Bursting bubbles?

Bacon and Roundup? Bursting together? Oh and lets add the new BPA fears.

One has been building for a long time, another a slow steady increase.

The Atlantic Food put a nice little synopsis together with a few cool external links about the Bacon bubble. Check out the link to the woman skating on a skillet with bacon strapped to her feet.

So The Atlantic links to the bacon article in the Wall Street Journal. Many of you better connected than I will have already read it.

2nd and 3rd paragraph:

Chef John Currence, owner of four restaurants in Oxford, Miss., adores bacon and proudly wears a pig tattoo on his arm. But even he says that the bacon craze has gone a bit far. Strike that: The man recently received a gift of bacon-flavored lip balm. It's gone way too far.

"It's like cussing," Mr. Currence says of today's over-use of bacon in restaurants. "It's easy, it's effective, it always gets a cocked eyebrow, but it just doesn't belong in church." Bacon is a staple of the Southern cuisine he specializes in, but it shouldn't become a crutch—it's facile and everything ends up tasting the same, Mr. Currence says. Lately, he has begun experimenting with less-obvious flavor boosters, including an intense mango vinegar he drizzles on seared scallops. Searching for flavors that "punch you in the mouth," he adds Indian spices to roasted carrot and red pepper sauces.

Like Cupcakes are Cyclocross. Gone too far...

Bacon is good. Tastes good. Good on basically anything. But that doesn't mean it should be used in everything. My take is you treat like a treat. Don't cook it very often, save it for a special occasion so it remains special.

The other bubble (we won't talk about Cyclocross's bubble - maybe - night weasels is the first indicator that the CX scene has jumped the shark and is headed down the tubes, that or i'm just bitter about not being able to go) is the Monsanto one. The big evil empire. Is it shrinking? Has Food Inc and the rest of the truth in "journalism" hitting home and causing problems? Or is it really like some people have been saying all along. Chemical farming is not sustainable and is NOT the solution to global food shortages (feels odd saying that in a country full of the fattest people on the planet - no excess of calories here /sarcasm).

Wait. Yields are going down? you can't just plant a GMO corn, spray it with a couple hundred thousand tons of crude oil derived fertilizers and herbicide/pesticides and have an amazing yield? Say it isn't so! GASP, what will the farmers plant now?

Bittman pointed the article out yesterday, along with a really gross picture (don't EVER eat a processed chicken thing again - *gag*)

Now setting that chicken paste aside, lets look a bit at the Monsanto problem. What happened? Is it a good thing for non-GMO crops? Is it a good thing for those working to reduce the dependence on oil for farming and increasing the sustainability? Nope.

All that has happened is Pioneer is taking up the slack. They Call it Pioneer more than the company that Pioneer brand really is: Dupont. Oh hey. Look at that. Dupont isn't really all that much better (if at all) than Monsanto. Two big chemical giants making food. Or should we say engineering crops/seeds for farmers to take the risk on growing.

They have all the profits, and none of the risks associated with growing it, kind of convenient and a damn awesome business model, no?

Go back to that BPA article I linked up top:

But vom Saal advocates the same precautionary principle that NYU nutritionist Marion Nestle supported last month on the Atlantic Food Channel. "If you set the bar at proof of harm to humans," vom Saal says, "you have failed to protect the public health."

BPA is bad? No way. But really, how do we know what has BPA in it? buying stuff that is labeled BPA-free is a solution but there really isn't much that is BPA-free. Some canned good companies are going BPA-free, okay, so far only one. BUY EDEN FOODS (and support their effort to keep us healthy). okay so I didn't mean to get into a product endorsement. When Wholefoods goes the way of BPA-free cans then I'll be a lot happier. The Ball Corporation has been doing it for a while (making those cans) why hasn't anyone else jumped in on it?

Unit Cost. Americans are dead set and ultra programmed to purchase based on unit costs (i'm so conditioned that it mentally hurts when I go with the higher unit cost items). Unit cost drives the market.

it is cheaper to spray crude oil derived chemicals on the growing crops than natural/organic options...

it is cheaper to line your cans, make your plastic, with BPA than without it...

Thanks chemical companies. Where would we be without you? (probably not the health problem ridden overweight country we are now).

Like Mark Twain's famous saying:

"It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it."

Maybe Thoreau's quote is better for this line of pondering:

Every man is the builder of a temple called his body.

How strong do you want that temple? Do you want it to last? Any decent builder knows that good construction and maintenance are still not going to keep a structure made with poor materials standing for so long. A more dire problem is that people are building their children's temple with poor materials and hindering the natural construction by allowing too many of these disruptive chemicals into their systems. Our bodies are resiliant. But they can only do so much. Sure greg lemond could eat at McDonalds every day and still win the tour, but look at him now, how is his temple holding up? Maybe it is better than some but it is what it could be? Maybe that's another poor example on my part. Oh well. I'm tired, need some sleep. despite and overwhelming desire to drive up to Night Weasels, I know it would just wreck me and that's not what I need now.

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