A Spinach Salad; Sexual Politics & The Second Bite of the Apple

Before we take the second bite of the apple, we should do it well with a delicious apple and spinach salad. Good apples and dressing are key. For four you will need.

Spinach

2 or 3 apples, cored, peeled and thinly sliced (Flavorful ones like Jonagold, Golden Russet or Granny Smith)

Chopped walnuts

Crumbled blue cheese

For the dressing whisk together:

3/8 cup grape seed oil

1/8 cup walnut oil

¼ cup sherry vinegar

1 Tablespoon of Dijon style prepared mustard.

To assemble coat the apple slices with the dressing, both for flavor and to retard oxidation. In a bowl toss the spinach leaves with dressing to coat. Divide the spinach to four plates, tastefully arrange the apple slices on the spinach and top with a generous sprinkling of walnut pieces and blue cheese crumbles.    

This is a beautiful and simple salad that a three or four-year-old child would delight in helping to make. (They will happily eat apple slices almost as fast as they are cut. They will also whisk vinegar and oil together with unbridled enthusiasm.) Making salads and cookies is work of a household. Children delight in participating in this work. Of course this changes when they become twelve or thirteen.

It is in context of these simple, but meaningful, household chores young children are nurtured, taught and begin to enter civil society.

Instead many kids are sent off to school to eat a cafeteria breakfast, a cafeteria lunch, and increasingly a cafeteria dinner. I make this observation in light of President Obama’s speech in Chicago on gun violence and families.

An Era of Sexual Confusion

The past forty years have been marked culturally by both sexual confusion and contentious sexual politics. Two new trees sprouted in our garden. The fruit from those trees, penicillin and oral contraceptives, allowed us figuratively to shed the clothes Adam and Eve passed on to us for covering our nakedness. Increasingly, to live within the bounds of monogamous sexual love became oppressive, psychologically damaging and above all unnecessary.

“Ozzie and Harriet” became commonly derided as  a TV poster child perpetuating an idiotic cultural myth. The TV show was said to be one of our last stands in clinging to our outmoded bourgeois ideals.  

All of that is simple observation. But in looking where this path has lead is to open a can of politically incorrect worms. It’s to find oneself up to their elbows in alligators wallowing in the pit of sexual politics. I’m not going there. I will only say that it seems, from our common perspective, our ultimate right is to achieve the perfect sexual orgasm, and the more often the better.

President Obama and the Ozzie & Harriet ideal

But maybe the Ozzie and Harriet ideal is in fact about right. That thought isn’t from me, but from our president. This is from a speech he gave in Chicago on gun violence, 90 percent of which is related to drug turf and gangs. [Speech Full Text] The president said:

“Now, that starts at home. There’s no more important ingredient for success, nothing that would be more important for us reducing violence than strong, stable families -- which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood. (Applause.) Don’t get me wrong -- as the son of a single mom, who gave everything she had to raise me with the help of my grandparents, I turned out okay. (Applause and laughter.) But -- no, no, but I think it’s -- so we’ve got single moms out here, they’re heroic in what they’re doing and we are so proud of them. (Applause.) But at the same time, I wish I had had a father who was around and involved. Loving, supportive parents -- and, by the way, that’s all kinds of parents -- that includes foster parents, and that includes grandparents, and extended families; it includes gay or straight parents. (Applause.)

“Those parents supporting kids – that’s the single most important thing. Unconditional love for your child -- that makes a difference. If a child grows up with parents who have work, and have some education, and can be role models, and can teach integrity and responsibility, and discipline and delayed gratification -- all those things give a child the kind of foundation that allows them to say, my future, I can make it what I want. And we’ve got to make sure that every child has that, and in some cases, we may have to fill the gap and the void if children don’t have that.

“So we should encourage marriage by removing the financial disincentives for couples who love one another but may find it financially disadvantageous if they get married. We should reform our child support laws to get more men working and engaged with their children. (Applause.) And my administration will continue to work with the faith community and the private sector this year on a campaign to encourage strong parenting and fatherhood. Because what makes you a man is not the ability to make a child, it’s the courage to raise one. (Applause.)”

The president went out of his way to promote sexual love and the necessity of households, as institutionalized by traditional marriage. It was a head fake to the notion that family is the foundation of civil society. He reversed course. Social salvation rests in universal preschool. He said:

“But what I’ve also done is say, let’s give every child across America access to high-quality, public preschool. Every child, not just some. (Applause.) Every dollar we put into early childhood education can save $7 down the road by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, reducing violent crime, reducing the welfare rolls, making sure that folks who have work, now they’re paying taxes. All this stuff pays back huge dividends if we make the investment. So let’s make this happen. Let’s make sure every child has the chance they deserve. (Applause.)”

A Federal Fix Bound to Fail

It’s good to consider the president’s remarks in the context of this passage from Wendell Berry’s essay, “Economy, Freedom, and Community.” Berry confronts our current social challenges head on. He views our industrial economy and now “post-industrial” as ultimately dehumanizing and enslaving. (I cited this in an earlier post.) In it he observes:

“The triumph of the industrial economy is the fall of community. But the fall of community reveals how precious and necessary community is. For when community fails, so must fall all the things that only community life can engender and protect: the care of the old, the care and education of children, family life, neighborly work, the handing down of memory, the care of the earth, respect for nature the and the lives of wild creatures. All of these things have been damaged by the rule of industrialism, but of all the damaged things probably the most precious and the most damaged is sexual love. For sexual love is the heart of community life...” [Wendell Berry Profile]

Berry is willing to acknowledge the nature of problems we confront. We’ve turned our backs to the sanctity of sexual love. In doing so we’ve turned our backs somewhat on what it means to be human.

