Purple Bars, Slopers and Farms

G-Ride's comment compels me to clarify. That wicked old skool purple Hyperlite Easton EA70 3 degree bar is brand new. Never installed. Never ridden. Not even cut down. Total pure NIB. And yes. The sloper (sloping top tube) is curious but, honestly functional for the too tall crowd. It works. Tighter stiffer frame triangles, less tubing (slightly) and slightly lower top tube (makes lifting more mechanically efficient -sort of).

It may look goofy and is completely and 100% impractical for medium to small size ESP extra small size frames, but. The big guys can take advantage of it. Hell I've been running so much seat post my whole life it just seems odd not to have a mile of post exposed.

And back to the purple. The littlest saw the black Bontrager Race Lite handlebar set to go on there (wicked wide at 46cm - oh so exciting) and was unhappy with it. PURPLE. You can't put black on there. It has to be purple, then the voice got more excited, PURPLE AND PINK! So. Now maybe the search is on for that old skool Cinelli splash in pink and purple... although I can't find it so maybe it means the pink and purple were a different brand? Save the black tape for re-taping the worn wrap on the Croll.

Oh and thanks to Matt Kraus... well now everyone can lust after more unobtanium. A 47 tooth Dura Ace chainring. Everyone together, a collective Ooooooooooo. At $124 it really isn't for everyone. But we can all dream. No?

And on the subject of cyclocross... I am down to the last 'article' in the CXMagazine. I've been savoring each article. Spacing out the reading of them after the initial devouring of the Litka/Vardaros collection there in the middle.

I saved the essays for last. Read the first two last night. Oh man. Talk about a perfect time to read them. All fired up with the new bike. Feeling all slow and out of shape as the rest of the team is hitting road race after road race and the mt guys are racing every weekend too... while I bank a bit of family time in prep for the fall campaign. Fantastic reading. I think the gamma correction on the images is what is bugging me. Too washed out maybe? I dunno. Doesn't matter. The writing is redeeming. Great stuff.

Speaking of reading. Give this New York Times Op Ed bit a read: Change We Can Stomach, by Dan Barber.

A great article I strongly reccomend that everyone read it. For example did you know:

"In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre."

No suprise? Sure, netting only $5,600 a year isn't going to pay the taxes on 4 acres of land around here, but... the real comparison is with the $39/acre. And a 1,364 acre farm is pretty small in the grand scheme of things.

Give it all a read.

And one more bit. How does ANYONE make loads of cash? Exploitation. Flat out plain and simple. Exploit a niche, exploit a market...

As long as agricultural companies exploit the poor and extract labor from them at slave wages, and as long as they aren’t required to pay the price for the pollution they so brazenly produce, their system will stay afloat.

Or more likely, just exploit people, a far more renewable resource than anything else.

Drug companies exploiting our penchant for a quick fix. Relishing in the reluctance of the populations to change lifestyles in favor of chemical bandaids that might help slightly treat some symptoms but leave a trail of unknown consequences down the road.

Exploitation doesn't have to have a purely negative connotation. I don't mean to make it sound that way. Although I assume I probably am. I tend to do that unintentionally (sound more negative than I mean to be).

Back to the article. Barber captures the essence of something that does need to change. I see it as the American way of trying to buy everything at the lowest unit cost possible. Oh hey if i buy 5 pounds of that suspect grain fed ground up cow I can save $0.25/pound. Sweet. They might see some grass fed ground up cow in the same store (unlikely) for 2x the price and think "there is NO WAY I am buying that stuff."

Barber succintly states it like this:

But it is possible to nudge the revolution along — for instance, by changing how we measure the value of food. If
we stop calculating the cost per quantity and begin considering the cost per nutrient value, the demand for higher-quality food would rise.

And then, as I have been doing with the Maynard articles. I'm going to share the spoiler. Because I want to shout a resounding AMEN after reading it.

I get chills and goosebumps reading it, and re-reading it.

Leave our agricultural future to chefs and anyone who takes food and cooking seriously. We never bought into the “bigger is better” mantra, not because it left us too dependent on oil, but because it never produced anything really good to eat. Truly great cooking — not faddish 1.5-pound rib-eye steaks with butter sauce, but food that has evolved from the world’s thriving peasant cuisines — is based on the correspondence of good farming to a healthy environment and good nutrition. It’s never been any other way, and we should be grateful. The future belongs to the gourmet.

Good to eat.

Eat food that is good to eat. Not just that is deemed "nutritious" or "good for you" is a very simple lifestyle. Does it mean reading labels and eschewing overly processed products with stuff like hydrolyzed soy protein and corn syrup? Yes. Yes it does. Both of those are almost assured to be from genetically modified crops. Any soy or corn product not in specifically labeled as 'organic' or 'gmo free' is probably all GMO crop sources. The beef that isn't grass fed? Fed GMO grain no doubt. I find it very ironic the whole surveys that suggest american's don't want genetically modified tomatoes but they are really happy drinking their HFCS loaded sodas or their hydrolyzed soy protein loaded "reduced fat" products. A confounding paradox.

Dan Barber's suggestion of farmers joining together to maximize distribution leads me to think that the system Gary, the CE-Yo, has worked out with Ryder would be brilliant. Couple that system with small farmer's products and yes it might be possible to get the produce to the consumer or the Chefs in a sustainable manner.

Demand quality. Buy quality. Ride your bike to work, take that gas money and us it to buy better tasting, better quality food. Do what you can do.

Even if I can't do it as well as I hope to, I do it to the extent I can.

When does Cyclocross season start? I want to eat huge quantities of really good food and stay under the Clydesdale line.

heddwch
G