The thin line between being glib and being profound is often not appreciated by those claiming to speak "the truth." This beautifully-written column describes this phenomenon. Enjoy.
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November 20, 2005
Lives
The Unwhole Truth
By LYDIA MILLET
It was during a winter of long, dreary parties to which the same people came week after week. My best friend and my boyfriend and I went to the parties hoping there would be new people, but there were always only the old people. And always, when I saw them again, my heart would sink at the realization that this party would be a thankless repetition of the last party, at which nothing of note occurred.
Passing in a crowded kitchen, these other guests and I would lift our drinks and grimace painfully, recalling how little we had to say to one another. I kept busy by pretending I had goals; I made a vector of purpose as I crossed a room, to discourage unwanted conversational sallies.
We stood in corners in an invisible fortress, my best friend, my boyfriend and I. The three of us had strong opinions and we had high standards - standards we ourselves rarely met.
"There are those analytical philosophers again," I might say, nodding at a group of three nebbish grad students at the window. "From that housewarming in Cobble Hill."
"Philosophers," my best friend would muse. "Were they even smart?"
My boyfriend shook his head grimly. "Actually, quite stupid."
Not that we meant to be snide. We meant to be honest. In a fallen world, a world of dire futures and world leaders less educated than bridge builders, one thing we could do for ourselves was be honest. We found solidarity in judgment.
Finally my friend started seeing someone, and the routine of dull, sarcastic weekends was broken. The new man was kind and did not feel the need to build invisible fortresses. It was the end of an era, and I suspect we were all privately glad.
And then one night my friend called me in tears. Her new boyfriend had suddenly ended it. Could I come to see her? Of course, I said, and went out into the cold with a bottle of wine.
I found her alone in her apartment, sobbing. We sat on the couch and wrapped blankets around ourselves and I alternated between patting her blanketed knee and rubbing her shoulder, in the awkward way people have when they know a comforting touch is called for but are feeling self-conscious.
"I just don't understand," said my friend, again and again. "It really seemed good."
I would pat more on the knee or the arm and try to say something different from what I said five minutes earlier. I wanted her to feel comforted; I wanted her to feel that the new and now-ex-boyfriend was wrong and more than that unworthy, and that I was the ambassador from the rest of the world, there to illuminate this for her with startling clarity.
As the evening wore on, we drank more wine and began to speak in generalities, getting in a few jabs at the new and now-ex-boyfriend; and finally there came a moment when she looked placid, if not exactly cheerful.
"I know it'll be fine eventually," she said softly. "I just don't feel like being by myself right now."
"Well," I said, leaning forward with what I imagine was a sage, world-weary face - rather premature since I was 26 - "think of it as a rehearsal. I mean, really, we all die alone."
She stared at me and started to cry again.
On the subway headed home I felt a sense of shame. I realized I had long clung to a simple axiom: say what comes into your head, for this is called honesty. Honesty was good; and if we were honest and therefore good, others would be good, too, and out of this honest conversation a miraculous truth would arise. But here I was, ashamed, alone and full of cheap wine and gazing at an ad for Dr. Jonathan Zizmor, scourge of pimples throughout the five boroughs. It occurred to me for the first time that truth was not the same as impulse.
This recognition was real but initially fleeting. Later my friend ribbed me for what I'd said. When her ribbing irked me, I retorted: "Well, it's true, isn't it? I mean, we all do die alone."
She shook her head and smiled. "Honey," she said, "true has nothing to do with it."
She said this with her usual calm forbearance, but in the turn of an instant I went away from youth. Being young I had needed judgment to make myself distinct; because honesty was the way to judgment, I said whatever came to me, thinking the speed and plenty of my words made them true. I'd confused honesty with expedience.
And the way to the future was illuminated. From now on the task would no longer be separation and difference, no longer the sculpturing of a self to be distinct from other selves. From now on the task would be to find happiness in a crowd.
Lydia Millet is the author of several novels. Her most recent is "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart."
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Sunday, November 20, 2005
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Having Good References
One of the challenges and great opportunities and even pleasures of having multiple blogs is the variety they offer.
Be sure to check my other blogs from time to time for a variety of good writing on many different subjects.
As the list of links to the right indicate, I have a blog about some of my favorite things and a blog for articles about the rebuilding of New Orleans (my ancestral home) and a blog about gardening issues.
These other blogs are mostly extraordinary articles written about a certain subject, with a brief introduction as to why I am posting it.
All it takes is one "click" to explore these articles.
Enjoy.
Be sure to check my other blogs from time to time for a variety of good writing on many different subjects.
As the list of links to the right indicate, I have a blog about some of my favorite things and a blog for articles about the rebuilding of New Orleans (my ancestral home) and a blog about gardening issues.
These other blogs are mostly extraordinary articles written about a certain subject, with a brief introduction as to why I am posting it.
All it takes is one "click" to explore these articles.
Enjoy.
Friday, November 18, 2005
Power in New Orleans
The New York Times
November 19, 2005
New Orleans Utility Struggles to Relight a City of Darkness
By GARY RIVLIN
NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 18 - From his temporary headquarters on the top floor of the Hyatt Regency here, Daniel F. Packer, the chief executive of Entergy New Orleans, has a perfect vantage point for viewing the problem confronting his beleaguered utility company: lights twinkling in dozens of neighborhoods, but darkness spread across 40 percent of the city.
Those vast stretches of New Orleans without access to electrical power represent the magnitude of work the utility must perform before the city can recover. Nearly three months after Hurricane Katrina, the afflicted areas include not only devastated sections of town like the Lower Ninth Ward but also neighborhoods that suffered relatively little water and wind damage.
To be sure, it is not just a lack of electrical power that is hindering the city's revival. Almost half of New Orleans lacks natural gas for cooking or heating, according to Entergy, even as temperatures here have fallen sharply in recent days, dipping below 40 degrees at night. Toilets in roughly half the homes are still not connected to the city's sewer system, municipal officials say. About a quarter of the city is still without drinkable water, they say, and some isolated patches have no running water at all, a circumstance that could prove disastrous in the event of a fire.
Still, no other ingredient is quite so critical to the recovery as power. And even in areas where the electricity or gas is back on, some customers have to wait for a city inspector's approval before getting it. The city requires such approval of any home or workplace that suffered wind or water damage from the storm, and several members of the City Council acknowledged that an inspector's arrival could take weeks.
"We're trying to get the city up and running so we have a viable tax base," Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell told Entergy officials this week at a meeting of the Council's Utilities Committee.
Under pressure from the Council and residents, Entergy has developed a plan to be providing electricity to at least 80 percent of customers by year's end, and gas services to 80 percent by mid-January.
