Gardening books again, 'pology

Doug Welsh's
Texas Garden Almanac

Very good! He knows his stuff, too. As a Texas transplant, I sometimes complain that people are always talking about this state like it's a separate country, magically isolated from the rest of the states and even the whole world. The world can go to heck, people say--because here in Texas we're safe from all those homos and hippies and en-vi-ron-mentals.

Obviously I think that attitude is crap, but in a gardening book, it's got its uses. Because the problem is that Texas is not "the southeast," although it can be awfully hot and humid at times, and it's not "the plains," but sometimes gets awfully icy in the winter, and definitely not "the desert southwest," but you wouldn't think so during an eight-week drought in late summer. Texas is some weird conglomeration of all of these areas with a few hills in the middle and a near-tropical rainforest in Houston.

You might think people in each area--northeast, west, hill country, and southwest--should simply pick up a gardening guide for their area. And maybe they can--but I, located a little north-east of center, would have to buy four books--and that's why I love this! Doug Welsh has done it for me.

He's organized all of the standard gardening topics into monthly-themed chapters along with a checklist for each month's activities. And frequently differentiates between the different climate zones. Here's an example--under August, he advises,

Grow pumpkins for Halloween. For the Panhandle and West Texas, seed should be planted in early July, but for the rest of the state early August will do. (Note: the panhandle is a major commercial producer of pumpkins for the nation.) Plant moderate-sized pumpkin varieties (e.g., 'Appalachin,' 'Connecticut Field', 'Small Sugar', 'Triple Treat');
See?  That's the kind of concrete advice I need. Plus a bonus:

If you fail to produce pumpkins but produce lots of foliage, then go to the grocery store and purchase pumpkins. Place them in your pumpkin patch, and the children will never know. It's magic!
I'm not sure the Great Pumpkin would deem that sufficiently sincere, but...what the heck. I'd do it.

State of the Garden Report, ending August

Precious baby!


Wait, didn't I just say this about...like...five months ago?  On February 18th I planted beets and on March 3rd I peeked under the row cover and saw they'd sprouted. The cycle begins again....

But what about the yearly wheel of change, Barbara Kingsolver's vegetannual parade of seasonal crops? She urges us to eat peas in the spring, tomatoes in the summer, pumpkins in the fall and--in general--bananas not at all. Unless you live in the tropics, of course. I could go for a fresh apple banana right off the stalk right now...the Pacific ocean winds caressing my cheeks....

Ms. Kingsolver makes her point well (see: Animal Vegetable Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007)) -- eat foods where they're grown when they're grown and they'll taste better. Plus you skip the tax-subsidized cost of hard traveling most fruits and vegetables undergo these days. But she lives in the hills of east Kentucky, nine degrees latitude north of me and at a considerable higher elevation. She gets to have blueberries, morel mushrooms, and sweet frost-kissed broccoli--but I get to plant two crops of beets in a year.

I planted lettuce, too, but I don't think it will germinate until the days cool down more. We've gone from the mid-90s to mid-80s so I'll not complain.  I still have lots of peppers,










cucumbers, okra that's beginning to resemble Jack's beanstalk,





basil enough to make a pesto-lover cry

 and one tomato plant that still has fruit.  I'd give a five-dollar-bill to know which one that is--stupid me for mixing up the labels! 

You're better off knowing the truth. Trust me.

 

Real Food/Fake Food: 

Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do About It

 

by Larry Olmsted

 I was sailing through, all trusting, and suddenly he said Omega-3 fatty acids were "good" and Omega-6 "bad."  Bad?  how can an essential fatty acid be "bad"?  The badness comes from the ratio of Omega-3 to Omega-6 in the Western diet -- we eat way too much Omega-6 by way of our seed oils--all that corn oil, soybean, sunflower, peanut oil--they have ratios like 8:1, 12:1 or 16:1. No one 'knows' what the perfect ratio should be, but the ratio in fish, grass-finished meat, pastured dairy, nuts and olive oils seems to be much better for us.

