An AP article on May 15th caught my attention. The title said: House approves $290B farm bill.

What really caught my attention was the line which said,

almost $30 billion would go to farmers to idle their land

Stop a moment to consider. That is $30 billion paid out to farmers so they will not produce food. (See here.)

When is the last time you went to the grocery store? Did you notice food prices had plunged dramatically, perhaps grain products costing half of what they cost a few months ago? Wasn’t it apparent that we have a massive over-supply of food and we need to start producing less food?

No?

Maybe that is just some delusional world occupied by politicians and special interest groups.

Maybe when you last went to the grocery store you saw the found prices continually climbing. Maybe your food budget is being increasingly pinched by high prices, and you wish somebody would start producing more food so prices would go down.

That would be the reasonable, intelligent, thing to do, right?

Instead, your illustrious government is spending your money to pay farmers to produce less food so the food prices will be higher. Your government is spending your money so that you will have to spend even more money to purchase your food.

That is your government working for you.

Now if only the government would start paying all of us to work less and stop being productive.

The American farm industry is screwed up. The scary thing is, a lot of countries are more screwed up than us.

What do interesterified fat and prenatal urination have in common? Nothing, except I learned something new about both of them recently. It would be very interesting if they had something more in common than that. As it is, I found what I learned about both to be both educational and interesting. Perhaps you will also find it so.

Interesterified Fat

When I came home from my Tuesday bike ride Grandma asked me what interesterified meant. Except, she pronounced it “Interest-er-fied.” I had no idea if it was even really a word and asked her where she had seen it. She then showed me the ingredient list on the back of the saltine crackers box where it said, “Contains one or more of the following oils: interesterified soybean, canola, palm.” I was stumped, having never seen the word before, but made my best guess at the word’s meaning. Not satisfied with that, I went to look up the meaning on the internet. And what is where my education began.

According to Wikipedia:

Interesterified fats are oils that have been chemically modified (e.g., turning soybean oil into interesterified soybean oil). This is done in order to make them more solid, less liable to go rancid and more stable for applications such as deep frying. The interesterification process is used as an alternative to partial hydrogenation, which results in trans fats. However, research indicates that interesterified fats may pose health risks, some greater in magnitude than trans fats.

Wisegeek has a good short piece on interesterified fats, which is well worth the read. It begins:

When scientific studies exposed the inherent dangers to public health in trans fats, many processed food manufacturers scrambled to find a suitable replacement. They needed to find a form of fat which would still provide the extended shelf life of partially-hydrogenated oils, but did not contain trans fatty acids. One solution arrived in the form of interesterified fat, a fully hydrogenated product with many of the same characteristics as trans fat, but closer to saturated fat chemically. Interesterified fat is produced through a process called interesterification, which rearranges the molecular structure of fatty plant oils.

It goes on to say that, “The problem with interesterified fat for consumers is that in many ways the cure is worse than the disease. If you would like to know more, you can finish read the Wisegeek article, and even look through a Google search on interesterified.

After all that, you can start looking for interesterified fats in the products you buy. You’ll find flaky crackers tend to either have partially hydrogenated oil or interesterified oil. I haven’t looked at other products.

Prenatal Urination

The discovery of prenatal urination came about because I was discussing with my sister the difficulties someone we knew was having with their pregnancy. A particular problem was a low level of amniotic fluid. Amniotic fluid, in case you didn’t know, “is the watery liquid surrounding and cushioning a growing fetus within the amnion. It allows the fetus to move freely without the walls of the uterus being too tight against its body. Buoyancy is also provided” (see Wikipedia).

This much I knew. But my sister, in looking up the causes and possible effects of this problem, pointed out to me what amniotic fluid is. That is, “Amniotic fluid is primarily produced by the mother until 16 weeks of gestation” but after that point, “In the late stages of gestation much of the amniotic fluid consists of foetal urine.” Thus low amniotic fluid “can be caused by infection, kidney dysfunction or malformation” in the unborn infant, as the child, in effect, is not filling their mother’s womb with enough urine.

There is a mental picture for you.

Which is all to say the pressing question of, “Do babies pee before they are born?” has been answered. If someone asks, now you can tell them.