I needn’t cite a litany of that which we’ve lost since we took to ridiculing Ozzie & Harriet. We can start with more than forty million women who for one reason or another have somehow felt compelled to terminate their pregnancies. Nor need we look at the fact the more than fifty percent children born today are born to single mothers. That the Center of Disease Control has deemed sexually transmitted diseases an epidemic shouldn’t raise eyebrows.[Full Text] All of these things are, like Chicago homicide rates, trivialities after all, and are things that one dutifully needs to pay lip service.

But, and this is the big thing after all, robust federal programs are in place addressing all of this wreckage. Perhaps, all we need is just one more. So the president says, universal mandatory preschool should do the trick. When households are unable to properly care for and nurture young children, quality day care and preschool are about all that we have, but those are no panacea.

Our long running Head Start program hasn’t resulted in statistically significant improved outcomes for the children enrolled in it.

Writing for Bloomberg, Charles Murray observed:

“Let me rephrase this more starkly: As of 2013, no one knows how to use government programs to provide large numbers of small children who are not flourishing with what they need. It’s not a matter of money. We just don’t know how.

“Is there anything that money can buy for these children? I am sure that Head Start buys some of them a few hours a day in a safer, warmer and more nurturing environment than the one they have at home. Whenever that’s true, I don’t care about long-term outcomes. Accomplishing just that much is a good in itself. But how often is it true? To what extent does Head Start systematically fail to serve the children who need those few hours of refuge the most?

“Asking those questions forces us to confront a reality that politicians and other opinion leaders have ducked for decades: America has far too many children born to men and women who do not provide safe, warm and nurturing environments for their offspring -- not because there’s no money to be found for food, clothing and shelter, but because they are not committed to fulfilling the obligations that child-bearing brings with it.” [Full Text][Charles Murray Profile]

Nothing to see here folks. Let’s move on.

The New Polyamorous Ideal

Instead, the next big thing we need to pay attention to, Popular Science informed us, is that we all have a great deal to learn from increasingly common, polyamorous negotiated sexual relationships. [Full Text]

Had the president seriously thought out his position of promoting marriage and fatherhood, he would have said what our highly learned, highly paid and fully tenured social scientists have been telling us for forty years is a lot of crap.[Link to a description of the FemSex workshops held on college campuses] Should the president have been serious, he should have asked this question: “is it really necessary or desirable to teach sixth grade children how to orally wrap a banana with a condom?”

I think there is better economy in teaching them to make a delicious spinach and apple salad.

On Macaroni & Cheese, the Death of Aaron Swartz and an Inaugural Address

Mom’s macaroni and cheese was both a simple thing and a thing great beauty. It was nothing more than milk, cheese, macaroni and possibly a little flour. Its great beauty was in the fact that the cheese was cut into cubes, tossed with the macaroni covered with milk and baked.  

I think she whisked some flour into that milk. On that point my brothers and sisters are divided. It’s the same thing about whether or not mom precooked the macaroni a bit. None of us paid proper attention.

There is agreement, however, that some of the macaroni ends poked above the milk browned a bit and delivered a delightful crunch. Beneath the crunchy top the, cubes of cheese remained largely intact – melted but not diluted in a cream sauce. Magnificent simplicity. To serve four you will need:

½ pound of raw macaroni

1 ½ cups of milk (plus or minus)

1 ½ tablespoons of flour

¼ teaspoon pepper

½ pound of cheddar cheese cut into ½ inch cubes

½ cup grated parmesan cheese

Paprika   

Precook the macaroni to a very toothy el dente, drain and toss with the cheese cubes in a casserole. The cheese should be very evenly distributed in the macaroni. Whisk the flour and pepper into the milk, then add it to the casserole. The milk should nearly cover the macaroni with macaroni ends poking up above the milk here and there. Top with the grated parmesan cheese and a sprinkling of paprika. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour in a 350^o oven until the top becomes lightly browned and crispy. 

So there it is, a simple home cooked recipe. If you like, this recipe can be improved upon. For example cubed smoked Gouda cheese and/or blue cheese crumbles can be added to the cheddar cheese and macaroni mix. So can any number of spices. A recipe that’s similar to my mom’s, appearing in a Penzeys Spice catalog, called for Turkish oregano and ground nutmeg.

The Slippery Slope into a Life of Crime

Caution is needed. The quest for macaroni and cheese perfection can surprisingly lead to jail time. I fear it’s a path I might be on. It’s my sister’s fault.

She gave me a cheese making kit for Christmas and advised the best cheese comes from very fresh raw milk. She knew I’d run with that.

The perfect macaroni and cheese requires homemade cheese from raw milk. Commerce in raw milk is illegal. A dairyman directly selling raw milk faces severe consequences. To do so in Wisconsin is to risk unleashing the bureaucratic hounds of hell. [Full Text]

Public Health and the Constitution

Now, the regulators will say their heavy handedness is a matter of public health. But really, isn’t individual consumer choice beyond the reach and scope of “public health” regulation? Isn’t it a higher order of regulation?