But skip that one misstatement, and read the rest of this book at your peril. You'll never order Kobe beef outside of Japan. You'll probably never order fish in a restaurant and you'll be highly suspicious of grocery story supplies.  You'll learn that America produces excellent wines and cheeses, but you'll know to look for names like "Midnight Moon" and "Constant Bliss" instead of ones stolen from places far away.  When a producer is proud of his product, he'll want to coin a unique name and not rip-off the copyrighted names of products like Parmesan-Reggiano or Gruyere'.

He spends a lot of time on wine, cheese, and beef, which were merely academically interesting to me.  I can't afford decent wine and I avoid cheese and beef, but I did come away with a strong desire to try--just once--a slab of real Parmesan-Reggiano cheese, from Italy--the only place it can legally be produced.  But he includes sections on many of the other commonly counterfeited foods, like coffee, tea, honey, fish, Balsamic vinegar, and olive oil.  Basically, anything that people will pay a lot of money for is sure to be faked, adulterated, or swapped with inferior versions. And no, the USDA and FDA are not looking out for us.  Should we expect them to?

The easiest way to eliminate drug trafficking would be to legalize domestic production and place heavy tariffs on imports. Soon, just like we can buy Kona coffee at the grocery store, we'll be able to buy "Copper Canyon marijuana" that was actually grown in Texas and consists of 10% actual marijuana and 90% corn and soybean by-products.  And we'll buy it because it's cheap and has a gorgeous label.

The Saturday after finishing this book I took a look at the label on my honey jar. It says: Glory Bee,  family owned since 1975.  It's 100% Pure (meaningless), USDA Organic (impossible--were the bees raised in cages?), non-GMO verified (probably not and again, impossible for honey), U.S. Grade A (meaningless and unregulated label), distributed by GloryBee inc. in Eugene Oregon, and, by the way--

Product of Brazil.

If I were a chemist, I'd analyze it and probably find it is 50% high fructose corn syrup and 50% honey from flowers common in China.  The jars of honey at the farmer's market have none of these fancy certifications, but of course, they only traveled about 30 miles to get here.  The Glory Bee traveled at least 8300 miles to get from Brazil to Oregon to here.  It takes a lot of labeling to travel so far.

All that said, this is not a depressing book. Remember--the title is Real Food / Fake Food, and there's a lot of Real Food described inside.  And best of all, he includes help on how to find it.  And why it's worth the trouble.



Be forewarned: occasionally


mouthwatering.

Not my cuppa

Treyf

My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw

by Elissa Altman

I fully expected to love this and I disappointed myself. I can't think of reasons to blame the author for my lack of love, but I can think of reasons in myself.  First and foremost is, I'm not so interested in reading such a personal memoir right now. I'm in the mood for some big-bang travel writing; or some meaty nonfiction.  Like Before the Dawn.

Maybe trying to stick to a book to-read list is a stupid thing. You put things on it when they appeal to you, but you soon build up a 70-book backlog and the next one up is always the book you wanted to read eight months ago.  I can rearrange the list, I guess, but then I suspect I'll simply keep moving books to the end and building up a larger and larger list.

But this book survived at least three "culls" and I still didn't like it.  A lot of it was about the family of the author, not the author herself, and sometimes it was so journalistic that it fell flat.  Example:

The afternoon before I leave [for summer camp], my mother packs my lunch in a brown paper bag as directed by the camp's ten-point list of instructions. She wants to make me the usual water-packed tuna with mayonnaise on untoasted diet white that she sends me to school with almost every day; I want Underwood Deviled Ham.

"Where did you hear of such a thing?" Gaga asks, looking up from her ironing. [Gaga is her grandmother]

"On television," I say.

"You don't even know what deviled ham is," my mother says, sighing.

"Neither do you," Gaga answers her, folding my camp shorts. "Come to think of it," she murmurs, "neither do I."