But the company declines to attach a target date to the restoration of power in areas "too devastated to even make a reliable prediction," Mr. Packer said. That includes parts of the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East, two predominantly black areas of the city, and Lakeview, a largely white middle-class community.
In the period immediately after the hurricane, Entergy encountered the ordinary post-storm headaches, like downed power lines and fallen utility poles, and also the extraordinary, including the severe damage that was done to substations when floodwaters covered much of the city. More than half of the utility's 42 substations in the metropolitan area were flooded, Mr. Packer said, along with two of its power plants.
So in the first weeks after the storm, Entergy brought in scores of extra workers to help repair its crippled system and, Mr. Packer said, was soon "ahead of the game." Then, on Sept. 23, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and at that point terminated all its contracts for outside workers.
Entergy had had "all this power available to people living in certain areas," but, with much of the city deserted, "there wasn't anyone here to take it," Mr. Packer said. And because of all the work, "we were burning cash at a time we couldn't afford to."
The utility's repair crew of roughly 200 workers, about evenly divided between electric and gas repairs, also had to contend with the damage the storm had inflicted on the maze of gas pipes that crisscross the city. The water that rushed into those pipes has been one large obstacle confronting Entergy workers as they labor to return gas service; pipes that cracked when buffeted by the floodwaters have been another.
The estimated cost of repairs to the utility's infrastructure is $260 million to $325 million, Mr. Packer said. Insurance will cover a part of that loss, but it remains unclear how much - or how the company will pay for the rest as it struggles to replace lost revenue.
"They're suffering from this double whammy," said Clinton A. Vince, a lawyer with Sullivan & Worcester in Washington who works as a consultant to the City Council's Utilities Committee. "They have these enormous recovery costs, but they don't have the customer base to cover it."
That base has been made all the smaller because many of the customers who would now be receiving power simply have not returned to New Orleans. Only about 30 percent of Entergy's electricity customers are now drawing power. For gas customers, the figure is less than 20 percent.
"To be without 70 percent of your electricity and gas customers more than 80 days after a storm is an unprecedented occurrence in the utility industry," said Curt Hébert, an executive vice president with Entergy New Orleans's parent, the Entergy Corporation, the country's fifth-largest power company.
The Entergy Corporation posted $350 million in profits in the three months ended Sept. 30, a 24 percent increase over the corresponding period last year. But company officials say regulators prohibit them from using money from any of its four other utilities to bail out the fifth. Entergy has granted its New Orleans subsidiary a $200 million line of credit, but the loan must be repaid.
Mr. Packer, the Entergy New Orleans chief executive, has made at least three trips to Washington, one this week, to meet with White House officials and members of Congress. He is in search of a $450 million bailout, for infrastructure repair and the expected amount of revenue loss, that is similar to the relief package requested by the New York power provider Consolidated Edison after the Sept. 11 attacks. (Con Ed asked Washington for $350 million and has so far received $93 million.) Mr. Packer's pleas, and those of the City Council members who have joined him, have elicited sympathy but as yet no dollars.
Without federal relief, Mr. Packer and others say, the utility may have to raise its rates 140 percent.
"We're not asking for anything different from what the folks in Manhattan got after the tragedy of 9/11," Mr. Hébert said.
Mr. Packer also warned that if relief did not come soon, the city might have no choice but to take over the company. That might seem good news for consumers, he said, but the utility would no longer have the buying power it enjoys in the energy market as part of a large conglomerate .
Several weeks ago, Entergy announced that large parts of the city would not have electrical service until mid-2006. The resulting roar of complaints spurred the company to shift strategy. On Thursday, the City Council approved an Entergy plan to use $11.2 million that had been earmarked for other purposes, including $6.8 million in a fund devoted to improving customers' energy efficiency. The extra money will allow the company to more than double the size of its repair crews.
###
November 19, 2005
New Orleans Utility Struggles to Relight a City of Darkness
By GARY RIVLIN
NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 18 - From his temporary headquarters on the top floor of the Hyatt Regency here, Daniel F. Packer, the chief executive of Entergy New Orleans, has a perfect vantage point for viewing the problem confronting his beleaguered utility company: lights twinkling in dozens of neighborhoods, but darkness spread across 40 percent of the city.
Those vast stretches of New Orleans without access to electrical power represent the magnitude of work the utility must perform before the city can recover. Nearly three months after Hurricane Katrina, the afflicted areas include not only devastated sections of town like the Lower Ninth Ward but also neighborhoods that suffered relatively little water and wind damage.
To be sure, it is not just a lack of electrical power that is hindering the city's revival. Almost half of New Orleans lacks natural gas for cooking or heating, according to Entergy, even as temperatures here have fallen sharply in recent days, dipping below 40 degrees at night. Toilets in roughly half the homes are still not connected to the city's sewer system, municipal officials say. About a quarter of the city is still without drinkable water, they say, and some isolated patches have no running water at all, a circumstance that could prove disastrous in the event of a fire.
Still, no other ingredient is quite so critical to the recovery as power. And even in areas where the electricity or gas is back on, some customers have to wait for a city inspector's approval before getting it. The city requires such approval of any home or workplace that suffered wind or water damage from the storm, and several members of the City Council acknowledged that an inspector's arrival could take weeks.
"We're trying to get the city up and running so we have a viable tax base," Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell told Entergy officials this week at a meeting of the Council's Utilities Committee.
Under pressure from the Council and residents, Entergy has developed a plan to be providing electricity to at least 80 percent of customers by year's end, and gas services to 80 percent by mid-January.
But the company declines to attach a target date to the restoration of power in areas "too devastated to even make a reliable prediction," Mr. Packer said. That includes parts of the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East, two predominantly black areas of the city, and Lakeview, a largely white middle-class community.
In the period immediately after the hurricane, Entergy encountered the ordinary post-storm headaches, like downed power lines and fallen utility poles, and also the extraordinary, including the severe damage that was done to substations when floodwaters covered much of the city. More than half of the utility's 42 substations in the metropolitan area were flooded, Mr. Packer said, along with two of its power plants.
So in the first weeks after the storm, Entergy brought in scores of extra workers to help repair its crippled system and, Mr. Packer said, was soon "ahead of the game." Then, on Sept. 23, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and at that point terminated all its contracts for outside workers.
Entergy had had "all this power available to people living in certain areas," but, with much of the city deserted, "there wasn't anyone here to take it," Mr. Packer said. And because of all the work, "we were burning cash at a time we couldn't afford to."