But as to where that urine goes . . . well, people might not want to know. Expectant mothers may not care to know that they are walking around with a belly full of baby pee.

Long time readers of this website will perhaps remember my previous attempt to add a photo section to this website. I called it an experiment. As such, it failed.

It failed primarily from lack of time. If I had been willing, or able, to take more time to upload random (or selected) photos from my everyday life . . . well then, we would have photos. But presently my free time is rather limited, and I must prioritize what is most important. Uploading photos to this website came too low on the list of priorities to ever become a reality.

Hence the lack of photos.

When my life situation changes, I may take another attempt at photo-journaling. But, for the present, I have realized that I must take a different approach.

So, undaunted by my failures, or unable to learn from my mistakes, I am attempting something a little different this year. I have decided to try what I have before only wished to create–that is, a true photo blog.

The idea was to create something more artistic, professional, and consistent than the general freewheeling existence of this website. The problem was, how would I do that if I couldn’t manage the informal photo dumping on this website?

One of the central problems, I realized, is that I can’t, (or don’t,) specifically set aside time for website work. Postings are thus left to the whim of my inclination, and availability of free time. And, if I’m not lacking in one I’m usually lacking in the other. I came to the conclusion that if I tried to undertake the project of consistently uploading photos throughout the year, such a venture was doomed to failure.

The solution was to not even attempt to upload photos throughout the year.

In November of 2006 I received a digital camera of my very own for my birthday. Since that time I have been erratically taking photos and saving them on my hard drive. Come January of 2008 I realized I would have, roughly speaking, a year’s collection of photos. I could cull a year of photos for blogging from that. Then, using the nifty feature of the Wordpress software where I can post-date my entries so that they appear at a different time than actually written, I saw I could assemble an entire year’s worth of photo blogging for 2008 in a few days. Thus, instead of setting aside time on a regular basis, I could set aside a few days for an the entire year of photo posting.

Before Jan. 1st rolled around I had completed the first three months. I am now in the process of setting up the rest of the year. I figure that in this way I can share some of the best of my photography from last year throughout this year.

The basic idea was to present one photo every other day, but I have discovered that sometimes I have several photos that are very similar, all of which I think are worth sharing. I have posted the similar photos over several days, but I am inclined to more often post the several similar photos on the same day, which breaks the one photo every other day format–but I’ve decided to not be too much of a stickler.

I have struggled against becoming too bogged down in making things perfect, or caught up in amusing myself. On occasion I have digitally altered some of my photos for amusement/interest. However, it can become rather distracting and time consuming to play around with all the plugins to my photo editing program, so I have tried to avoid it, except on rare occasions. So far I have also studiously avoided offering commentary on my photos as writing a comment immediately doubles (or more) the time required to post.

The photo blog is of a somewhat more professional nature, so I set it up over at my professional website. Anyone who is interested in seeing the photos should go to http://glimmers.creative-vapors.com. Those interested in keeping tabs on my photography can check back every other day for a new picture, or subscribe to the RSS feed at the website and receive notification when photos are added.

Feedback is welcome. I hope you enjoy.

[Note: This week I was doing cleanup and going through my old pads of note paper. On one pad, stuck in among some other writing, I found this short descriptive essay. It had no date attached and I can’t recall exactly what year I wrote it. It was probably about four years ago, and I don’t think it ever saw the light of day, until now. Looking at what I had written, I didn’t find it as good as I would have liked. It lacked a certain smooth flow, and as a descriptive essay it didn’t quite fully invoke the panorama of an autumn day with as much force as it could. Nonetheless, even being less than a perfect essay it still managed an evocative touch and brought back to my mind the day I had written it. I always enjoy the ability of writing to bring things into the mind’s eye, so I touched it up and decided to share this peice of old writing.]

Right now, it is one of those glorious late afternoons in the early autumn.

People will sometimes ask, “What is the country like?” This is the country life, I would say to them, and show them this day. Country living is the golden sunshine, the fading light of autumn that sings of relaxation. Like the end of a long day of work so autumn is the end of summer, the season speaking of ends, and rest.

