furor over the Alberta oilsands. Its product is routinely described, lazily and slanderously, as the dirtiest on the planet. The Premier of Ontario, a province that owes much of its prosperity to its huge automobile industry shivers when he looks at Alberta, mutters about the dark forces of the “petro-dollar,” and implied (until he was scolded and half-recanted) that somehow Ontario’s fretful financial state is Alberta’s fault.
It’s almost a fantasy disconnect. Dalton Mcguinty can throw billions at General Motors and urge the feds to do the same, all to save the automobile industry. He ignores that four decades or more of Ontario’s prosperity wasn’t founded on windmills: It was based on gas-guzzling cars and trucks.
Down in the States, Fort MacMurray is the green lobby’s ultimate bogeyman. Environmental groups raise money by attacks on the oilsands. Fort McMurray and the Keystone XL pipeline that would take its bounty south. This rhetoric has even made it into presidential politics. The shameless and high-gloss National Geographic put out a hit-issue deploring the oilsands as the ultimate “polluter.”
Are Canadians falling for this propaganda, too? The bounty of our country has made us complacent, even smug, about the resource extraction that makes it possible. Canada is at the very forefront of the world’s developed nations. Our schools, hospitals, universities, arts and industries are at the very top of the chain — all because we have the energy to drive an economy that can support these great boons.
Yet how easily we bite the hand that feeds us. “Environment” has become a narrow, bitterly focussed word turning exclusively on hurts or despoilations of nature, magnifying the slightest alteration or disturbance of “the natural” as an unspeakable sin.
There is another wider, larger, humane dimension to the environment — larger and more vital than any reference to landscape. That is the human and social element, the business of supplying reasonable support for workers and their families, towns and communities, and ultimately wealth for the entire nation. We owe something, it is true to the rocks and trees. We also owe something to human beings as well.
In my view, this is the first and deepest justification for Fort Mac and the oil industry. Jobs are essential for the human environment — for a woman’s or a man’s sense of self-reliance and independence. By this, I mean the right to be able to obtain what you need for yourself and your family from what you have honestly earned. Being able, because you are employed, to stay off welfare, to turn aside from handouts — this is good for the environment of human dignity.
It mightn’t have the smug appeal of a panda face, and you will not see it on the vivid posters of the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but having a job and earning a living is a great thing. Those who have been out of work know what a cruel “environment” that is — an emotional and psychological assault of frightful power. So we should celebrate some of the contributions that the oil sands have already made to the fundamental human environments of so many Canadians.
I have thought, and thought again, of my own province of Newfoundland, caught in the great calamity of the fisheries’ close-down in the 1990s, and how providential it was that “out West,” an oil economy was booming at the same time. Many Newfoundlanders (and Maritimers) migrated there in a time of real need.
Great social misery was averted because of the oil boom and Newfoundland’s related offshore developments: Thousands of divorces never happened, thousands of families didn’t break up, thousands of men and women didn’t fall into the trap of depression and worse, which so often attends long-term unemployment — because there was a great oil industry that allowed them the wherewithal to feed their families. It is a great story of modern Confederation: How Alberta, in particular, modified and mitigated the misery of Newfoundland — and other places.
I can summarize the entire case very simply. The environment is not just what you see on green posters. It is not just sunsets and tall trees. It is also the people living in it. And people need energy, and people need jobs. Projects such as the oilsands, which supplies both in abundance, should be celebrated for its cutting-edge technological and scientific prowess. It is Canada’s great national project for the 21st century. I look forward to the trip.
National Post
Rex Murphy offers commentary weekly on CBC TV’s The National, and is host of CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup.
I'm spending a couple of weeks with distant relatives who've become very good friends. My grandfather was born in one of the leeward islands in the Caribbean, so we've been very fortunate to be able to come to a little slice of paradise for a couple of weeks during the winter and stay with family. The relatives live on a hundred and sixty acre farm in the eastern half of the country, growing tree fruit and vegetables. They've invested huge amounts of money and time to make a go of their operation, and have been rewarded with enormous losses. Some of it linked to the weather: green beans are ready to be harvested (early March), they purchased a bean harvester to make the job more efficient, and it poured almost 6 inches of rain making the fields unworkable. If the poor weather continues they may lose the bean harvest all together, again. Stories like this will be familiar to farmers, unfortunate to others.
