The Egg Salad Sandwich & The Fear Mongering Assault on the Home Economy

A beautiful egg salad sandwich is a triumph of household economy.

It’s tasty, think of a deviled egg sandwich because deviled eggs are really at the heart of making egg salad. Add to that a few crunchy, cold lettuce leafs and sandwich it all between two lightly toasted slices of good bread, the result is a beautiful sandwich for lunch. For a good egg salad per serving you will need:

2 Hardboiled eggs, coarsely chopped

1 Large tablespoon of minced onion

1 Large tablespoon of mayonnaise

1 Teaspoon of Dijon style mustard

1 Splash of Worchester Sauce

¼ Teaspoon of smoked Spanish paprika

1/8 Teaspoon of ground celery seed 

½ Teaspoon of freeze dried chives

Thoroughly mix the above together and there you have it – egg salad, which I guess is something of a throwback to an earlier culinary age. That’s precisely the point. If you are like me, until I rediscovered the delicious beauty of an egg salad sandwich, most of us have to think a long way back to when we last ate one. Why should that be?

It’s economical. My sandwich, garnished with a dill pickle and few pickled beets, served up with a glass of milk and an orange for dessert cost less than $1.30.

It’s satisfying. This lunch will neatly tide you over until supper time.

And lastly, it’s quick. Aside from the time needed to boil the eggs, this simple lunch took less and 10 minutes to assemble. Should I have made this luncheon for four, it might have taken another 10 minutes, but probably less.

This is good household economy of time and of basic foods. And it is a good household economy we desperately need to return to. It’s one from which we are being pushed away.

A Flood of Fear Mongering Propaganda

Yet for all of this beauty, the food police of the industrial, consumer food economy would be quick to warn me of the perils of eating this sandwich. In the course of just two days I’ve been warned not to eat:

Bread and other foods made from wheat. It contributes to heart disease. [Full Text];

Bacon, sausage, ham and other ‘cured’ meats. These are associated with colon cancer and heart disease  [Full Text];

Salads, chicken, ground beef, imported seafood, farmed salmon, raw oysters, raw milk, deli and buffet food (including deli egg salad which is not nearly as good as homemade). These are loaded with food poisoning pathogens [Full Text].

This is on top of the long warnings that I should not eat mayonnaise, dairy products, eggs and most dietary oil and fat on account of their artery clogging cholesterol. (The fact that possibly most of us are not physically active is only secondary the in consideration of the health our hearts and arteries, especially when statin drug therapy can reduce our blood cholesterol levels and leave us with a pleasant affirmation of good health.)

Cholesterol Laden Killers

You see, my delicious egg salad sandwich, from the view of the industrial food economy and the food regulators who oversee it, is an agent of early and untimely death. It’s an unhealthy combination of bread, iceberg lettuce, eggs and mayonnaise. Yet that’s not the case. Instead they should urge me to pack a delicious egg salad sandwich for lunch once or maybe twice a week. And they should not discourage a quick omelet for supper once in a while.  

From about the late 1970s, as I recall, until about a dozen years ago, eggs were believed to be cholesterol laden killers. We were told it was best to avoid them. And if we must use them in cooking, then we were to use commercial egg substitutes or just the whites. The dietary science has advanced since then. Now an egg a day is generally considered a good thing. They pack a ton of protein relative to their calorie content, which means that if an egg is part of your breakfast you won’t be carving a junk food snack at 10:00 a.m. [Full Text] Like eggs, it should be noted that the risks associated with saturated fats have been grossly overstated too. [Full Text]

Egg demonization demonstrates just how wide of a brush the protectors of health paint with in their constant propaganda war on the household economy.  Hence the constant barrage of news stories on what I should not eat. The purpose of this is to make us fearful of our meals.

A Lunch of Boiled Bean Curd Stuffed Wantons for Crying Out Loud

These busybodies occupy our bureaucracies and our halls of higher learning. Their fingers nervously twitch at the prospect of micromanaging our affairs. They dream of the day when I lunch exclusively on boiled bean curd filled wantons.

Things get worse as soon as our meals are enveloped in the industrial economy. Once there our lunch is no longer in their realm of fantasy. It’s real. It’s regulated. It’s politicized.