At this point my macaroni and cheese becomes a lesson on the Bill of Rights.

The transactions between the individual consumer and producer are regulated by personal rules of self-interest and trust. The individual consumer wants a superior wholesome product. The individual dairyman selling raw milk wants a satisfied customer, one who above everything else, he does not want to make sick. Similarly, the mom or dad who sends their kid to school with home baked chocolate chip cookies, to share with their classmates, above all other things does not want to make anyone ill either.

Those neighborly treats brought to school by the second grader are frowned upon and increasingly forbidden in our schools.

On a neighborly level, the rules of self-interest and trust seem to work pretty well. These unwritten rules of neighborly commerce should trump the rules of corporate commerce. They do not.

While the federal Food and Drug Administration cautions that  the risk of becoming ill from raw milk are about 100 times greater than from big dairy pasteurized milk. Its data are faulty. The health risk of raw over pasteurized mild is about ten times greater, an order of magnitude, but nevertheless it’s miniscule. Flying on commercial airlines is riskier. The health risks of drinking raw milk are somewhat less than those from random strikes of lightning. [Full Text]  

I tend to put more trust in my local farmer than the teenager in charge of the regulated ‘deli’ sandwiches lining the gas station’s cooler of ready to eat fast foods, or worse the hot sandwiches, the horrible hot dogs that rotate for an eternity in a glass encased slow cook oven. It’s not possible to slap enough mustard on those beauties.

An individual engaging in commerce is exposed to a bewildering maze of Byzantine regulation. Those rules so often do little to protect the “consumer” -- food recalls are not uncommon -- whereas the unwritten operating rules of neighborly trust sublimely and presciently do. Yet, should an individual violate the regulatory codes of commerce, even unknowingly and without doing harm, they face severe penalties and possible criminal prosecution.  

Now, should it be my pleasure to pursue a simple agrarian life raising vegetables, chickens and livestock for my family and selling the surplus to my neighbors, it shouldn’t raise any eyebrows. But it would if I was selling raw milk, butter and farmers cheese made from the same, as well as home packed pickles, tomatoes and jams from a roadside stand. If such small enterprise were to be allowed, the permitting regulatory oversight would likely be so onerous as to erect a de facto prohibition.       

And to be sure if federal and state regulators didn’t ensnare me, the busybodies in my town likely would.

Martha Boneta, a small farmer in Fauquier County, Virginia, discovered that in spades. Her good busybody neighbors enacted what can only be called a harass Boneta ordinance. She has been fined for hosting birthday party eight ten-year-old girls, and for selling her farm produce without a special “administrative” permit. [Full text] Her farm store is open one day a week for six hours.

Writing in the American Thinker, on this sad state of affairs Mark J. Fitzgibbons observed: “Thousands of times per day, government violates the law, bullies its citizens, and compounds its grab of our property rights and individual liberties. We don’t hear about most of these incidents because most people fear government retribution and decide to cave in.”

Making Criminals of Us All

The plain meaning of our Declaration of Independence and our Bill of Rights has been slowly chiseled away. It’s eroded. Good law has become an indiscriminant bludgeon of tyranny.    

That would be what is called a “conservative” take on things. But there is a radically “liberal” take on these things as well. Shall we trust in the plain meaning of words?

It begs the meaning of a simple statement. Our Bill of Rights explicitly affirms the founding principles proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence which were grounded in liberal thought of the 17^th and 18^th Centuries.

A Wikipedia writer says our individual rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness incorporate John Locke’s idea that the purpose of civil society is the protection of private property – in Latin, “proprius,” or that which is one’s own, meaning “life, liberty and estate.”

The author continues in speculating that “Locke’s argument for protecting economic rights against government may have been most salient to the framers of the Amendments; quartering and cruel punishments were not the current abuses of 1791.“ [Full Text]

Locke’s notion of “estate” is written clearly, in the plain meaning of words, in the Bill of Rights.

The Fifth Amendment explicitly states that no person shall be denied the right to life, liberty and private property without due process of law, nor shall property be taken for public use without just compensation. In a similar vein, the Eight Amendment prohibits excessive bail, fines and unusual punishment.

Going back to trusting in the plain meaning of words, it seems the Bill of Rights has become severely encrusted in the multiple layers of both criminal code and administrative law.

With a macaroni and cheese casserole, a bit of a crust is a good thing, with the Bill of Rights not much.

Writing in the Huffington Post, Radly Balko points out that we are subject to now no fewer than 4000 separate criminal laws at the federal level and to as many another 10,000 to 300,000 regulations can be criminally enforced. [Full Text]

He notes this regulatory labyrinth constructs a formable wall blocking individual participation in the economy. From my perspective, it’s not easy to buy raw milk in order to make homemade raw milk cheese upon which the perfect macaroni and cheese depends. But that’s trivial.

He writes: “But you, citizen, are expected to know and comply with all of these laws. That isn’t possible, of course. It would probably take you most of the year to understand them all, at which point you’d have the next year’s batch of new laws to learn.”