But because no Jewish mother or grandmother has ever said no to a food request made by her child, Gaga shuts off the iron, grabs her purse, and marches down Austin Street to the Associated grocery store. She returns ten minutes later, with a kosher pumpernickel raisin loaf and a single paper-wrapped can of Underwood Deviled ham.

[Then her mother makes the sandwich with the entire can of ham and wraps it in tinfoil."
It sits in the fridge overnight where the meat congeals into salty, porky spackle. At lunchtime, Elissa daintily eats the ham while her friend eats peanut butter and jelly.]

I pat the corners of my mouth with my napkin, roll up my bag, and am instantly and violently ill.

Possibly Ms. Altman was taught to show a story, not tell it. And that's what she did, with clarity and detail. But I failed to connect--I was just watching and never feeling.  I can imagine other people loving it; I did not.

State of the Garden Report, Eclipse Edition

Fiercely hot and incredibly humid, but the 7-foot tall okra loves it. Soon I'll need a stepladder to harvest it.

Planted the shallots I'd bought in the spring, but half of them were dried out. Planted a row of leaks and two rows of beets.  Starting now I have to sprinkle or mist every evening.

Next weekend is the lettuce, etc. But the bed is not prepared.  It's too hot.  If it rains Wednesday as expected, I'll make better progress.  After my labors, I retired indoors and joined the fall CSA--out of guilt. They were out there working harder than me and in the same excruciating conditions, and I was too cheap to support their agriculture. Plus, I'm not sure I can actually grow a fall crop.  The only thing I ever planted in the fall was turnips.

 Ed did cedar chips. Wonderful things--I love 'em.  if I had enough there's be a three-foot wide path all around the garden, and at least 4-inches deep. Love 'em.





Here's how they looked yesterday,
at the max of the eclipse.

Before dawn; after awesome

Before the Dawn:

Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors 

by Nicholas Wade
 

I wanted to start off this review with a jibe at the 'Paleo diet' fad, but I quickly realized that would be an insult to this scholarly review of human history and the study thereof. This is an awesome work! He includes the most recent findings, theories, and ongoing studies of genetics, archeology, paleoanthropology, historical linguistics, primatology, social anthropology, evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology and evolutionary anthropology; and there may be a little geography thrown in as well. The result is a fascinating summary of known--and yet to be known--human history. And he tops this off with a lovely little speculation on our possible futures. Which isn't all that scary, especially since I heard just last week that scientists have succeeded in doing a gene repair in human embryos.

If I were the sort who wrote letters to authors, I would ask about this one statement I caught early on,
" ...an organ or faculty cannot be created out of nothing; it can only be shaped, by gradual stages, out of some existing structure, and each of those intermediate stages must confer advantage in its own right.

The phrase "must confer advantage" has to be a typo, doesn't it?  Many other places he mentions genetic drift and other cases where harmless mutations are accumulated for no other reason than chance alone, so why can't an organ or faculty be created out of an accumulation of harmless mutations? Unlikely, yes, but not at all impossible.  He was speaking of language which seems to defy the stated rule, so my guess is that this was not meant to be a fact but a lead-in to the research into "the language paradox" -- why don't any animals seem capable of anything similar to human syntax?

One proposal he quotes is that,
" ...the human capacity for syntax might have evolved out of an animal brain module designed for some other purpose, such as navigation.  "   They describe ways in which syntax is similar to navigation, i.e., "the ability to embed one phrase inside another in an indefinitely long chain."

I'll describe a couple--of many--of other topics he explores--

Dogs, the first domesticated animal, were important allies to the early humans. The record shows that they were first domesticated at the same time that the first human settlements appeared, and it is very likely that people adapted to live with dogs as much as dogs adapted to live with people. And just as people learned how to watch dog behaviors as a clue to something they might need to know, dogs learned to watch humans. Experimenters using dogs, wolves and chimpanzees have demonstrated that dogs, and even puppies, picked up human hints much faster than the other species.

Ray Coppinger, a dog behavior expert at Hapshire College, believes that people can take little credit for the process; it was wolves who domesticated themselves.