This couple has done all of things the "experts" recommend to make farming profitable. they have a large market to sell directly to consumers, they "value-add" making juices, jams, chutnies, relishes from produce grown on the farm. They've put up expensive greenhouses to grow fruit trees susceptible to plant viruses, grow hydroponic lettuce, have a huge pond to capture water during the rainy season, and an old windmill to irrigate the fruit trees during the dry season (which is supposed to be now). They've spent years trying to get the right mix of technology, labour, varieties to at least break even, but it hasn't happened yet. Only off farm income keeps the operation going,
They could accept the idea that they're bad farmers, made bad decisions, didn't work hard enough, but none of that is true. They deal with the same marketing problems as farmers almost everywhere: competition from lower cost areas, buyers (including cruise ship lines) with tremendous buying clout capable of dictating what they're willing to pay with little relationship to the cost of production, and with miniscule, often negative, profit margins, the scale of production just isn't big enough to turn a profit, but getting bigger feels like risking, possibly losing even more money than they are now.
Like most farmers they know there will come a time when producing food will be seen as important and profitable again, when low cost producers in South America and Asia will require more of their production to feed a growing middle class, when oil prices are high enough that transporting food everywhere just won't make sense, but none of this has happened yet.
Real Fake Chicken: The Op-Ed columnist Mark Bittman visits a factory that is perfecting a new type of vegetarian substitute for chicken.
IT is pretty well established that animals are capable of suffering; we’ve come a long way since Descartes famously compared them to nonfeeling machines put on earth to serve man. (Rousseau later countered this, saying that animals shared “some measure” of human nature and should partake of “natural right.”) No matter where you stand on this spectrum, you probably agree that it’s a noble goal to reduce the level of the suffering of animals raised for meat in industrial conditions.
There are four ways to move toward fixing this. One, we can improve the animals’ living conditions; two (this is distasteful but would shock no one), we might see producers reduce or even eliminate animals’ consciousness, say, by removing the cerebral cortex, in effect converting them to a kind of vegetable (see Margaret Atwood’s horrifying description in her prescient “Oryx and Crake”); three, we can consume fewer industrially raised animals, concentrating on those raised more humanely.
Or four, we can reduce consumption, period. That is perhaps difficult when people eat an average of a half-pound of meat daily. But as better fake plant-based “meat” products are created, that option becomes more palatable. My personal approval of fake meat, for what it’s worth, has been long in coming. I like traditional meat substitutes, like tofu, bean burgers, vegetable cutlets and so on, but have been mostly repelled by unconvincing nuggets and hot dogs, which lack bite, chew, juiciness and flavor. I’m also annoyed by the cost: why pay more for fake meat than real meat, especially since the production process is faster, easier and involves no butchering? And, I have felt, if you want to eat less meat, why not just eat more of other real things?
But in October I visited a place in The Hague called The Vegetarian Butcher, where the “butcher” said to me, “We slaughter soy” — ha-ha. The plant-based products were actually pretty good — the chicken would have fooled me if I hadn’t known what it was — and I began to consider that it might be better to eat fake meat that harms no animals and causes less environmental damage than meat raised industrially.
(When I say fake meat, I don’t mean the much publicized laboratory simulacrum from Maastricht University that combines pig cells and horse fetal serum, a mixture that’s then “fed” sugar, fat, amino acids and so on, to produce translucent strips. We’ll tackle that when and if it becomes marketable.)
Really: Would I rather eat cruelly raised, polluting, unhealthful chicken, or a plant product that’s nutritionally similar or superior, good enough to fool me and requires no antibiotics, cutting off of heads or other nasty things? Isn’t it preferable, at least some of the time, to eat plant products mixed with water that have been put through a thingamajiggy that spews out meatlike stuff, instead of eating those same plant products put into a chicken that does its biomechanical thing for the six weeks of its miserable existence, only to have its throat cut in the service of yielding barely distinguishable meat?
Why, in other words, use the poor chicken as a machine to produce meat when you can use a machine to produce “meat” that seems like chicken?
I love good chicken, but most of the chicken we eat doesn’t qualify, and the question becomes more compelling as meat imitators gain sophistication. The vegetarian meat I ate in The Hague isn’t widely distributed, but Quorn, a mushroom-based product, can be pretty appealing in some instances, Gardein has made some advances in soy-based products and at least one new product is a better-than-adequate substitute for chicken in things like wraps, salads and sauces. I know this because Ethan Brown, an owner of Savage River Farms, came to my house and fooled me badly in a blind tasting. (A pan-European “LikeMeat” project appears to be making progress on a similar product, and others are in the works.)