Let Aaron Swartz be a Lesson to Them All

Balko’s column followed the suicide death of Aaron Swartz, a computer programming genius, who had been charged with criminal violations of The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

His crime was downloading too many “free” files (spectacularly, some five million) from JSTOR, a subscription based digital search engine and library of academic journals and mostly subscribed to by and accessed through educational institutions. Rather than pursuing a civil lawsuit against Swartz, JSTOR reached a settlement with Swartz, whereby he surrendered the downloaded data.

In a sober society of neighborly commerce, one would think Swartz’s settlement would have ended matter. But that’s not how it works in a regulatory, authoritarian state. A month following the settlement, federal prosecutors charged Swartz with a number of data theft crimes relating to the incident. In total these crimes exposed him to a million dollars in fines and up to thirty-five years in prison, but they were willing to deal.

Swartz was a high profile internet innovator who actively opposed government regulation of the internet. His crime was to hack a MIT’s firewall preventing general access to papers that are the product of publicly funded academic research. And worse from his point of view, JSTOR’s revenue mostly benefitted the academic publishers, rather than the authors. The law, if you will, protected an unnecessary cozy monopoly benefitting from what is either public or individual intellectual property.  

Many, including Swartz’s father, believe the heavy handed federal prosecution of the case was “politically” motivated to put Swartz in his place and was a contributing factor motivating his suicide. More than 45,000 have signed a petition calling for the lead prosecutor’s, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, dismissal.

In his Huffington Post column Balko observes: “Prosecutors have enormous power. Even investigations that don’t result in any charges can ruin lives, ruin reputations, and drive their targets into bankruptcy. It has become an overtly political position – in general, put particularly at the federal level. If a prosecutor wants to ruin your life, he or she can. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it.”

Balko failed to explicitly acknowledge that the Justice Department is an executive branch of the government under presidential oversight. He nevertheless concludes the abuses of prosecutorial discretion have “increasingly made us a nation ruled not by laws, but by politics (and by aspiring politicians). And once criminality is influenced primarily by politics, we’re all just potential criminals.”

The fact is prosecutors, whether federal, state or local, are unbridled from any standard of Fifth Amendment “due process” in choosing which laws to enforce and how aggressively to enforce them; nor are they restrained by the Eight Amendment’s prohibition of excessive bail, fines and unusual punishment.

We are told the President signs off on terrorist leaders to be targeted by drone attacks. Somehow, we are to assume he pays no attention those citizens who are to be targets of Department of Justice drone attack like investigations. (Regarding those drone attacks, it’s come to light that the Justice Department’s lawyers have adopted a more expansive and nuanced meaning to the term “imminent threat.” The plain meaning of words isn’t to be trusted, nor are the constitutional provisions regarding treason.)

Should anyone of us become such a target, we are overwhelmed by the resources of government in prosecuting a case. So if ensnared we cop a deal. (The drone targeted terrorists, even if they are U.S. citizens, are not so lucky.) That’s how it is.

On this state of affairs, our president gave his blessing in his second inaugural address. He began by honoring our founding principles, proclaimed in our declaration of independence, only to bury them in a guarded denunciation of our bill of rights.

“Ultimate Freedom Requires Collective Action”

He went on to say: “But we have always understood that when times change, so must we. That fidelity to our founding principles requires responding to new challenges; that preserving our ultimate freedom ultimately requires collective action.” [Full Text]

Our “collective action” is specifically what is embodied in tens of thousands of pages of regulatory code that can be used to make criminals of us all. And so it seems from our president’s perspective our founding principle of natural law, and the safeguard of Locke’s “proprius,” is to be subjugated to the “collective.” He’s turned our founding principle on its head to embrace the very abuses from which our bill of rights was intended to guard us.

He seems to have forgotten some parts of the Declaration, or perhaps he failed to read the whole thing. Among the complaints lodged in our Declaration of Independence was:

“He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

It is the same sentiment that was expressed by a group of hacker’s, in response to Swartz’s death, in posting this on a U.S. Department of Justice Web page:

“Citizens of the world, Anonymous has observed for some time now the trajectory of justice in the United States with growing concern. We have marked the departure of this system from the noble ideals in which it was born and enshrined. We have seen the erosion of due process, the dilution of constitutional rights, the usurpation of the rightful authority of courts by the "discretion" or prosecutors. We have seen how the law is wielded less and less to uphold justice, and more and more to exercise control, authority and power in the interests of oppression or personal gain." 

The hacked off hackers are not alone. They are not as eloquent as Thomas Jefferson, but they sound the same note. It’s a charge anyone of us would likely make if we became entangled in an aggressive regulatory enforcement action.

Nefarious Motives of the Prosecution

“I mean, the Government’s got all the money in the world to throw at these things and they just bully people is what it is, and it’s completely wrong. It’s just not American,” said Russell Caswell in explaining is experience to Boston Public radio station, WBUR, after defeating a Department of Justice suit seeking to seize his Tewksbury motel.

Caswell owns a modest $57 a night motel. It’s the kind of place I like stay at when I travel. Caswell was never accused of any crimes. His property was. The prosecution lead by U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, the lead prosecutor in the Swartz criminal complaint, alleged that motel, the property and not the owner, had “facilitated” drug crimes. Under federal drug enforcement laws private property is subjected to confiscation when used to facilitate drug crimes.