It is also likely that the actual domestication event occurred only once, in a single location, from a group of related animals with special features in their behavior that made them easier to train. After "dogs were discovered," they were so darned useful they spread like wildfire.

Me, I think it likely that the Big Bang of Dog event occurred when one very clever she-wolf wanted an easier life for her precious puppies. They're smarter than us, you know.

The book includes a fascinating description of cannibalism and why it may not be so rare in history as we like to believe. When mad cow disease broke out in England, the effect wasn't nearly as bad as expected--it appears a good number of Britons had a genetic protection against it. And that same sequence of genes also protects against a particular disease spread by eating human brains, as they learned when the Fore population of Australia started a practice of having women and children eat the brains of the dead. When there were almost no women left, geneticists identified the gene the survivors had in common, and it was also found in survivors of mad cow in Britain.  Cause or effect? The jury is still out but the evidence is fascinating.

He also explores the theory that our genes predilect us toward a belief in religion. Religion makes it easier for people to live in society--it promotes cooperation and altruism, but it also feeds to our natural desire to punish freeloaders. It's scary to think there might be a genetic component to religion, but it might explain to persistence of such magical thinking against all odds. Lucklily, we're not always a prisoner of our genes. And also luckily, evolution is not done with us yet.

 Even evolutionary changes need not be permanent. The aggressiveness of the Yahomamo could have a lot to do with the marginal nature of the environment in which some of them live. Under conditions in which aggressive men have more children, genes that favor aggression would become more common. If the Yahomamo should suddenly become peaceful traders for many generations, then a new set of genes might be favored. The fierce Vikings of the tenth century became the peaceful Scandinavians of today.

All those dummies who believe human evolution got stuck in the paleolithic era and conclude we should be eating grubs and tubers, take that!  But wait--wait--I'm a Caucasian of Northern European ancestry. Maybe I'm better adapted to eating apple strudel, Brussels sprouts, and sauerkraut with Weiner Schnitzel!  I can't have my olive oil and pita bread with hummus anymore?

But seriously, it's a serious book. Funny at times and very easy to read in spite of the complexity of the subject, and worth seeking out a copy. Trust me.

Yes

Does this Beach Make Me Look Fat?
by Lisa Scottoline, Francesca Serritella

 
Should be subtitled, Lisa Scottoline and her daughter Francesca spin funnies. Lots of funny little tales, essays, and escapades from The Flying Scottolines.

I found them all charming and chuckle-worthy but seldom drop dead funny. Here's an excerpt from one where she explains that after seeing the movie Nonstop, she's suddenly becoming nervous when flying--

But when I looked around at the other passengers...they seemed not to realize that the world was about to end.
The captain got on the speaker and said things like "random air pockets," "being rerouted," "keep your seat belts fastened," but I was too stressed out to hear any of it, and all I can tell you is that it was the first flight I wouldn't get up to go to the bathroom.
I almost went in my seat.
Then the plane dropped suddenly, and I instinctively reached over and clutched the arm of the man next to me.
I say instinctive, but God knows if it's instinctive.
Maybe it's instinctive only for single women.

It gets funner on the return flight.

State of the Garden Interrupted

by short vacation.


Big Cedar Lodge is really nice but the grounds are awfully noisy. I think a "cabin" at Beaver's Bend is more my speed.  I went jogging this morning on the 5K trail.  I planned to do two miles, but I seem to have lost the trail on the way out because I never saw the 1-mile marker.  (Saw the .9 mile)  On the way back, I lost the trail again and ended up going a good bit further than I intended.  Basically, I got lost.  I ended up going for over 40 minutes and no clue how far.

By the way: Ozark Mountains trails are not the same as Northeast Texas roads. Guess how?