The utility's repair crew of roughly 200 workers, about evenly divided between electric and gas repairs, also had to contend with the damage the storm had inflicted on the maze of gas pipes that crisscross the city. The water that rushed into those pipes has been one large obstacle confronting Entergy workers as they labor to return gas service; pipes that cracked when buffeted by the floodwaters have been another.
The estimated cost of repairs to the utility's infrastructure is $260 million to $325 million, Mr. Packer said. Insurance will cover a part of that loss, but it remains unclear how much - or how the company will pay for the rest as it struggles to replace lost revenue.
"They're suffering from this double whammy," said Clinton A. Vince, a lawyer with Sullivan & Worcester in Washington who works as a consultant to the City Council's Utilities Committee. "They have these enormous recovery costs, but they don't have the customer base to cover it."
That base has been made all the smaller because many of the customers who would now be receiving power simply have not returned to New Orleans. Only about 30 percent of Entergy's electricity customers are now drawing power. For gas customers, the figure is less than 20 percent.
"To be without 70 percent of your electricity and gas customers more than 80 days after a storm is an unprecedented occurrence in the utility industry," said Curt Hébert, an executive vice president with Entergy New Orleans's parent, the Entergy Corporation, the country's fifth-largest power company.
The Entergy Corporation posted $350 million in profits in the three months ended Sept. 30, a 24 percent increase over the corresponding period last year. But company officials say regulators prohibit them from using money from any of its four other utilities to bail out the fifth. Entergy has granted its New Orleans subsidiary a $200 million line of credit, but the loan must be repaid.
Mr. Packer, the Entergy New Orleans chief executive, has made at least three trips to Washington, one this week, to meet with White House officials and members of Congress. He is in search of a $450 million bailout, for infrastructure repair and the expected amount of revenue loss, that is similar to the relief package requested by the New York power provider Consolidated Edison after the Sept. 11 attacks. (Con Ed asked Washington for $350 million and has so far received $93 million.) Mr. Packer's pleas, and those of the City Council members who have joined him, have elicited sympathy but as yet no dollars.
Without federal relief, Mr. Packer and others say, the utility may have to raise its rates 140 percent.
"We're not asking for anything different from what the folks in Manhattan got after the tragedy of 9/11," Mr. Hébert said.
Mr. Packer also warned that if relief did not come soon, the city might have no choice but to take over the company. That might seem good news for consumers, he said, but the utility would no longer have the buying power it enjoys in the energy market as part of a large conglomerate .
Several weeks ago, Entergy announced that large parts of the city would not have electrical service until mid-2006. The resulting roar of complaints spurred the company to shift strategy. On Thursday, the City Council approved an Entergy plan to use $11.2 million that had been earmarked for other purposes, including $6.8 million in a fund devoted to improving customers' energy efficiency. The extra money will allow the company to more than double the size of its repair crews.
###
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Save the Horse Farm
SAVE THE HORSE FARM!
The most beautiful Green Space remaining in our city, the former UL Lafayette Horse Farm on Johnston Street, is presently scheduled for rezoning and commercial development. Unless the caring and creative citizens of Lafayette step forward immediately, one of the last remaining gems in our urban landscape will merge with the commercial blight of Johnston Street. We have now begun the dialogue concerning our community vision and how to achieve it.
As a group of concerned Lafayette citizens and UL students, we would like to encourage the Lafayette and UL communities participation in creating alternatives to the commercial development of the UL Horse
Farm, a tax-payer owned property. We would like to achieve consensus in a plan that would accomodate every party’s needs - UL, the surrounding neighborhoods, and the citizens of Lafayette.
In order to facilitate public participation in this process, we would like to extend an invitation to all community members, UL administration, city officials and UL students to attend a series of round-table discussions on these issues. These meetings will be held Thursday, weekly upstairs in the UL Union Laginappe Room at 5:30.
This is an opportunity for Lafayette citizens to create the city that we live in. We know what we want our city to look like - lets work together to make it happen.
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO
WRITE: a personal statement about the value of this Green Space to our community and mail to:
Zoning Commission, c/o Jim Parker
220 West Willow Street, Building B
Lafayette, LA 70502
EMAIL: jparker@lafayettegov.net
FAX : 291-8492
(NOTE: your comments will be given to commission members)
SHOW UP at the Zoning Commission meeting:
Monday, December 5th at 5 pm
at City Hall
SIGN THE PETITION
Please include your address on the petition to verify that the undersigned are from Lafayette! Names without addresses may not be counted in the final total!
CONTACT YOUR COUNCILMEN
RELATED NEWS ARTICLES
The Daily Advertiser : University to Sell Former Farm Site
The Daily Advertiser : UL Deal Includes Land Swap
The Advocate : ULL Offers Some Details of Land Deal
The Independent : Cold Shoulder
The Daily Advertiser: Students Fight to Save Green Acreage
The Independent : Suspect Swap
Ragin Pagin Sticky Post About the Horse Farm
The Daily Advertiser : UL Farm Supporters Meet to Oppose Development
The Advocate : Foes Discuss ULL Land Swap
The Independent: Horse Play
Community Meetings
ALL meetings are Thursdays at 5:30pm in the Lagniappe Room at the UL Union. The dates of the meetings are as follows:
October 27th
November 3rd
November 10th
November 17th
TUESDAY November 22nd
NOT November 24th (Thanksgiving)
December 1st
ALL meetings are open to the general public and the student body! Public participation is important!
If you would like to get involved or learn more, please contact
horsefarm@gmail.com.
GET “SAVE THE HORSE FARM” STUFF!
For T-Shirts, call Danica at (337)235-6149
For Yard Signs and Bumper Stickers, call EB at (337)781-9766
Get the word out! We appreciate your support.
*
*
Committees and Contact Information
o City Councilmen Contact Information
o City/Parish Zoning Commission Members
o Community Vision / City Planning
o Democracy
o Environmental
o Fundraising/Alternate Planning
o Media
o Rezoning
o University Expansion / ROTC Use
Download the Flyer
Download the Petition
Save the Horse Farm
The most beautiful Green Space remaining in our city, the former UL Lafayette Horse Farm on Johnston Street, is presently scheduled for rezoning and commercial development. Unless the caring and creative citizens of Lafayette step forward immediately, one of the last remaining gems in our urban landscape will merge with the commercial blight of Johnston Street. We have now begun the dialogue concerning our community vision and how to achieve it.
As a group of concerned Lafayette citizens and UL students, we would like to encourage the Lafayette and UL communities participation in creating alternatives to the commercial development of the UL Horse
Farm, a tax-payer owned property. We would like to achieve consensus in a plan that would accomodate every party’s needs - UL, the surrounding neighborhoods, and the citizens of Lafayette.