On its own, Brown’s “chicken” — produced to mimic boneless, skinless breast — looks like a decent imitation, and the way it shreds is amazing. It doesn’t taste much like chicken, but since most white meat chicken doesn’t taste like much anyway, that’s hardly a problem; both are about texture, chew and the ingredients you put on them or combine with them. When you take Brown’s product, cut it up and combine it with, say, chopped tomato and lettuce and mayonnaise with some seasoning in it, and wrap it in a burrito, you won’t know the difference between that and chicken. I didn’t, at least, and this is the kind of thing I do for a living. Brown does not see his product as a trendy meat replacement for vegans but one with more widespread use. (His production is at an early stage, but Whole Foods is planning to start using his products in prepared food soon. Retail sales of his “chicken,” which does not yet have a trademarked name, are expected to begin this summer.)
Perhaps it will replace some of the chicken in a McNugget, or become a meat substitute at Chick-fil-A or Chipotle. (Department of Agriculture regulations already permit up to 30 percent soy products in school lunch meats.)
We’re ready for this. According to a Harris poll commissioned by the Vegetarian Research Group, a third of Americans now eat meatless meals “a significant amount of the time,” and that doesn’t include vegetarians, who make up at least 3 percent of the population. These numbers would grow faster, advocates of meatlike plant foods believe, if fake meat fooled us more often.
“When you ‘veganize’ food convincingly,” says Kathy Freston, author of “Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World,” “people can enjoy a healthier, better version of their traditional favorites. And if you know that food won’t hurt your body or the environment and it didn’t cause any suffering to an animal, why wouldn’t you choose it?”
Indeed. This country goes through a lot of chickens: We raise and kill nearly eight billion a year — about 40 percent of our meat consumption, compared with roughly 30 percent beef and 25 percent pork. Chickens are grown so quickly that The Veterinary Record has said that most have bone disease, and many live in chronic pain. (The University of Arkansas reports that if humans grew as fast as chickens, we’d weigh 349 pounds by our second birthday.)
I don’t believe chickens have souls, but it’s obvious they have real lives, consciousness and feeling, and they’re capable of suffering, so any reduction in the number killed each year would be good.
If that’s too touchy-feely for you, how’s this? Producers have difficulty efficiently dealing with the manure, wastewater and post-slaughter residue that result from raising animals industrially; chickens, for example, produce about as much waste as their intake of feed.
Then there’s the antibiotic issue: roughly 80 percent of the antibiotics sold in this country are given to animals, which has increased the number of antibiotic-resistant diseases as well as the presence of arsenic in the soil and our food. Work in meat and poultry processing plants is notoriously dangerous. In 2005, Human Rights Watch called it “the most dangerous factory job in America,” and nearly every test of supermarket chicken finds high percentages — sometimes as high as two out of three samples — of staph, salmonella, campylobacter, listeria or the disease-causing antibiotic-resistant bacteria called MRSA. Bill Marler, a leading food safety lawyer, told me he assumes that “almost all chicken and turkey produced in the U.S. is tainted with a bacteria that can kill you.”
Until now, cost remained an objection. Some fake meat sells for upward of $12 a pound, which is nearly four times the national average for boneless breasts. Brown says that his price will be below that of chicken.
All of this got me down to Cumberland, Md., where Brown’s pilot facility is housed, to make some “chicken” myself. (You can find a video of my trip at nytimes.com/bittman.) The process mimics that of pasta, breakfast cereal, Cheetos and, for that matter, plastic. I poured some powder into a hopper — in this instance, soy and pea protein, amaranth, carrot fiber and a few other ingredients (not many, mostly unobjectionable and of course no antibiotics) — and an extruder mixed it with water, applying various temperatures and pressures to achieve the desired consistency.
The thick strands that emerged on the other end didn’t precisely resemble chicken strips, and when I tasted them unadulterated I found it bland, unexciting and not very chicken-like. But not offensive, either, and as an ingredient we’d all be hard-pressed to distinguish it from most of the animal-based models.
Even the Department of Agriculture is now on the side of plant-based diets. Its “Dietary Guidelines” say “vegetarian-style eating patterns have been associated with improved health outcomes.”
And almost all unbiased people agree that less meat is better than more: for our health, for the environment and certainly for the animals treated as widgets.