White River Catfish House is worth a detour anytime you're anywhere near Branson, Missouri or within a 90-mile radius thereof. Get the jalapeno cornbread.  The Hungry Hunter is indeed a good breakfast spot, but watch out for the cinnamon rolls--cream cheese icing.  Too much icing on the cake. Also, no pecans and not enough cinnamon.  Great sausage gravy! Lovely biscuits!  I thought hashbrowns came with my order but either I was mistaken or the kitchen was.  Definite do-over, but I'll make sure I'm ordering what I want and I'll maybe try the French Toast next time.

On the way back we passed Ingalls Road. Could it be?  Nope--coincidence.  Rocky Ridge Farm, where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived her adult years, is farther north. Next time...and maybe sneak in a dinner at you-know-where.

.

Why I still read YA at my age

Sorta Like a Rock Star
by Matthew Quick





I haven't cried so much at the end of a YA book in years. I think the author did it on purpose--set out to invent a really cook person in really horrid circumstances just so he could mess with our emotions. He succeeded, admirably.

But the heroine of the tale, Amber Appleton, is just one of many heroes and heroines. There's her mother, who raised an awesome girl under the worst of conditions; her priest, an immigrant from North Korea with an honest bu unbreakable faith; Private Jackson, a Vietnam war vet who writes Haiku to handle ordinary life, her friends from school, misfits who bond over Halo 3; her English language students whom she calls the Korean Divas for Christ; the old people in the home whom she visits with her dog B-Thrice and does a weekly battle with Neitschze-quoting Joan of Old; and Donna, lawyer and single mother of an autistic boy who's a math genius but repeats anything he is told. Just listing those names makes me want to read it again.

But I don't want to have to cry at the end!

I'm sure the book has many flaws but it would sure make a sparking discussion topic for young folk. So many questions and so few answers and still more questions. And maybe, some answers...or should I say suggestions?

Eating my way back home

 

Edible: An Illustrated Guide to the World's Food Plants

by National Geographic Society, Deborah Madison (Foreword)

The first section, on fruits, was awesome.  The foreword was good too, very good--all the info about agriculture, the Fertile Crescent, the Americas...darn. Just writing this makes me want to go re-read it.  Nothing "big" that I didn't already know, but a beautiful fairy tale for a dedicated gardener.

Basically each major fruit received a one or two-page spread, with less common ones getting a half-page.  For reasons unknown they didn't mention that there are a lot more varieties of bananas available that just the single grocery store variety we know. (And they taste better.)  But, sadly, I'm still not sure what that really delicious fruit I ate on Oahu was. My best guess is a cultivated variety of Custard Apple.  Next time I go to the Islands, I'm trying every fruit I see.

The book's treatment of vegetables was just a bit disappointing, and then it went on to to herbs and beverage plants and grains and sugars, and all of these were given short shrift, IMHO.  Only two pages for corn?  I wanted more! 

Which is just plain silly of me. The subject matter would have filled an encyclopedia and this was just a single book.  A nice, big book with pictures out the gazoodle.  I liked, I very much liked.  If I could afford a big library this would be in it.

State of the Garden Report August 7

 I had a ball in the garden today!  I forget how good gardening can make me feel--why haven't I been doing it?

Let's see...95-degree afternoons, a weekend trip to Arkansas followed by a Saturday trip to Houston...okay, I get it. Sunday I finally committed to a fall garden by ordering seeds, so I got out there to start preparing the soil. Yes, it was mid-90s and sunny, but I had plenty of sweat on order.  I pulled two wheelbarrow loads of weeds, dug about four small potatoes, pulled the last of the carrots--



As mentioned before, I'm no longer a carrot-growing disaster.  I can grow carrots!  These were put in late and it's way too late to be pulling them, but they taste fantastic. 
From now on, I'm a carrot farmer and here are the rules:  start early;
mist daily until they're established;
thin rigorously;
and most importantly, plant amid a nurse crop of radishes. (The fast-growing radishes break up the soil and shelter the tiny, delicate sprouts of carrot from sun and rain.(  If you can tickle out a radish or two out without disturbing the baby carrots, all the better, but if not, sacrifice the poor things. Besides, how bad a sacrifice is it to a radish not to get eaten?
 