Here’s the thing. Caswell’s motel wasn’t a crack house. There were no more and probably fewer drug transactions in his Tewksbury motel than in a neighboring Motel Six. To make its case DOJ copped a deal with the local police. Says WBUR:

“The idea to go after the Motel Caswell sprung from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the trial revealed. The DEA has an agent who testified his job is to seek out targets for forfeiture by watching television news and reading newspapers. When he finds a property where drug crimes occur he goes to the Registry of Deeds. Finding the Motel Caswell had no mortgage and was worth almost $1.5 million, the DEA teamed up with the Tewksbury Police, who were offered 80 percent of the taking, the agent testified.” [Full Text]

In California the U.S. Department of Interior is shutting down the Drake’s Bay Oyster Company. The oyster farm is a family owned business that has been in operation for more than four generations. The Department of Interior didn’t fault the oyster company with any specific environmental degradation to the pristine waters of the 2200 acre Drakes Estero. Instead it seems the oyster company was deemed incompatible with the 1976 wilderness designation of the surrounding seashore. Ironically the oyster farm is considered a local attraction by San Francisco area residents. [Full Text]

We answer to the “collective,” and live in troubling times.

Legal Macaroni and Cheese Revisited

With that I will not advocate making a perfect macaroni and cheese casserole from raw milk, homemade-cheese, instead this recipe improves upon my mom’s without breaking any laws. It’s from Penzeys, a Milwaukee spice company that’s gone national. [Link] Naturally it’s spiced up a bit with oregano and nutmeg. But there is no reason not to and it can be spiced differently. Think of chives or pepper flakes or even with a little stout beer. Making a cream sauce rather than simply adding milk makes this more adventurous take on macaroni and cheese possible.   

     

Penzeys Macaroni and Cheeses for eight.

1 lb. uncooked macaroni

1 block of cheddar cheese (3/4 – 1 lb. one cup grated and the rest cut into ½ inch cubes)

½ Cup butter

2 cloves of garlic, minced

3 TB. Flour

2 ½ Cups half & half

1 tsp. Turkish oregano

¾ Cup grated Parmesan cheese

½ tsp. ground pepper

½ tsp. salt

¼ tsp. ground nutmeg

Precook the macaroni to a very toothy el dente. While the macaroni cooks make the sauce by melting the butter over medium heat. Add the garlic and lightly sauté. Whisk in the flour and cook for another two or three minutes. Add in the half & half and spices continue stirring until the sauce thickens then add the Parmesan cheese and one cup grated cheddar cheese. Reduce to a slow simmer.

Toss the macaroni and cubed cheddar cheese together in a casserole taking care that the cheese is evenly distributed. Cover with sauce and bake for 30 to 40 minutes in a 350⁰ oven until gently browned.

Chicken and Dumplings: Time to Go Retro

Third rate chicken “nuggets” are fine, so long as they are served up with baked sweet potato “fries” and a raw vegetable side with low fat Ranch dressing. It seems stewed chicken and dumplings is a culinary state of mind that’s being paved over by an entirely new food ethic.

It’s ugly. A burgeoning bureaucracy threatens to take command of our menus.  

In an editorial that appeared in my local paper, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Traci Flood and George “Chip” Morris wrote, “Obesity’s effect on the country is epidemic, meaning forceful and immediate action is essential.” Flood is pediatric research fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health. Morris is a past president of the Milwaukee County Medical Society. [Full Text]

Their mission is to save ourselves from ourselves.

They say: “This intervention is not a “nanny state” issue. It’s a “take the gun out of their hands” issue and a “systematic attack of obesity with American Leadership” issue.”

Food production, processing and distribution are all highly regulated industries. This is supply side regulation to ensure that our food is wholesome. What Morris and Flood are calling for is something new – consumption side regulation, to ensure we eat balanced healthy meals. Healthy is defined by regulatory code and municipal ordinances. We are calling upon regulators so save us from ourselves, to as they say “take the guns out of our hands.”

On this New York’s Mayor Mike Bloomberg is leading the way. He’s not alone. The First Lady, Michelle Obama, successfully shepherded the 2110 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act through congress. [Full Text News Story] The unhappy legislation imposed controversial rules that set rigid dietary guidelines on our school lunch programs. [USDA Healthy, Hunger-Free Web Page] It should be noted, in an ironic Orwellian twist to this story, that the dietary guidelines implementing this law have been suspended until the food processors develop “products” that comply to the new law. [Full Text]

White bread, whole milk and French fries are out. Tofu, skim milk, oven roasted sweet potato “fries,” whole wheat bread and raw vegetables with a low calorie ranch dressing are in. Some schools have banned the brown bag lunch. This oversight is needed because as Morris and Flood tell us, one out of six kids is obese.

Substituting the enriched white bread with whole wheat will change nothing other than satisfy the elitist notion that whole wheat bread is significantly more nutritious than the white. Not true. [Full Text] (This same group turns its nose to iceberg lettuce despite the fact that it made year round green salads a staple on American tables.)

The problem isn’t the bread. We’ve changed how we eat, and mostly not to the good.

Stewed chicken and dumplings were once an everyman’s Sunday dinner, but not so much anymore.

It’s a dish that might show up as an entrée on the menu at neighbor café or a decent truck stop, alongside the open faced hot roasted turkey or pork sandwiches served with mashed potatoes and gravy. These places too, are being pushed aside by franchise America. Over the past fifty years our food culture has dramatically changed. That which we once knew as everyday home cooking is fading into the past. Maybe it’s time to go retro.