In order to facilitate public participation in this process, we would like to extend an invitation to all community members, UL administration, city officials and UL students to attend a series of round-table discussions on these issues. These meetings will be held Thursday, weekly upstairs in the UL Union Laginappe Room at 5:30.
This is an opportunity for Lafayette citizens to create the city that we live in. We know what we want our city to look like - lets work together to make it happen.
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO
WRITE: a personal statement about the value of this Green Space to our community and mail to:
Zoning Commission, c/o Jim Parker
220 West Willow Street, Building B
Lafayette, LA 70502
EMAIL: jparker@lafayettegov.net
FAX : 291-8492
(NOTE: your comments will be given to commission members)
SHOW UP at the Zoning Commission meeting:
Monday, December 5th at 5 pm
at City Hall
SIGN THE PETITION
Please include your address on the petition to verify that the undersigned are from Lafayette! Names without addresses may not be counted in the final total!
CONTACT YOUR COUNCILMEN
RELATED NEWS ARTICLES
The Daily Advertiser : University to Sell Former Farm Site
The Daily Advertiser : UL Deal Includes Land Swap
The Advocate : ULL Offers Some Details of Land Deal
The Independent : Cold Shoulder
The Daily Advertiser: Students Fight to Save Green Acreage
The Independent : Suspect Swap
Ragin Pagin Sticky Post About the Horse Farm
The Daily Advertiser : UL Farm Supporters Meet to Oppose Development
The Advocate : Foes Discuss ULL Land Swap
The Independent: Horse Play
Community Meetings
ALL meetings are Thursdays at 5:30pm in the Lagniappe Room at the UL Union. The dates of the meetings are as follows:
October 27th
November 3rd
November 10th
November 17th
TUESDAY November 22nd
NOT November 24th (Thanksgiving)
December 1st
ALL meetings are open to the general public and the student body! Public participation is important!
If you would like to get involved or learn more, please contact
horsefarm@gmail.com.
GET “SAVE THE HORSE FARM” STUFF!
For T-Shirts, call Danica at (337)235-6149
For Yard Signs and Bumper Stickers, call EB at (337)781-9766
Get the word out! We appreciate your support.
*
*
Committees and Contact Information
o City Councilmen Contact Information
o City/Parish Zoning Commission Members
o Community Vision / City Planning
o Democracy
o Environmental
o Fundraising/Alternate Planning
o Media
o Rezoning
o University Expansion / ROTC Use
Download the Flyer
Download the Petition
Save the Horse Farm
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Local Flavor
"Localism alone can lead to culture." - William Carlos Williams
Over the past several months, I have frequented several local events throughout Acadiana that were all extraordinary in one way or the other - but that may, I hope, become quite commonplace among even more local cities and towns of every size, from Lafayette's 250,000+ hurricane-boosted population to Maurice's few hundred.
Among these events were :
1. Farmers' Markets
2. Productions of plays
3. Fairs and Festivals
In each of these towns, from Crowley to Rayne to New Iberia to St Martinville to Breaux Bridge to Abbeville to Eunice to Opelousas to Grand Coteau to Lafayette at the center of it all to others in between and too numerous to mention, there was a positive spirit that was visible, palpable, breathable, tasteable, hearable and touchable.
Neither force of nature (recent hurricanes) nor force of negative personality (blame seekers) could diminish what was natyurally present in the hearts, minds, and most importantnly, souls of those who peopled these events, from the unselfish planners to those who attended.
This Thanksgiving, simply look around you if you need a reason to be thankful.
We are a remarkable people, those of us who live in Acadiana, and God Bless each and every one of you for the way you behaved and continue to behave as we continue to recover from the various challenges thrown at us.
As someone who's recently returned from another part of the country and resettled in this my home area, I feel more than ever as Dorothy felt in the Emerald City : There's No Place Like Home.
Over the past several months, I have frequented several local events throughout Acadiana that were all extraordinary in one way or the other - but that may, I hope, become quite commonplace among even more local cities and towns of every size, from Lafayette's 250,000+ hurricane-boosted population to Maurice's few hundred.
Among these events were :
1. Farmers' Markets
2. Productions of plays
3. Fairs and Festivals
In each of these towns, from Crowley to Rayne to New Iberia to St Martinville to Breaux Bridge to Abbeville to Eunice to Opelousas to Grand Coteau to Lafayette at the center of it all to others in between and too numerous to mention, there was a positive spirit that was visible, palpable, breathable, tasteable, hearable and touchable.
Neither force of nature (recent hurricanes) nor force of negative personality (blame seekers) could diminish what was natyurally present in the hearts, minds, and most importantnly, souls of those who peopled these events, from the unselfish planners to those who attended.
This Thanksgiving, simply look around you if you need a reason to be thankful.
We are a remarkable people, those of us who live in Acadiana, and God Bless each and every one of you for the way you behaved and continue to behave as we continue to recover from the various challenges thrown at us.
As someone who's recently returned from another part of the country and resettled in this my home area, I feel more than ever as Dorothy felt in the Emerald City : There's No Place Like Home.
Monday, November 14, 2005
What is Charity ?
The New York Times
November 14, 2005
What Is Charity?
By STEPHANIE STROM
ACROSS the country, nonprofit leaders who battle poverty saw hope in Hurricane Katrina, which starkly illustrated how even something as evenhanded as a natural disaster can discriminate against the have-nots.
"Suddenly, everyone was talking about poor people," said Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, a former nun who has devoted herself to the poor as a public official and is now a charity executive. "It seemed to dawn on everyone that we didn't win the war on poverty."
Yet, among the many who had been turning away from Americans most in need of charity was the philanthropic sector itself. Last year, the share of giving going to organizations most directly related to helping the poor hit a record low, accounting for less than 10 percent of the $248 billion donated by Americans and their philanthropic institutions.
Adjusted for inflation, gifts to health groups have almost tripled over the last four decades, and those to educational institutions have risen almost fourfold, while donations to human services groups are up only 28 percent.
Other statistics also suggest that the nonprofit sector has drifted from core notions of charity. Nonprofit hospitals provide no more charity care than taxpaying counterparts do. While university assets soar, tuition continues to outpace inflation. Only a sliver of giving to churches is spent on social services. Last year, of the 14 gifts that exceeded $100 million, only one - a $1.5 billion bequest to the Salvation Army from Joan B. Kroc, the widow of the founder of McDonald's - went to a human services organization, Forbes magazine says.