When I dumped all that green stuff into the compost bin, it was full. So I debated whether to add some soil to the top of the bin or go ahead and turn it over like I'd planned. There was still daylight left and I had the thought--quit talking about turning the compost pile over and just do it!

So there!  I moved the top layers to a neighboring pile and found something magical at the bottom. Seriously magical--compost.  Not as "done" as one might want, but perfectly usable. I took a load and a half to the garden and I'm still not done. See how boring this looks?










It's not boring to me nor to any other gardener. Trust me on this one.


So my fall garden looks like dirt but seeds are in the mail.  How I'm going to plant anything if I can't stand to pull the old plants up, I dunno. How can you stand to pull up a plant that's still blooming?

Enviable pain

Almost Somewhere:

Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail

by Suzanne Roberts

Let me first say that I enjoyed this. I might not place it on my all-time top adventure writing favorites list, but I really enjoyed it. I recommend it, too--it's not always bright and cheery, but it's honest and happy. It's about how three women backpacked the John Muir Trail in 1993, on a 28-day adventure that changed their lives. It may not change yours, but it definitely has points to consider.

So, here are my own particular points. Women traveling alone outdoors are a lot more common than they used to be. We still get stared at, still get unwanted advice, still get creeped out by strangers who stare, or violate boundaries, or simply act weird. Men get bugged by strangers, too, I admit it. But how many men have been whistled at, leered at, or propositioned on the street?  (Outside New Orleans)   These women took it as coolly and competently as they possibly could, and they had a good time despite the occasional weirdnesses.  And they also discovered a foolproof method for getting rid of unwanted campsite squatters--I won't spoil it for you, but if want to know, read pages 231-233.

It reminded me how good meeting a physical challenge can make you feel. After an encounter with a eighty-year-old hiker, Ms. Roberts writes,
A friend's great-grandmother used to say, "If I could do it yesterday, I can do it today. And if I can do it today, I'll be able to do it tomorrow." At eighty-nine she still played golf and practiced yoga.
Yes!  That's an attitude I can live by. Or aspire to, at least--on a sunny day in August when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees (38C), I can definitely NOT run six miles. Even if I did it yesterday. But I might do it next week.

I also noticed and was a little bummed about how desperately these three women wanted to please men. They weren't nutty about it (much), but early on they shared their dwindling food supply with a couple of guys who joined them on the trail, even though the guys had adequate supplies of their own. I don't understand what was going through the heads of the guys, but I know well the conflicting feelings in the heads of the women. " I want to nurture. I want to be generous. I don't want to be a stingy bitch." Possibly even, "If I quit putting out the food, he'll leave."  I know the feeling and sometimes share it, but I don't approve of it. Did they learn their lesson later on, when the guys had left and they were running out of food?  Would I?

The human story, both of the author herself and of the interaction between the three friends, dominated the narrative. That's a good thing--but at times I was sorry not to read much description of the trail. Here's one of the few,

We looped down through a diverse forest of mountain hemlock, silver pine, red fir, Jeffrey pine, aspen, white fir, and cottonwood. A purple carpet of lupine swathed the slope with an occasional clump of yellow black-eyed Susans or red Indian paintbrush. The diversity of the forest reminded me of the mystical Sherwood Forest; I expected Robin Hood and Maid Marian to jump out from behind a tree at every turn. ...Though lovely at that time of day, I wouldn't have wanted to hike through there at night. I imagined the dense forest would be downright spooky. Nightfall would turn Maid Marian's playground into Dracula's wilderness.

In retrospect, that passage isn't all that descriptive. But her pages of day-to-day events are so very detailed, I wonder if she didn't spend a third of every day making notes.  I liked that a lot--it felt like being there.

Wish I were. But now I'm going back to work.