On the hillside the leaves are just beginning to color, the first frost having not yet come, this being a warm year. The air is not hot, but not cold either, a temperature almost unfelt, leaving the senses to dwell on other things.

Sitting in the easy chair on the porch, I can see the final pink and purple Asters in front of the porch. The garden is beginning to die back up on the hill. The corn is long gone, drying out in yellowish brown stalks. The squash is almost finished and the tomatoes are hurrying in. Too bad most of the apple blossoms were killed this spring by a late frost. Otherwise we would now have a wonderful harvest of apples. As it is, there are only a few apples hanging on the tress, red and delicious, reminders of what we are missing.

The entire scene lies below a blue sky dotted with those proverbial fluffy white clouds. Near the porch the bugs buzz and tweet in their continual racket. The cat lies stretched out on the porch, dozing pleasantly. The only annoyance is the flies which seem to be particularly enjoying the warm September.

The air is clear, and not cold yet, but there is that hint of ending for those who can sense it. There are the sings of seasonal change everywhere. Sometimes it can seem sad as to think about the passing of summer. But other times it is beautiful and peaceful. There is rest in the end of things, some beauty in its completion. And in this late autumn afternoon, I see that.

I guess you could call it a sign of the times we live in–the economic times we live in, I mean. I don’t carefully follow the price of all groceries when I do my weekly shopping, but I do keep a regular eye on the price of a gallon of milk. The recent trend has been instructive.

Not too very long ago–probably a few months–the price of milk was $1.86. It had hovered at about that price for some time. Then, at that point several months ago, the price of milk began to go up. Sharply. In the space of those few months the price of milk went from $1.86 to about $2.89.

That was last week.

This week I went into the store and saw the posted price: $3.25. It was enough to stop a person in their tracks. An increase in the price of milk by $1.00 in a few months is alarming. A jump in price of nearly fifty cents in a week? Unbelievable. I don’t know how anyone can look at a price change like that and not think that something very, very bad is happening. If this trend continues, the price of milk will have easily doubled in the space of a year.

Talk about inflationary pressure.

If I owned a few acres and saw food prices acting up I’d really think about pulling the shovel to start growing my own food, and buying a cow for my own milk. That kind of volatility in food prices raises the specter of not being able to afford to eat.

This observation on the price of milk does need to be tempered a bit. Of all food stuff, milk pricing (at present) appears most volatile, and the first of all grocery goods to show an increase in price. I have not seen the same surge in the price of most other goods. For example, while beef has been on an upward trend, I haven’t seen any near doubling in price.

Yet.

But it would be unwise to take comfort in the mantra, “It’s just something about milk,” and think the pricing surge is a problem limited only to milk. While it is true that there is jiggering going on with milk production, the price increase can’t be brushed aside as simply nothing more than the result of poor governmental regulation of farms, or poor farmer choices. While that may account for some price increase, the truth is that milk is a leading indicator. It is a short term commodity, and reflects the increase in cost of materials more quickly than other products.

Let me explain. In a simplified expression of the milk production cycle, the cow eats grain and then produces milk. The milk is transported to the store where is it bought and consumed by us. Milk doesn’t have a long shelf life, so you’re drinking what was produced not that long ago. If the price of grain (which the cow eats) goes up, then the price of your milk will shortly go up as well. If the cost of gas goes up (which is used to transport the milk) the cost of your milk will go up.

By contrast, a can of beans doesn’t reflect an increase in the cost of materials as quickly. When you buy a can of beans from the store, you are most likely eating last years beans. They have been produced and canned last year, and now are just sitting around waiting to be eaten. The cost of gas to run the farm tractors last year was part of the cost to produce that can of beans. If the price of gas suddenly jumps the price of your can of beans isn’t going to jump as much because the present cost of gas isn’t affecting how much it cost to produce the beans, only how much it cost to recently transport them to the store.

The point of what I am saying is this: the cost of milk more closely follows the present economic situation. Most other food goods lag behind, but the price of milk will give you a good idea what direction the price of everything else is going, and what kind of increase we are looking at. So just because your hamburger hasn’t doubled in price yet, don’t think you can rest easy.