"In general, philanthropy seems to have stopped talking about poverty and race," said Jan Masaoka, executive director of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, which tries to strengthen charities. Small groups still get funding, but the sector "in some ways has retreated from taking on poverty in a larger-scale, more direct way."
So what is charity today if it is not aimed primarily at the have-nots? Has its definition been stretched so broadly that it no longer has meaning? If so, are the tax breaks that propel our philanthropy justified? Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California, the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, has raised those questions in a series of hearings examining whether tax exemption is justified for certain types of nonprofits.
The question, in his words, is, "What is the taxpayer getting in return for the tens of billions of dollars per year in tax subsidy" offered to donors through tax write-offs or to nonprofits through their tax exemptions? According to the Treasury Department, the charitable deduction will amount this year to a $40 billion tax subsidy, mostly to upper-income households - overshadowing the roughly $20 billion the human services sector is likely to raise. No official estimates exist for the cost of the tax exemption covering money that nonprofits spend and for the property they own.
The hearings have received little public notice but have terrified nonprofit leaders, more than a Senate Finance Committee threat to tighten regulation of charities.
"When you start to ask what is the fundamental underlying rationale for tax exemption and the charitable deduction for donors, it leads to questions that are far more difficult to answer than questions about greater disclosure and better governance," said John D. Colombo, a tax-law professor at the University of Illinois who testified before Rep. Thomas. "It gets you to questions like, why should an institution with billions in the bank get tax exemption?"
Relieving the plight of the poor is the bedrock of charity, dating as far back as when the Roman Empire became Christian, and donations that had honored the gods were instead aimed at the underprivileged. But the English code that grew into the foundation for laws governing nonprofit organizations, the 1601 Statute of Charitable Uses, better known as the Statute of Elizabeth, defined charity's purposes much more broadly, covering everything from bridge repairs and the education of orphans to the "marriage of poor maids." From this seed grew the current vibrant nonprofit sector, and the murkiness that now equates a university with a multibillion-dollar endowment with a local Boys and Girls Club.
"We simply don't have a coherent rationale for what it is we call charity," Professor Colombo said. "So we have these vastly different sorts of organizations doing vastly different things and calling it charity."
Representative Thomas and others are particularly vexed by nonprofit hospitals, often noting that data from the American Hospital Association calculated that their average spending on uncompensated care was 4.4 percent of their costs in 2002, compared with 4.5 percent for their commercial cousins.
Representative Charles Rangel of New York, the senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, has asked whether a better target may be universities, which sit on tens of billions of dollars in assets while tuition increases are outpacing inflation.
Of course, some portion of contributions made to health, education and religious institutions, which are the recipients of most philanthropy, do benefit the poor. Universities provide tuition assistance to students from low-income families, medical research can alleviate problems like asthma, which is a particular issue for the poor, and churches engage in a variety of activities to help the needy.
Experts say, however, that the money trickling down that far is usually quite limited. "There is a big debate about how much of the giving in those sectors eventually flows to charity, as in day care centers, family counseling, drug abuse counseling and after-school youth programs," said Lester M. Salamon, director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University. "I'm not for a really narrow definition of charity, but at the end of the day, it's distressing that human services attracts such a small slice of overall giving."
Research by Mark Chaves, a sociology professor at the University of Arizona who was principal investigator of the 1998 National Congregations Study, the first comprehensive study of churches and their spending, showed that less than 3 percent of the average congregation's total budget was spent on social services.
The average university spent 4.8 percent of its endowment on its operations last year, according to the 2005 Commonfund Benchmark Study, an annual look at education endowments. But its return on investments increased 14.7 percent. At Harvard University's current rate of growth, its endowment will be larger than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest foundation, in three years. And while Harvard increased its spending last year on financial aid for undergraduates to $80 million a year, that figure represents less than .5 percent of its $22 billion endowment, and only about 2 percent of the approximately $4 billion it earned last year on its investments.
"For the past 15 to 20 years, educational institutions have been funded primarily by tuition and fees, not donations," Professor Colombo said. "We're conditioned to think of them as charities, but they aren't."
Not surprisingly, leaders of nonprofit institutions take exception to the criticisms being aired in Congress. In a statement submitted to the Ways and Means Committee, the Alliance for Advancing Nonprofit Hospitals called the figures on charitable care a "cursory" analysis that missed crucial differences with commercial hospitals. Sheldon Steinbach, the general counsel of the American Council on Education, called the focus on endowments "an easy cheap shot." Universities, he said, may be legally prohibited from spending their endowments to reduce the costs of college.
But beyond the question of what large institutions do with their money is another debate: why donors are giving less to charities focused on America's poor.
Many of the biggest foundations fighting poverty have turned their focus overseas. The Gates Foundation, for instance, has given more than $5 billion for health issues abroad. But it also does work at home. It has spent heavily around the country on education, particularly at high schools, and in the Pacific Northwest donated $556 million to food banks, transitional housing for homeless families, shelters for battered women and other human services. Greg Shaw, who oversees the group's giving in that region, sees a link in these different spheres. "The one thing that really cuts across all areas of our giving is inequity," he said.
What's more, the foundation has a category it calls "special projects," $562 million dispensed solely at the discretion of the Gateses themselves. While part of that money has gone to universities, much of it has been given to groups like the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law and the Society of St. Vincent De Paul.
When it comes to raising money directly, most human services groups have weak fund-raising operations, if any, and their board members typically lack the resources of those who serve as trustees of universities or museums.
Their missions also hamper their fund-raising efforts. "You can build compassion for certain things, but there are things we work with like substance abuse, child abuse and domestic violence that the average donor just can't relate to," Ms. Barrios-Paoli, the former nun, said.
Ms. Barrios-Paoli is the executive director of Safe Space, a charity that operates group homes for foster children, services for abused children and health and mental health services for poor families in New York City. It holds two benefits a year, generating $70,000 to $80,000 each, a fraction of what most private schools in Manhattan raise at a single similar event. It has one fund-raising executive and two other employees who solicit grants from foundations.
Over all, private donations account for roughly 3 percent of Safe Space's $18.5 million budget. The rest comes from contracts it has with the state and local governments.
Its board members are professionals who contribute what they can, but it does not require them to give a minimum amount each year like many of the city's more elite charities do. "They're great, very dedicated and committed, but it's not the board of the Met," Ms. Barrios-Paoli said, referring to the Metropolitan Opera, whose board includes one Forbes 400 member, the wives of two others and the son of another.
Ms. Barrios-Paoli listed the benefits of being a Met board member, from special seats to audiences with Placido Domingo. "All I can offer my board is a tour of a foster home or a community kitchen," she said.
