Auburn Ave. and vegetarianism

In the last post I included some pictures of my trip to Germany in 2007 and the big sausage and pork knuckle dishes I had in Köln.

Well on Thursday I took a trip up Auburn Avenue in Atlanta. I hadn’t walked up and down the street for a few years and this was the first time with a knowledgeable guide, Dr. Josh Inwood of Auburn University. Josh did his PhD on the the history and politics of the avenue and had a lot of great stories to tell. He has a forthcoming paper on it as well I believe.

Anyway, continuing the food theme here is the Soulfood Museum on the avenue. Click for more pictures (including an incredible one of an ad surviving on a wall from the 1920s for Gold Dust Washing Powder).

I’m just about to start reading Jonathan Foer’s new book Eating Animals which I’m looking forward to. This is not a manifesto for vegetarianism but a true to life examination of the mass market food production industry in this country. A review essay appeared ion the New Yorker recently which is how I learned of the book. Check this out:

Foer ends up telling several stories, though all have the same horrific ending. One is about shit. Animals, he explains, produce a lot of it. Crowded into “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs, they can produce entire cities’ worth. (The pigs processed by a single company, Smithfield Foods, generate as much excrement as all of the human residents of the states of California and Texas combined.) Unlike cities, though, CAFOs have no waste-treatment systems. The shit simply gets dumped in holding ponds. Imagine, Foer writes, if “every man, woman, and child in every city and town in all of California and all of Texas crapped and pissed in a huge open-air pit for a day. Now imagine that they don’t do this for just a day, but all year round, in perpetuity.” Not surprisingly, the shit in the ponds tends to migrate to nearby streams and rivers, causing algae blooms that kill fish and leave behind aquatic “dead zones.” According to the Environmental Protection Agency, some thirty-five thousand miles of American waterways have been contaminated by animal excrement.

I didn’t know this and if it’s true (and I have no reason to doubt it) that’s a staggering and serious claim. While I continue to like the taste and smell of meat I’ve noticed that stories like this (and others quoted in the article which were new to me; seems there’s still plenty of argument left about eating meat) have even started to affect my feelings about flesh on my plate. (I’ve followed a pescetarian diet since August 2008.) Fish of course is the obvious next decision and I do try not to buy from fish farms because of the pollutants.

As far as I know Foer will make the argument that one should try to eat locally farmed and produced meat (if you do eat it) and “know the name” of your butcher. This of course is easier in the cities (well, the supply there is greater despite it coming from the countryside). And as he himself points out, there is so little meat food produced like this that there’s no chance of it being available in sufficient quantities.

Foer begins by pointing to the contrast between the ways Americans treat their pets (lovingly) and the way their animal food is produced (far from lovingly or even sanitory). Eating dogs would be a sustainable low-energy source of food but to even put it this way will be off-putting for many people (eat my pet??). He points out that in fact sad to say many euthanized pets become animal food or “food for our food.” Again, this is an offensive idea. (Of course you can elect to cremate your pet.)

So I think this is going to be a challenging read. I anticipate it will make me rethink again the kinds of foods and food production practices I am involved in. He is a novelist so I hope he writes effectively even where he is retreading old ground, but I also anticipate that much of what he will cover will be new. It is not per se a pro-vegetarianism book (although I understand he is a vegetarian) and maybe this will allow him to get beyond the binary veg-non veg divide. Looking forward to it.

Food pics

So I’m in Koln Germany in September 2007 and go out for a meal:

Halfway through. Sausage on a wooden tray:

Finished!

And then this couple let me picture their meal:

Notice we all go for the Koln beer there, known as Kölsch.

Now, try this:

I tried:

Not too bad, but boy this was one of the hardest things ever to eat. Getting through the fat was the most unappetizing:

Meanwhile back in the UK I go to my favorite chippy, the Sea Breeze:

Yesssssssssssss!! 2-0

Beachballs, what beachballs…

Very phildickian

PKD’s grave:

Among the items found at gravesites in Fort Morgan’s Riverside Cemetery have been beer, cigarettes and — sheep?

Toy and stuffed sheep are frequently placed at the tombstone of Philip K. Dick, who was buried at Riverside in spite of his family’s wishes because he wanted to be interred next to his twin sister, who died in Fort Morgan in infancy.