Exactly how the price increases affect different food products only time will tell, and I’m not an economist who could guess. I will say that it does appear that cattle and poultry products look set to be most heavily affected. Firstly, because large amounts of corn (which is used to feed both cattle and poultry) are being diverted from animal feed to ethanol production. The shortage of corn has made the price for corn go up, and when the corn feed of the cow or chicken goes up, the cow and chicken products (meat, milk, eggs) go up as well. On top of this goes the added cost of farming and transporting with higher gas prices. With meat, milk, cheese, butter, and eggs all set to go up, and drastically so, what are we to do?

Eat beans.

As a final note I will say that the one week spike of nearly fifty cents in the price of milk may be something of an anomaly. That particular store was Aldi’s, which is a budget grocery store, and the particular one I shop at is on the small side. I suspect they were unwilling or unable to cushion the rising milk price by disbursing some of the higher expense into other products. Next week the price of milk may very well be re-calibrated somewhat, but I’m sure it will still be higher than a few weeks ago, and even a few weeks ago the price of milk was already dramatically up.

For the record, I didn’t buy the milk at that price. Before I went out shopping I checked the sales flier for Price Chopper, another local grocery store, and saw that they were having a sale on milk. Very interesting coincidence, yes? This week the normal price for milk was $3.09 for a gallon and the sale price was $2.59. I bought the sale milk for some very hefty savings. Now, Price Chopper milk is normally more expensive than Aldi’s milk–and the $3.09 was higher than Aldi’s last week price of $2.89. In this case I simply think that Price Chopper was able to cushion the sudden rise in milk prices better, and decided to add on a milk sale to draw more consumers. I wouldn’t be surprised if next week, or within the next few weeks, the milk price at Aldi’s drops slightly and rises slightly at Price Chopper so that Aldi’s milk is again a few cents cheaper.

The end result?

Milk will still be up, way up.

I think the next twelve months will be economically very interesting, and I don’t mean that in a good way. I just hope you’re not living on a really tight grocery budget.

[For any really picky people out there, I may not have gotten all the milk prices correct down to the very cent. I’m working from memory.]

****

Having pontificated on such doom and gloom, I will finish with two mildly weird and anecdotal stories from my life.

Story One:

After getting that great deal on milk at Price Chopper, I was in the parking lot loading groceries into the car when I noticed an elderly lady headed in my direction, crossing from the CVS, and presumably heading toward the Price Chopper on the other side of me. People cross parking lots all the time, so my first instinct was to dismiss her from my mind. But something struck me as a little off. The back of my car was parked close to the front of another car, which didn’t leave much space to get through, and in any case people generally walk in the parking lot aisle, (not between the cars,) and will generally move to avoid someone loading stuff into their vehicle. Instead, this elderly lady was looking directly at me, and heading right toward me.

I keep loading my groceries, figuring I’m either just imagining it or else she just thinks I look funny, and in either case I’m not going to make an awkward situation by staring back. By that time she is practically upon me, and is still heading directly for me, and looking at me in that direct way that indicates someone who wishes to speak with you. So I turn around to ask her if there is anything I can do for her, supposing that perhaps she is in some type of distress and she was looking for me to give her aid.

Before I could open my mouth she warmly said, “So, how many children do you have?”

Uhhh . . . Brain freeze. Nothing like a question totally and completely out of the blue that you are in no way expecting. My first inclination is to ask back, “What made you ask that question?” Instead, I guess that the question was spurred by the amount of groceries I was putting into the trunk. So I say, “No. I don’t have any kids. I live with my ailing grandparents. I’m buying groceries for them. I buy all the groceries for the week at once, and Grandpa likes his desserts.” I figure that is enough of an explanation for the amount.

“Oh, that’s so very nice. God bless you,” she says, and continues on toward the grocery store.

It was a very odd encounter. The old lady seemed very kind and friendly, if rather nosy for asking such a question, so I didn’t think I just had a run-in with a stalker or child snatcher. But it did make me wonder if there was something about me that would spark such a question. After all, I was only buying a week’s worth of groceries for me, Grandma, and Grandpa. It wasn’t that many groceries. I could have been a young man with a wife or girlfriend and no kids, or some bachelor loading up on groceries for a weekend of partying with my friends. What would inspire someone to walk up to a complete stranger (a man no less!) and ask him how many little ones he has, when he doesn’t have a single kid with him?