James S. Tisch, president and chief executive of the Loews Corporation, whose family cuts a wide swath in philanthropic circles, agreed. "That's always part of it, putting together a board and creating an aura that it's a group that other people want to be part of," he said. "Museums have done that very well, and hospitals."
Mr. Tisch is a trustee at Mount Sinai Hospital, where his family has given enough money to have its name on a building, but he has also served on the board of FEGS, a cluster of charities offering a range of social services, for more than two decades.
FEGS, like Safe Spaces, is mostly supported by income from government contracts, and Mr. Tisch cited that as the biggest reason giving to human services has shrunk. "Why should a philanthropist pay if the government will?" he asked.
The federal budget for health and human services rose 183 percent, adjusted for inflation, to $459.4 billion in 2002 from $68.3 billion in 1980, according to research by Patrick Rooney, director of research at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
Nonprofit leaders counter that they have been forced to seek more government support as donations have declined. "It becomes a chicken and egg kind of thing," said Peter B. Goldberg, chief executive of Alliance for Families and Children, which represents more than 300 family service groups nationwide. "I'd argue that my agencies have become increasingly dependent on public sector funding because nongovernmental funding simply hasn't kept pace."
One reason for that failure, Mr. Goldberg says, is the increased demand by donors for proof of some return on their dollars. "This is a tremendous challenge for human services," he said. "We don't have good ways of measuring what we do, yet that's what donors want from us."
The few social service agencies that have found ways of demonstrating the benefits of their services get at least some positive responses. Lifetrack Resources Inc., a Minnesota nonprofit that helps poor families, has increased the portion of its budget underwritten by donations. Terry Anderson, its vice president for development, attributes some of the growth to its increasing reliance on metrics to prove its success.
Using a 42-year study of the effect of preschool programs on children who are developmentally delayed because of abuse or neglect, Lifetrack calculates that every dollar invested in its own preschool program produces a $17 return in services the children will not need in the future.
Similarly, for every dollar spent on employment services, Lifetrack says it saves the public $2.34 that would have been spent on welfare, not to mention the increase in tax revenue generated by the people it helps to find work.
"This kind of metric is becoming part of our brand, and it came as a result of our board asking why we weren't looking at ourselves that way," Ms. Anderson said.
Ms. Anderson was hired by Lifetrack in 1987 to increase support from foundations and corporations, which totals about 6 percent of its $10 million budget. Recently she has turned her attention to individual donors, whose contributions have doubled over the last couple of years, but only to $70,000.
"If there's one thing that's true, it's that people give to people because they have a personal connection to the place they're giving to, and people who have personal connections to human service organizations are not usually people with money, " Ms. Anderson said.
That assertion is supported by demographic data showing that older donors, particularly women, have been the biggest supporters of groups helping the poor, said Robert F. Sharpe, a fund-raising consultant. Those donors are dying out, he said, and the emerging generation of baby boomer donors is less likely to support social service organizations. "People who grew up in comfortable, clean, prosperous suburbs have just never had as much familiarity with how many others live," Mr. Sharpe said.
"Many commentators talked about how the Katrina disaster pulled back the curtain and exposed the extent of poverty that exists in many American communities," he said. "Perhaps one effect of that may be renewed interest among younger Americans in organizations that are working to meet the needs of the poor and otherwise disadvantaged among us."
###
November 14, 2005
What Is Charity?
By STEPHANIE STROM
ACROSS the country, nonprofit leaders who battle poverty saw hope in Hurricane Katrina, which starkly illustrated how even something as evenhanded as a natural disaster can discriminate against the have-nots.
"Suddenly, everyone was talking about poor people," said Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, a former nun who has devoted herself to the poor as a public official and is now a charity executive. "It seemed to dawn on everyone that we didn't win the war on poverty."
Yet, among the many who had been turning away from Americans most in need of charity was the philanthropic sector itself. Last year, the share of giving going to organizations most directly related to helping the poor hit a record low, accounting for less than 10 percent of the $248 billion donated by Americans and their philanthropic institutions.
Adjusted for inflation, gifts to health groups have almost tripled over the last four decades, and those to educational institutions have risen almost fourfold, while donations to human services groups are up only 28 percent.
Other statistics also suggest that the nonprofit sector has drifted from core notions of charity. Nonprofit hospitals provide no more charity care than taxpaying counterparts do. While university assets soar, tuition continues to outpace inflation. Only a sliver of giving to churches is spent on social services. Last year, of the 14 gifts that exceeded $100 million, only one - a $1.5 billion bequest to the Salvation Army from Joan B. Kroc, the widow of the founder of McDonald's - went to a human services organization, Forbes magazine says.
"In general, philanthropy seems to have stopped talking about poverty and race," said Jan Masaoka, executive director of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, which tries to strengthen charities. Small groups still get funding, but the sector "in some ways has retreated from taking on poverty in a larger-scale, more direct way."
So what is charity today if it is not aimed primarily at the have-nots? Has its definition been stretched so broadly that it no longer has meaning? If so, are the tax breaks that propel our philanthropy justified? Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California, the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, has raised those questions in a series of hearings examining whether tax exemption is justified for certain types of nonprofits.
The question, in his words, is, "What is the taxpayer getting in return for the tens of billions of dollars per year in tax subsidy" offered to donors through tax write-offs or to nonprofits through their tax exemptions? According to the Treasury Department, the charitable deduction will amount this year to a $40 billion tax subsidy, mostly to upper-income households - overshadowing the roughly $20 billion the human services sector is likely to raise. No official estimates exist for the cost of the tax exemption covering money that nonprofits spend and for the property they own.
The hearings have received little public notice but have terrified nonprofit leaders, more than a Senate Finance Committee threat to tighten regulation of charities.
"When you start to ask what is the fundamental underlying rationale for tax exemption and the charitable deduction for donors, it leads to questions that are far more difficult to answer than questions about greater disclosure and better governance," said John D. Colombo, a tax-law professor at the University of Illinois who testified before Rep. Thomas. "It gets you to questions like, why should an institution with billions in the bank get tax exemption?"
Relieving the plight of the poor is the bedrock of charity, dating as far back as when the Roman Empire became Christian, and donations that had honored the gods were instead aimed at the underprivileged. But the English code that grew into the foundation for laws governing nonprofit organizations, the 1601 Statute of Charitable Uses, better known as the Statute of Elizabeth, defined charity's purposes much more broadly, covering everything from bridge repairs and the education of orphans to the "marriage of poor maids." From this seed grew the current vibrant nonprofit sector, and the murkiness that now equates a university with a multibillion-dollar endowment with a local Boys and Girls Club.