The sheep are a homage to Dick’s story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” which became the movie “Blade Runner,” Fort Morgan Museum educator Andrew Dunehoo told several groups of area residents during tours of the cemetery Saturday.

Several of Dick’s stories became motion pictures, among them “We Can Dream It For You Wholesale,” which was developed into “Total Recall,” “Minority Report” and “A Scanner Darkly.”

Fans of Dick sometimes leave pens at his graveside, a nod to his writing vocation.

The game

Soccernet’s montage for the big game tomorrow:

Ugh, my nerves will be shredded! No beach ball jokes plz.

I’m somewhat confused by the time change as the US doesn’t change for another week (thanks Bush!) but Europe, ahead as always, changes tonight. Oh well, I’ll tune in early just in case!

Rep Grayson pwns a Georgia GOP rep. (plus Agamben)

Glenn Greenwald is right to point to this piece of House drama (or what passes for drama there). If you don’t like politics skip pressing play here, but if you like, not polemics, but a serious point dramatically made, then watch it:

As Glenn and many of the commenters (on his site and at YouTube) point out, this is a small lesson in the Constitution, and also kinda funny and inspiring at the same time. Inspiring because I’ll feel like doing that at the next work-meeting when someone is being ignorant!

However. Behind all this is a more substantial and less recognized problem. Namely are our laws (inc. the Constitution) “sufficient” or are they always at the last fated to be overturned due to “special circumstances” (“national security,” “the war”) or what  to get fancy one much-adored Italian philosopher has called a “permanent state of exception”?

Glenn often appeals to the law–as it exists–in the face of those times when it is being overridden, eg FISA, PATRIOT ACT, government surveillance without a warrant, etc. Notice that this is a case of the law as it exists, not a case of oh, we should change the law for the better. Glenn’s position (and I’ve been reading him since he first appeared with his own website in late 2005) is basically that actually existing laws–including the Constitution again–are circumvented in the name of national security.

If laws are fated to be overturned, then the conclusion we are faced with is that legal formations of rule are insufficient: law, itself, is not the solution to the way a country will be ruled. America calls itself a nation of law, but think about that for a moment: how can it be if at the last, law runs out or is trumped by the state of exception? What would it mean? It would mean that you can’t appeal to the law (as Glenn does) to do the right thing.

Now I’m not a big fan of Agamben (the fancy Italian philosopher afore-referenced) but I’m beginning to wonder, as much as I admire, Glenn Greenwald, whether he isn’t just a bit naive on all this in appealing to the law and the constitution.

WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance

Nice review of Man in the High Castle

The New Staggers has a nice review of what must be a UK re-issue of the Man in the High Castle:

Even so, his fictions are powerfully thought-stirring. Like Borges and Calvino, Dick uses fiction to do more than portray the all-too-familiar ambivalences of human emotions. More ambitiously, he is challenging the ideas by which we interpret our experience. We think we are embodied minds, which conceive and execute plans of action; we believe our lives reflect these plans. We imagine that the theories we frame about the world are not only useful, but also true. These highly questionable suppositions are Dick’s subject matter, and in freeing us from the false certainty that goes with the ruling view of things, he is one of the most liberating writers of the 20th century.

Luckily the review, by John Gray, restrains itself to only the one reference to drugs (“A highly strung character whose tensions were aggravated by prodigious drug consumption”) and usefully reminds us that sf is about the present:

The critical disparagement of Dick’s work has various sources, not least that of literary disdain for science fiction. Seeing the genre as being concerned with possible futures and imaginary worlds, these critics miss the central thrust of the best SF, which is to reimagine the world we live in. H G Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Stanislaw Lem and J G Ballard enable us to see ourselves differently, and this is what places them among the greatest modern writers.

Health care: your state ranked

How well does your state do in providing health care? Georgia ranks a pitiful 38th out of 51 (all states plus DC). But hey, that’s up from 44th! Yay!

One observation: this “opt out” that’s being discussed, whereby states can opt out of health care reform. Notice the worst states are in the South (darker = worse care). If they opt out, as would seem more likely, then people there will be hit twice over; they already have bad care, and the conservative leadership there (supported by Blue Dogs) will prevent them from getting better care.