It’s easy enough to bemoan the decline and fall of our food culture. To do so however, is short sighted and foolish. Set before us is bountiful table, unprecedented in human history. Rather than moaning about it, it should be celebrated.

A Hot Lunch for America on the Go   

Even the often maligned McDonald’s burger chain often viewed as nothing short of the culinary anti-Christ is anything but. Ray Kroc unleashed nothing short of a small miracle upon America. His franchise set the benchmark for quickly serving a consistently tasty, inexpensive hot lunch that could be eaten on the go.       

Kroc didn’t change our food culture. Our life styles and culture changed. Kroc was simply riding the crest of that wave. TV dinners were called TV dinners for a reason. To an alarming degree we’ve turned our backs to our culinary past.

While our bellies are full, we’re not necessarily well fed. It seems God did not intend that we live on burgers, fries and soft drinks alone, but he certainly programmed us to prefer them. Human evolution coupled with abundance finally culminated into an ironic “social welfare” crisis. Hunger is no longer an overwhelming social concern. Obesity is.

Food Nazis to the Rescue and the Elephant in the Room

The same food industry, stocking our grocery stores with frozen TV dinners, is processing lower cost, less appealing and high volume versions of the same for our school lunches. It’s a somewhat more institutional version of the institutional foods kids grow up with. At that point the, unlike McDonald’s chicken McNugget, the generic chicken nugget is very little chicken. It’s mostly fill and fat. The deference in flavor is made up by labs in the business of whipping up chemical flavorings.

Animals are fed a scientific blend of meat protein, corn and soy feed. Our kids are fed about the same.

Those who are in charge of the kids’ lunches are forced pick and choose from what these industrial mega-commissaries offer. Those who manage school cafeterias in fact do not know a whit about cooking, and are much less expert banquet chefs. They are managers who can control costs within a budget, efficiently manage labor and are expert regulatory compliance clerks. Nevertheless, they do want to serve foods that kids will eat – often that’s third and fourth rate chicken nuggets and similar delights.

In an industrial food economy, bureaucratic dietary food police make good sense. In a home food economy, not so much. 

In an odd way, we are seeking an institutional (legislative/regulatory) solution for a problem that is wholly institutional (legislative/regulatory policies that favor industrial food production and processing). 

A Women’s Church Guild Conscription Act

In our cooking we need to look back. In rural America the good women cook up beautiful banquets for weddings, and at the drop of a hat for funerals too. In North Dakota and Minnesota the organizing force behind these feasts are the various Lutheran Women Church Guilds. Elsewhere it’s probably much the same but not necessarily Lutheran. The bounty that spilled from their kitchens included delicious casseroles and “hot dishes,” delightful home canned pickles and relishes, salads, and an abundance of home baked goods.

Before centralized school districts and institutional food service managers, these women were put in charge of school hot lunches. This was before what the kids despairingly now refer to as “mystery meat” began turning up on their lunch plates.

Maybe these good women should be conscripted and pressed into duty, running our school cafeterias.

The Stewed Chicken Solution 

In that context, those home cooked “comfort foods” should be reintroduced to our tables in a way that fits our time pressed and overly busy lives. Call it retro home cooking for the Twenty-first Century. Often the problem is not the preparation time but the cooking time. That is problem that is neatly solved with a little forethought and timed-bake feature on our ovens or a crock pot. In the stewed chicken and dumpling dinner pictured, the preparation time was less than thirty minutes, in less time than it takes to preheat an oven and bake a frozen pizza.  

The chicken, on the other hand, took two and one-half hours to bake. That’s a problem that can be solved by cooking them the night before or cooking them in a timed oven. I would think about four hours at 300^o would do fine – covered and baked in low sodium chicken broth.  

Dumplings

The dumplings are quick. These ones fall more to biscuit side of the spectrum between noodles and biscuits. They are like spätzle but with much more baking powder. They poof up more than spätzle. To serve four you will need.

¼ cup milk

1 egg

1 cup flour

2 teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt     

In a mixing bowl dissolve the salt and baking powder into the milk, then whisk in the egg and finally add the flour to mix. Drop tablespoons of the batter into slow boiling water or stock. Allow the dumplings to continue boiling, for about five minutes, after they have risen to surface of the boiling liquid. Transfer to a 200 ^o oven to keep warm while making the gravy.

Stewed Chicken

4 Chicken Legs

32 Ounces Low Sodium Chicken Broth

Salt, Pepper and Garlic to taste

3 Tablespoons flour

This would be better with a stewing hen. These however no long show up in the grocery. They are ground up for more profitable chicken nuggets. Chicken legs, however, are normally stocked and often very favorably priced in five pound bulk packages.

Oven brown the legs in a skillet, with a cup of stock, for an hour in a 350 – 375^o oven. Add the remaining stock and continue baking the chicken covered at 300⁰ for an hour or until the meat is falling from the bones.

Season the pan dripping with salt, pepper and garlic to taste then thicken into pan gravy with a whitewash of flour and water.

Serve with dumplings with both swimming in gravy. A mix of boiled root vegetables such as carrots, rutabaga and parsnips is a wonderful complement to this plate. So there you have it – a simple every man’s  Sunday dinner fit for a peasant king.