"We simply don't have a coherent rationale for what it is we call charity," Professor Colombo said. "So we have these vastly different sorts of organizations doing vastly different things and calling it charity."
Representative Thomas and others are particularly vexed by nonprofit hospitals, often noting that data from the American Hospital Association calculated that their average spending on uncompensated care was 4.4 percent of their costs in 2002, compared with 4.5 percent for their commercial cousins.
Representative Charles Rangel of New York, the senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, has asked whether a better target may be universities, which sit on tens of billions of dollars in assets while tuition increases are outpacing inflation.
Of course, some portion of contributions made to health, education and religious institutions, which are the recipients of most philanthropy, do benefit the poor. Universities provide tuition assistance to students from low-income families, medical research can alleviate problems like asthma, which is a particular issue for the poor, and churches engage in a variety of activities to help the needy.
Experts say, however, that the money trickling down that far is usually quite limited. "There is a big debate about how much of the giving in those sectors eventually flows to charity, as in day care centers, family counseling, drug abuse counseling and after-school youth programs," said Lester M. Salamon, director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University. "I'm not for a really narrow definition of charity, but at the end of the day, it's distressing that human services attracts such a small slice of overall giving."
Research by Mark Chaves, a sociology professor at the University of Arizona who was principal investigator of the 1998 National Congregations Study, the first comprehensive study of churches and their spending, showed that less than 3 percent of the average congregation's total budget was spent on social services.
The average university spent 4.8 percent of its endowment on its operations last year, according to the 2005 Commonfund Benchmark Study, an annual look at education endowments. But its return on investments increased 14.7 percent. At Harvard University's current rate of growth, its endowment will be larger than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest foundation, in three years. And while Harvard increased its spending last year on financial aid for undergraduates to $80 million a year, that figure represents less than .5 percent of its $22 billion endowment, and only about 2 percent of the approximately $4 billion it earned last year on its investments.
"For the past 15 to 20 years, educational institutions have been funded primarily by tuition and fees, not donations," Professor Colombo said. "We're conditioned to think of them as charities, but they aren't."
Not surprisingly, leaders of nonprofit institutions take exception to the criticisms being aired in Congress. In a statement submitted to the Ways and Means Committee, the Alliance for Advancing Nonprofit Hospitals called the figures on charitable care a "cursory" analysis that missed crucial differences with commercial hospitals. Sheldon Steinbach, the general counsel of the American Council on Education, called the focus on endowments "an easy cheap shot." Universities, he said, may be legally prohibited from spending their endowments to reduce the costs of college.
But beyond the question of what large institutions do with their money is another debate: why donors are giving less to charities focused on America's poor.
Many of the biggest foundations fighting poverty have turned their focus overseas. The Gates Foundation, for instance, has given more than $5 billion for health issues abroad. But it also does work at home. It has spent heavily around the country on education, particularly at high schools, and in the Pacific Northwest donated $556 million to food banks, transitional housing for homeless families, shelters for battered women and other human services. Greg Shaw, who oversees the group's giving in that region, sees a link in these different spheres. "The one thing that really cuts across all areas of our giving is inequity," he said.
What's more, the foundation has a category it calls "special projects," $562 million dispensed solely at the discretion of the Gateses themselves. While part of that money has gone to universities, much of it has been given to groups like the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law and the Society of St. Vincent De Paul.
When it comes to raising money directly, most human services groups have weak fund-raising operations, if any, and their board members typically lack the resources of those who serve as trustees of universities or museums.
Their missions also hamper their fund-raising efforts. "You can build compassion for certain things, but there are things we work with like substance abuse, child abuse and domestic violence that the average donor just can't relate to," Ms. Barrios-Paoli, the former nun, said.
Ms. Barrios-Paoli is the executive director of Safe Space, a charity that operates group homes for foster children, services for abused children and health and mental health services for poor families in New York City. It holds two benefits a year, generating $70,000 to $80,000 each, a fraction of what most private schools in Manhattan raise at a single similar event. It has one fund-raising executive and two other employees who solicit grants from foundations.
Over all, private donations account for roughly 3 percent of Safe Space's $18.5 million budget. The rest comes from contracts it has with the state and local governments.
Its board members are professionals who contribute what they can, but it does not require them to give a minimum amount each year like many of the city's more elite charities do. "They're great, very dedicated and committed, but it's not the board of the Met," Ms. Barrios-Paoli said, referring to the Metropolitan Opera, whose board includes one Forbes 400 member, the wives of two others and the son of another.
Ms. Barrios-Paoli listed the benefits of being a Met board member, from special seats to audiences with Placido Domingo. "All I can offer my board is a tour of a foster home or a community kitchen," she said.
James S. Tisch, president and chief executive of the Loews Corporation, whose family cuts a wide swath in philanthropic circles, agreed. "That's always part of it, putting together a board and creating an aura that it's a group that other people want to be part of," he said. "Museums have done that very well, and hospitals."
Mr. Tisch is a trustee at Mount Sinai Hospital, where his family has given enough money to have its name on a building, but he has also served on the board of FEGS, a cluster of charities offering a range of social services, for more than two decades.
FEGS, like Safe Spaces, is mostly supported by income from government contracts, and Mr. Tisch cited that as the biggest reason giving to human services has shrunk. "Why should a philanthropist pay if the government will?" he asked.
The federal budget for health and human services rose 183 percent, adjusted for inflation, to $459.4 billion in 2002 from $68.3 billion in 1980, according to research by Patrick Rooney, director of research at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
Nonprofit leaders counter that they have been forced to seek more government support as donations have declined. "It becomes a chicken and egg kind of thing," said Peter B. Goldberg, chief executive of Alliance for Families and Children, which represents more than 300 family service groups nationwide. "I'd argue that my agencies have become increasingly dependent on public sector funding because nongovernmental funding simply hasn't kept pace."
One reason for that failure, Mr. Goldberg says, is the increased demand by donors for proof of some return on their dollars. "This is a tremendous challenge for human services," he said. "We don't have good ways of measuring what we do, yet that's what donors want from us."
The few social service agencies that have found ways of demonstrating the benefits of their services get at least some positive responses. Lifetrack Resources Inc., a Minnesota nonprofit that helps poor families, has increased the portion of its budget underwritten by donations. Terry Anderson, its vice president for development, attributes some of the growth to its increasing reliance on metrics to prove its success.
Using a 42-year study of the effect of preschool programs on children who are developmentally delayed because of abuse or neglect, Lifetrack calculates that every dollar invested in its own preschool program produces a $17 return in services the children will not need in the future.