I dunno. Maybe I exude some kind of domesticated fatherly charm that says I just must have several little tykes running about back home along with a lovely wife? I suppose that is better than exuding some kind of dangerous and deranged aura. Certainly, I’ve readily been mistaken as the father of my siblings–some of whom are no more than a few years younger than myself. I had always figured that had more to do with my facial hair, a feature that in the eyes of some people apparently adds twenty years to my real age. But this was the first time I was asked how many children I had when no children–young or old–were present.

Life is a little strange sometimes.

Story Two:

Talk about life being a little strange.

Every few weeks Grandma writes me out a check to cover groceries and other miscellaneous expenses. I then go to her bank and cash the check. This saves Grandma from being required to go out to the bank and withdrawing the money herself. So it was that last week found me waiting in line at the bank.

When my turn finally came I stepped up to one of the tellers with check and driver’s license (for ID purposes) and slid them across the counter. The teller picked them up and without so much as a pause looked at me and said, “You probably don’t remember me, but I know you from way back.”

Talk about unexpected. I am generally very bad at remembering names, but I’m generally pretty good at remembering faces, and this young lady sitting behind the counter was coming up as a complete blank. At that point my mind was working very fast, trying to flip through the faces of every young woman with whom I had even remotely come into contact, and still I didn’t have even a glimmer. I had an idea things were about to get very awkward. My feeling was along the lines of, “Lady, I don’t know who you think I am, but you’ve made a mistake. I can probably count all the young ladies that I know on one hand, and two of them are my sisters. I can probably count all the young ladies that might possibly remotely know my name on my other hand, and you’re not one of them. I don’t know who you are, and you’ve made a mistake. You don’t know me.”

Instead of being so blunt, I decided to get to the bottom of this by the process of elimination, so I asked, “From when do you know me?”

“I’m A.J.” she said, “And your parents used to go to the same church as my parents.”

Well, if we were talking about way back that was at least feasible, but it would have to be back to when I was six or under. In other words, A.J. was right–that long ago I wouldn’t know her, and I still wasn’t sure she really knew me.

So I asked, “What church?”

She gave the location of the church (which didn’t help the memories of the six year old me) and then mentioned another family that I still do know. At that point I became a little amazed and perplexed, because–as my family had indisputably gone to that church–it seemed the young teller did indeed know me from waaaay back. We’re talking twenty years ago. I was a little boy of about five years old then. How anyone can recognize a boy of five years of age in the man twenty years later after only 30 seconds of looking at his driver’s license is beyond me.

But, having been duly identified, I was obligated to exchange pleasantries with this complete stranger who knew me. A.J. tried to jog my memory by saying how her family had taken us to the zoo, but with no success. I do have memories from that time in my life, but apparently not of her family, or those events–or at least I wasn’t as good at adding twenty years to my memories and placing them with the young lady sitting in front of me. So it ended in the slightly awkward exchanges of:

“And so how are you?”

“Oh, I’m married and I have two kids now. And what are you doing these days?”

“Taking care of my grandparents. And I write when I can.”

So I departed, wondering at the strangeness of life and trying to fix A.J.’s name in my mind so on the next occasion I might ask my Mom exactly who was that woman?

Mom did remember them, and they did indeed take us to the zoo. After searching through her memory Mom said A.J. was probably five or seven years older than me, meaning she was ten or twelve years old at the time we knew them, which made me feel a little better about the fact that she remembered me so well, and I not her at all. Even so, I find it a little flabbergasting that she could recognize me after looking at my driver’s license for only thirty seconds and so smoothly introduce herself. When I expressed that surprise to A.J., she said, “Well, you do have an unusual name.” True, but I don’t know as I would remember the unusual name of some little boy or girl I knew when I was twelve–especially not twenty years later. And if somehow I did remember their name, and even somehow thought the person standing in front of me twenty years later might be the same person–I don’t think I would ever dare introduce myself.

I guess the world has all types of people, including those with such good memories, and such outgoing dispositions that they can smoothly introduce themselves to someone they last saw as a five-year-old kid.