Our nutritionists only see an industrial national diet where for breakfast it's a sausage, egg, cheese and muffin sandwich is eaten on the way to work, some sort of double cheeseburger with bacon, a large order of fries and a supersized sugary soft drink for lunch, and for dinner it’s fried chicken with sides of biscuits & gravy and macaroni & cheese. In their mind’s eye they see it, day in and day out, we are eating to die early and for our own good, and possibly restoring the solvency of the nation, something must be done about it. (Public “health care” costs are driving the nation’s deficits.)

The solution of course is dietary regulation. Strict dietary guidelines for school nutrition programs are a starting point. Nutritional labeling for fast food chains and other retail food outlets like grocery store delis is certainly a common sense requirement, enabling us to make healthy food choices. That no-brainer has been neatly tucked into the 2000 page Affordable Care Act. The regulatory code is being promulgated as I write this. [Federal Register Full Text. It’s worth a quick glance because it reveals just how absurd the federal regulatory environment has become.] We are solving problems grossly exaggerated by a handful of bureaucratic dietary health zealots and mostly the result of bureaucratic agricultural policies. Is insane the right word?

A Pizza Rebellion

The pizza chains have taken exception to this nonsense. The Washington Post reported that Domino’s says that there are no fewer than 34 million ways its pies can be customized and that labels are irrelevant. Industry wide 90% of pizzas sold are ordered by phone and most in store customers don’t pay attention to nutrition “boards” and labels when they order anyway. [Full Text] 

The new labeling regulations will do little to improve American’s health, but that’s not point of it. It opens the door for more intrusive, or should I say more robust, regulation, such as regulating the ingredients in the dishes we are served and the size of the portion. On this score New York City leads the way. The city banned trans-fats a few years ago and is now limiting the size of containers in which soft drinks may be served. There is no reason this order of regulation couldn’t go national. New Yorkers are willing to put up with it. Why shouldn’t we all?

It’s not inconceivable that the U.S. food stamp program, now serving some 47 million of us, could adopt some sort of public health related rationing provisions. It’s being discussed.

The Truth Behind the Modern Diet

In terms of diet and disease, our diets have taken two huge turns in the past hundred years. The first began in the 1920s when gas and electric ranges became common, and refrigeration opened the door to an escape from seasonal eating.  Processed food products entered the market. In the 1920s, Bird’s Eye frozen vegetables and Skippy Peanut Butter were born. And the curvy Coca-Cola bottle took its shape. The second happened in the late 1960s and progressed through the 1970s, franchise fast food and ready to eat convenience foods flourished.

Our meals moved from the household economy into the industrial economy and we got fat. Since the late 1800s the obesity rate in the 40 to 69 age cohort was about five percent. Today it’s 25 percent for those of us between 40 and 49 years-of-age, nearly 40 percent of us between 60 and 69. What’s changed is that our calorie intake has increased by 20% since the 1970s and since 1947 through 2005 our sugar consumption has increased fivefold. [Full Text] That’s most of the story on diet and health.

On the whole we are not quite as physically active. It’s not the saturated fats, or the eggs. We sit too much and then feast on our highly subsidized, FDA approved, industrial food economy. Think of corn syrup, refined polyunsaturated seed oils and Wonder Bread.

The solution of course is to return to our kitchens, to make our own meals and to avoid commercial soft drinks. Simple, but it’s more complicated than that.

Abdicating the Household Throne

Once something moves from the household economy into the industrial economy we suffer in innumerable ways. First, in one way or another we get sick, then we abdicate personal choice for the wisdom of the ‘collective;’ and finally we settle for something we otherwise would find absolutely unacceptable. It is happening to our meals now. Our schools have long been on this trajectory.

The more ‘federalized’ and divorced from the household economy they have become the more dismal they are. This is not to berate the women and men who teach. They are called upon to fill the void left by the collapse to household economy.

In the household, reading and literacy walk hand in hand with language acquisition. Infants and children who are read to, before and as they begin to speak and throughout their early childhood, do well. In the absence of that we hope Head Start will fill void. It doesn’t.

Today, 80% of the kids graduating from New York high schools are deficient in basic math and language skills. [Full Text] And worse, the federal government is busy creating a massive and intrusive database tracking our kids from preschool through the twelfth grade. [Full Text] With the proper data set, we can of course track outcomes and more neatly tailor our programs to achieve their desired results.

It’s all nonsense and dehumanizing claptrap.

In an age of federal micromanagement, Washington seems hell bent on a march toward bankruptcy. A handful of our largest states are already there. And even more of our cities are struggling to find a way out their insolvency. You would think politicians and public administrators would have more pressing obligations than regulating the size of soft drink containers and insisting fast food stores include on their menu boards a detailed nutritional profile of every item.  Whatever.