From house slave to glamour girl

Revolution at the Table

The Transformation of the American Diet 

by Harvey Levenstein

Gosh! I'd never dreamed of all the history behind our crappy American diet. Except...it wasn't always as crappy as it is now. The book leaves off in the 70's, so it doesn't fully comprehend our fast food and convenience food explosions. It doesn't mention the extremes of over-processing that makes so much of the food in a grocery store not really food at all. It omits how nutritional qualities and flavor were whittled away as industrial agriculture learned to grow things bigger and faster. And it's not able to tackle the issues of weight gain and adult onset diabetes and other diet-related diseases. I assume these things come in the next volume.

But I'm going to have to give it a rest before attempting the sequel, Paradox of Plenty. This one was heavy going--it wasn't a slog, had no more detail than needed, and was very well-written--but I still found it heavy.  (And the print was small)  Mr. Levenstein did his research well, covering 1880 through 1970, and that's a lot of material.

He writes about how prohibition helped shift our idea of eating out from a rich person's or drinking man's prerogative to and activity that can be done by everyone, every day. Shoppers and shop girls, working men and whole families--they all began to enjoy light meals, sandwiches, cold drinks and ice cream at the soda fountains and cafes.  He writes about how the science of Home Economics was created as a career path for women who weren't approved to work in the hard sciences. He shows how diet reform for the working class people was seldom attempted and seldom successful, but the diets did change, eventually, through peer pressure (school lunches; army mess halls) and aspiration to eat like the middle class. There's a chapter The Rise of the Giant Food Producers all about Campbells and Heinz and Schlitz and the triumph of pasteurized milk over fresh. He spends a chapter on the food fads, frauds, and plain old nonsense that abounded at the turn of the century.

Other than the influence of prohibition on eating patterns, I was most surprised to read about the shifting expectations for middle class women, from mistress of servants to homemaker. I don't know what percentage of middle class women employed cooks in the 1800s, but that percentage dropped steadily and drastically--by 1970 it was rare. Without the cooks and servants to direct, the woman was supposed to do it all herself--to be a good cook, an exacting house cleaner, a careful mother, and a thin, beautiful, sexy lady. Wearing stockings and perfectly manicured nails.  Hows that for a self image goal?

I did get weirded out by one factual error. In writing of Mexican laborers diets, he states that...the processing of the corn for masa, which involves soaking it in lime, removes important nutrients as well.  Huh? I have always read that the preparation of corn with lime water increases the nutritional value of the corn meal it produces. Specifically it allows the niacin to be easily absorbed, and although it reduces the overall protein content slightly, it improves the balance of amino acids. As a side effect it adds minerals, especially calcium.  I'm not an expert on this, but the error seemed rather glaring and it made me doubt his other assessments of traditional diets of immigrants against the American diet they adopted.  So I went back and read that chapter; didn't see anything else wrong. In an earlier chapter he'd talked about Italian, Jewish and other immigrants to the cities of the north; her writes how their diets also changed and in some ways, much for the worse. 

Writing all this makes me want to read the sequel now. We'll see.

State of the Garden Report, almost August

Due to missing two weekends in a row on family business, I thought I was going to have to post sad pics of weedy, bug-eaten, tired beans past due for the compost pile. But instead I found







Peppers!


Peppers, and okra of course, love the heat.  Okra can take hot and dry but peppers prefer a little water, and if you keep peppers watered enough, they're only just coming into their own in the hundred degree heats of July.  The ones on the left are tabasco peppers, which Ed is going to smoke and make pepper sauce with. Then I have just plain old "chili peppers", that liven up my curries and also seem to be one of the cats' favorite toys.  If I leave peppers on the counter, they gradually migrate all over the house.  Not a problem--the cats never seem to eat them, and they're easy to spot on the brown carpet.




And tiny little Thai ornamental peppers. I use them to ornament my intestines, via stir-fry.  We also have bananas, Italian frying peppers, and various sweet salad peppers. But they're segregated from the hot ones. It's all about racial purity.







Then I found this tiny guardian of my last sweet fruits in the tomato patch. I'm told that her sisters build huge webs overnight in the walkways, but she's in just the right place.  Love ya!