The Good Fortune of Meeting Mr. Albert Jay Nock

Today, I had the good fortune to meet Mr. Albert Jay Nock. Jonah Goldberg introduced me to him. [Full Text] As it turns out Nock is a remarkable, indifferent “liberal” who never sought an audience, but figured his audience would find him.

He put it this way: “The wise social philosophers were those who merely hung up their ideas and left them hanging, for men to look at or to pass by, as they chose. Jesus and Socrates did not even trouble to write theirs out, and Marcus Aurelius wrote his only in crabbed memoranda for his own use, never thinking anyone else would see them.”  

In watching the advance of statism in the 1930s, whether cloaked in National Socialism, Communism or even Roosevelt’s New Deal, he likened his task to that of Isaiah. In a 1936 Atlantic essay “Isaiah’s Job” he wrote:

“In the year of Uzziah's death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. "Tell them what a worthless lot they are." He said, "Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you", He added, "that it won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life."

"Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job -- in fact, he had asked for it -- but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so -- if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start -- was there any sense in starting it?

"Ah," the Lord said, "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it"”. [Full Text]

But that was written in the 1930s. Today things are different, as Goldberg pointed out:

“And that is why the Right is in so much better shape than it was during Nock’s time, even as liberals are mounting a statist revival. Yes, statism is on the march again, but anti-statism isn’t an amusing pursuit for cape-wearing exotics like Nock anymore; it is the animating spirit of institutions launched and nourished by lovers of liberty. Retreating into the Nockian cocoon of the good life may be appealing, but it is morally defensible only if creeping collectivism is impervious to resistance. Moreover, the American people are not nearly as Neolithic as Nock believed, proof of which can be found in the slow and uneven unraveling of statism since his death, as with the still-unfinished Reagan Revolution. This, again, explains why liberals can be nostalgic for Nock while lamenting what has become of his successors: Nock was content with failure, his heirs are not.”

Stuffed Pork Roast in Honor of Fermentation

The Space Between Fresh and Rotten – A Fermentation Festival



Reedsburg Fermentation Fest Photo



According to Katz, fermentation is the flavorful “space between fresh and rotten, where the world’s most prized delicacies exist.” – Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, September 9, 2012.

Sandor Katz is a man of sublime truth. He’ll be a participant at the Live Culture Convergence, this year’s edition Fermentation Fest – that will run from October 12^th through the 21^st  in the general vicinity of Reedsburg Wisconsin [Link]. He wrote the bestselling book Wild Fermentation. Riveting.

Many might dismiss a fermentation festival as odd, but then sometimes the most beautiful lunch can simply consist of a little bread, some wine and a few slices of cheese. Top it off with a few pieces of chocolate for desert. That beautiful lunch was all a product of fermentation. In that light a fermentation festival isn’t odd. It makes perfectly good sense.

And almost larger than life, compost falls into the category of things fermented. We don’t think of it that way, but it is. More importantly, it is the mother that nurtures fertility.  

Growing Power Photo  -- An Urban Farm

Milwaukee’s Will Allen is all over that story. It seems, he’s writing an interactive textbook, scattered among small postage stamp sized plots of land, here there and elsewhere. The book’s title is Growing Power [link], but it isn’t a book. It’s a model.

The Fallacy of “Organic”

“Organic” has been has been the high profit, boutique side of agriculture for a long time. It’s been thought by many to be the salvation of the diversified family farm. For some it has been. The Organic Valley Co-Op in southwestern Wisconsin [Link], for example, has been hugely successful. But it isn’t necessarily a panacea.

Compost is part of the organic farming method but it doesn’t favor small farmers alone. Corporate/industrial farms can spread manure to grow organic produce and animal feed. And they do. A confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) can produce “organic, cage free” chickens, reap all of the benefits from that label and do so with little additional costs. “Organic” doesn’t necessarily imply all that we might think it does. It doesn’t necessarily imply wholesome foods produced through agricultural and environmental best management practices.

The trouble is the economics of food production is always weighed in terms of the cost of production versus the market value of crop. So land spread raw manure is an organic alternative to commercially produced nitrogen fertilizers. Well manure isn’t soil. Nutrient overloaded waterways don’t distinguish between organic and commercial fertilizers. What’s lost in the equation is the value and beauty of fermentation.

Will Allen's Composting Urban Farm

That’s where Allen’s model is a game changer. The finished crop isn’t the only product brought to market. It’s one of many byproducts of fermentation. 

On Allen’s farm soil is the first product. Everything else is a byproduct from producing soil. On Allen’s urban farm, organic feedstock for composting is the first stream of revenue. He is first dollar comes from picking up and disposing of vegetable wastes from restaurants, grocers, and produce wholesalers. On that he competes with the land fill garbage haulers.

That garbage is his raw material. From it comes a second stream of income in the form of the organic potting soils and slow release organic fertilizers he sells.

Earthworms and worm castings are a cash byproduct from the compost heap. Finally year round fresh salad greens, herbs, mushrooms and tomatoes are a final compost byproduct.

Years ago when I first visited his Milwaukee three acre farm, he estimated that as a family business it could produce nearly $500,000 net revenue a year. Allen stumbled into a new way of viewing agriculture. Rather than looking at economic model based on cost inputs and harvest yields. Allen instead saw the entire process from compost to table ready produce as productive. The result is an economically viable, environmentally sound, highly intense agricultural method suitable for small acre farms. It makes small footprint urban agriculture commercially possible.