G.K. Chesterton observed that when we lose our way it doesn’t make sense to keep marching forward until we tumble over a cliff in the darkness. It is better, he said, to wait for daylight and then backtrack some until we find the trail from which we’ve wandered. Upon finding and returning to the right path we will better find our way.

“I long for a society in which the extraordinary dynamic that is at work in the encounter between a man and a woman continues to be established, under a specific name.” Rabbi Gilles Bernheim, Chief Rabbi of France

We are subject to a bewildering number of rules and regulations. In my most recent posts I’ve noted that a higher order rules should guide and inform our behavior. Since those posts, I’ve come across a pair of remarkable essays to which I should have liked to provide links.  

In my post on macaroni and cheese I noted the transaction between farmer or dairyman in selling raw milk directly to a consumer is subject to a higher order of “rule” that is unmatched by any USFDA food safety regulation.

That higher order regulation can be summed up by one word – Trust. In short, a consumer, who wants real milk for making cheese, trusts that the dairyman selling raw milk wants to provide a wholesome food that is not commercially available. Above all, the raw milk producer does not wish to make anyone sick.

The Front Porch Republic, posted an essay by Skyler Reidy detailing what that trust entails. [Full Text & It’s a worthy read.]

“I work at a small raw milk dairy located on a Christian community in Texas. We take great pains to keep our milk pure. On a typical morning in the barn we might spend about four minutes prepping cows and cleaning for every one minute we spend milking. Every morning we clean our cows literally from head to tail. We milk the cows into stainless steel buckets, and strain the milk twice through cheesecloth. After milking, our milk is put directly on ice and kept cool until the moment it’s consumed. When customers come to our ranch we insist that they bring a cooler for us to fill with ice. Throughout the process we leave ourselves no room for error. Any milk that might be contaminated is left outside for the dogs or sprayed into our vegetable garden. This isn’t always fun. Mornings can be cold and dark, and nothing is more disheartening than hand-milking an entire gallon into a pail only to pour it out after seeing a speck of dirt land on the surface of the milk...

In my last post I quoted President Obama’s recent speech on violence, he said “there is no  more important ingredient for success, nothing would be more important to us for reducing violence than strong, stable families -- which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood.”

In that statement the president implicitly acknowledged a higher order of rule on human sexuality and the tradition marriage as the proper context honoring sexual love and the formation of household and family.

Marriage, like Trust, is a higher order rule governing the proper expression of human sexual desires.

Yet, should the president examine those rules as such, I am sure he would be reluctant to explicitly endorse them.   

To do so would be to endorse Gilles Bernheim’s, the Chief Rabbi of France, Orthodox Judaic defense of traditional marriage and warning on the moral and social hazards of legalizing gay marriage in France. [Full Text. It’s a must read.]

In a long essay on the topic, he concluded:

“I am one of those who believe that a human being is not an autonomous construction with no given structure, order, status, or role. I believe that the affirmation of freedom does not imply the negation of limits and that the affirmation of equality does not imply the leveling of differences. I believe that the powers of technology and of the imagination do not require that we forget that being is a gift, that life is prior to all of us, and that it has its own laws.

“I long for a society in which modernity would have its full place but without implying the denial of elementary principles of human and familial ecology; for a society in which the diversity of ways of being, of living, and of desiring is accepted as fortunate, without allowing this diversity to be diluted in the reduction to the lowest common denominator, which effaces all differentiation; for a society in which, despite the technological deployment of virtual realities and the free play of critical intelligence, the simplest words—father, mother, spouse, parents—retain their meaning, at once symbolic and embodied; for a society in which children are welcomed and find their place, their whole place, without becoming objects that must be possessed at all costs, or pawns in a power struggle.

“I long for a society in which the extraordinary dynamic that is at work in the encounter between a man and a woman continues to be established, under a specific name.”

It’s a long essay, but it’s a must read for anyone who wishes to have an informed opinion on the topic, whether in support or opposition to gay marriage. Sections of essay were cited by Pope Benedict XVI in his Christmas Address in 2012. It has since gone “viral” among diverse faith communities throughout the English-speaking world.

To criticize Bernheim's essay as gay bashing is a mean spirited excursion into postmodern and deconstructionist sexual politics, because it is anything but. It is instead a traditionalist essay in defense of the plain meaning of a word -- marriage.

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.