The cost input isn’t fertilizer, herbicides, insecticides and hybrid seeds. It’s garbage, which he get paid to haul away. His farm-to-market logistics do not require a legion of food processors, transporters and wholesalers to resolve.

Allen is the son of a sharecropper whose career as a professional basketball player in Europe led him to rediscover his love for the garden and growing things. One thing leads to another. Allen’s basketball career led to a corporate career. His marriage and love of growing things lead to taking over his wife’s parent’s vegetable farm. The farm led to his purchase of the site of few vacant greenhouses on Milwaukee’s urban north side. He thought of it as a produce market for the farm. One thing leads to another. His willingness to help out a local boys and girls club establish a garden on his property, as a club activity, led to putting the three acres back into agricultural production.

Ultimately, the greenhouses led to Growing Power [Link], an internationally renowned non-profit educational organization demonstrating the viability of small site urban agriculture and the distribution of locally produced foods. It’s hands on. A conference it hosted a few weekends ago drew more than 2000 attendees from around the world.       

The Mystery of Bread -- Fermentation Forgotten and Remembered

It seems the mysteries of fermentation are seeing renewed attention in our increasingly manufactured and digitized environment. With that, we would do well to pay attention to bread. It is our culinary corner stone. And before we turned the baking of it over to the large commercial bakers, a fine loaf was presented as part of almost every meal. It offered a beautifully chewy explosion of yeasty flavor that filled both body and soul. It’s something not to be wasted.

What had once been the crown jewel of our diets has become an uninspired and insipid ingredient for sandwiches and toast. The large scale commercial bakers, like the large brewers, are interested primarily in an acceptable, uniform product with a long shelf life. With that, the individual and often unpredictable glory of fermentation is carefully removed from the recipe, and so are its delights.

The home brewer or baker has no fear of fermentation’s unpredictable charms. Things sometime go badly, but more often wonderfully well.

Turning back to the simple supper of a good soup, good bread, a few slices of cheese and a decent glass of wine or beer, in it are all the elements of a charming and delicious meal. Replicate that with a condensed soup, a soggy, enriched, machine sliced commercial white bread, processed cheese and a “light” low calorie beer, and the result might be as nutritious but it will be miserable.

Adding Fermented Goodness to a Pork Roast

Unrolling the Roast

Our bread has been so degraded that we settle for grossly inferior bread crumbs, and rarely think of bread dressing. If we do think of the bread dressing, it comes in a boxed kit with almost flavorless croutons.

So good stuffing begins with the bread. It should be bakery bread or rolls. If you’re frugal, it will come from left over bread and rolls that have become somewhat stale. These are cut into croutons and thoroughly dried in a 200^o oven for about an hour. Stored in an air-tight container these keep almost forever and are ready to use for bread stuffing or ground into bread crumbs.

The Roast Secured for the Oven

The bread dressing here is a simple sage dressing. It could be many others. For pork a bread dressing with apples and spinach is beautiful. I’ve made it in the past, but have not written a recipe for it. So unless you’re adventurous a sage dressing will do.

Stuffed Pork Roast for Six

1 ¼-1 ½ pound pork sirloin roast flattened

6 cups of sage dressing

Out of the Oven

4 strips of bacon

Sage Dressing (about six cups)

¾ Cups diced celery

¾ Cups diced onion

3 Tablespoons butter

1 Heaping Tablespoon sage

2 Cups chicken broth (must be low sodium)*

2 Cups beef broth (must be low sodium)*

4 -6 Cups bread croutons

*Bacon figures into the final roast. There is plenty of salt in that.

Saute the onions and celery in butter. When the onions are translucent add the broth and sage. Bring to a boil then simmer for ½ hour. Gradually add croutons to make a stiff dressing. If necessary ripped up fresh bread can be added to stiffen.

1 ¼ -1 ½ Pound Pork Sirloin Roast, Flattened

To flatten the roast, think of it not as a round log but a spiral. To unroll the spiral begin cutting horizontally along the bottom of the roast at a depth of about ½ inch. Unroll the roast as you cut. This will yield a large pork cutlet. Place this between two sheets of wax paper and additionally flatten it with a mallet to somewhat uniform 3/8 inch thickness.



Sliced and Ready for Gravey

 Stuffing the Roast

Layer 3 or four slices of bacon on the flattened roast then mound tightly packed bread dressing in the middle along the full length. Roll the sides of the roast over the dressing so they slightly overlap and secure with bamboo skewers.

Bake the stuffed roast in a 350^o uncovered for an hour with ¾ cups of chicken broth and ¾ cup of beef broth and 1 rounded tablespoon of sage. After an hour, repack any dressing that might have spilled from the roast, add liquid if necessary, cover and continue to bake at 300^o for another hour or until the roast reaches and internal temperature of 160^o. Prior to serving, again repack any stuffing into the ends of the roast and allow it to rest for about 10 minutes before slicing. While the roast is resting make a pan gravy with the pan drippings, adjust liquid and flavor and thicken with a flour and water whitewash.

Slice the roast into 12 portions, two per serving and top with the rich gravy. This can be served magnificently with mixed oven roasted root vegetables, think carrots, parsnips, rutabagas and onions.

Delicious. This works well with turkey thighs too.