Similarly, for every dollar spent on employment services, Lifetrack says it saves the public $2.34 that would have been spent on welfare, not to mention the increase in tax revenue generated by the people it helps to find work.
"This kind of metric is becoming part of our brand, and it came as a result of our board asking why we weren't looking at ourselves that way," Ms. Anderson said.
Ms. Anderson was hired by Lifetrack in 1987 to increase support from foundations and corporations, which totals about 6 percent of its $10 million budget. Recently she has turned her attention to individual donors, whose contributions have doubled over the last couple of years, but only to $70,000.
"If there's one thing that's true, it's that people give to people because they have a personal connection to the place they're giving to, and people who have personal connections to human service organizations are not usually people with money, " Ms. Anderson said.
That assertion is supported by demographic data showing that older donors, particularly women, have been the biggest supporters of groups helping the poor, said Robert F. Sharpe, a fund-raising consultant. Those donors are dying out, he said, and the emerging generation of baby boomer donors is less likely to support social service organizations. "People who grew up in comfortable, clean, prosperous suburbs have just never had as much familiarity with how many others live," Mr. Sharpe said.
"Many commentators talked about how the Katrina disaster pulled back the curtain and exposed the extent of poverty that exists in many American communities," he said. "Perhaps one effect of that may be renewed interest among younger Americans in organizations that are working to meet the needs of the poor and otherwise disadvantaged among us."
###
Sunday, November 13, 2005
"FrAussies" invade Acadiana !
Sister J C and friend in AustraliaA trio of French-Autralians ("FrAussies") invaded Acadiana under the cover of darkness near midnight Saturday.
Their presence will not long go undetected.
Although we have award-winning photographs of the three invaders to share online in this very blog, - they are so huge (1.29 mb each !) that we will have to wait to post them until we either learn how to reduce them via photoshop (anyone - please email instructions to me if you know how to do that, at funburn@gmail.com ) or that will be done when Auntie Artist S.M. arrives on the scene - she is coming home from Belle Chase Wednesday, according to the latest sightings and reports from her home front.
GAussie (girl FrAussie) M.C. will turn 8 Nov 28th and BAussie (Boy FrAussie) H.A. will turn 6 Dec 2, so they is a big visit for the pair, who are full of life and will dominate any gathering of which they are a part for the next three weeks.
Don't miss it !
Schedule you visit now !
Upon arriving at Houston's Bush International airport, Boy Aussie H jumped into the arms of his waiting Aunt J - and Girl Aussie M followed soon after. They had been on a plane and/or in transit for more than 22 hours - since leaving Sydney around noon Saturday Sydney time.
Although it was 7pm local Houston tinne - the pair wanted to play games and so we engaged in a countries of the world guessing game until they both fell asleep about midway through the four-hour trip back to Acadiana.
They ended up awakening once at Aunt J's home and did not finally go back to sleep until about 2am Sunday.
By Sunday at 11am, they were still asleep !
The children and their mother, the penultimate sibling among eight, will try to visit New Orleans and brother J and friend L, this week, along with seeing Dad and other friends in Crowley.
FrAussie Mom said she will rent a car to make her visiting easier.
Friday, November 11, 2005
A Day with Dad
Today was one of those rare days spent mostly with Dad, and I cherished it.
Dad (as most of you know him) was in fine form - his acerbic wit slashed left and right, crossing all boundaries of political correctness - with a huge dose of fatalistic self-pity thrown in for good measure - in other words - typical Dad.
"I aint interested in any of these 'lifetime guarantees' people mention to me," he grumbled at one point. He's 80.
His funniest story was of his visit to a local grocery store. Since the hurricane hit, he gets some help with special food coupons, but they can only be spent for human food (no alcohol, no tobacco, etc). But he loves his three cats ("I would have 12 if I could, and build 'em a big cathouse in the back yard"), and so tried to purchase some salmon cat food for them.
The clerk would have none of it. "Sorry sir," he said she told him. "You cannot purchase pet food with these special food coupons, only human food."
"But these are my favorite - I eat these - this has been part of my diet for a long time" he said he told her - to no avail. Just like Dad - trying to slip something past someone in authority. And he wonders where we get that streak of anti-authoritarian behavior from time to time.
My favorite part of the visit was our tour around town in his truck. After he sat in the front passenger seat, he put on a big white straw cowboy hat that he had in the back jumpseat of his truck, and the sudden sight of him wearing it caught me by surprise and I laughed out loud.
He didn't even change expression as I laughed so hard I could not drive. In his 80 years he has NEVER possessed even one molecule in a cowboy bent - but he wore that hat as I chauffeured him around. He actually looked fine in it.
"Moe gave me this hat, and I like it," he stated simply, refering to a son-in-law. I am still smiling at the sight of Dad in a cowboy hat (a big one). Made him look like a father of a member of the Village People. Thanks for that laugh, Moe.
During our ride he showed me the new ballparks out at the Recreation Center Area on Standard Mill Road in southwest part of town. It's a phenomenal sight - all those new ballparks for the children of our hometown to enjoy.
I even rode by the park where I played Little League (under his coaching tutelage) and saw a baseball laying in the grass near home plate. I retrieved it and then stood on the same exact mound where I stood 41, 42, 43, 44, and 45 years ago and pitched.
Then I walked over to the shortstop area, where I played when I was not pitching. I got a bit of that old feeling inside for a moment. It felt great - and I felt myself checking my position relative to third base and second base - just as I did those many years ago.
Those were some of my glory years and part of Dad's as well : he coached so many pennant winners that there was a collective sigh of relief from the other coaches when he retired from coaching our hometown boys - which he did for more than 20 years.
He commented on the people in the cemetery. "I just want my ashes put in some garden, mixed up with good compost," he said. He recently donated his body to science, so he may ultimately get his wish.
"Your brother the chef just started a new job at Old Time Cafe," Dad informed me. "It's the best place to get a plate lunch these days in this town," he said.
We then tried to find a childhood friend of mine that once lived across the street from our home, and we did not guess (but found out later) that he'd moved, along with his 87-year old mother, to a home just behind the Methodist Church, on 4th Street. I made a mental note to visit E.W. and mom R.W. later.
We went by Dad's former business location on the west side of town. You could still clearly see his name on the sign out front, although the present owners tried to paint over it. Dad said it was about to become a church hall.
Each time we passed a home where someone he knew once lived but has now died, he mentioned that fact. "Heck almost nobody I knew 52 years ago when I moved here is still alive," he mused. I tried to change the subject.
He also pointed out homes that used to house a certain family - sometimes over several generations - but has now been sold to a new family - and I found this unsettling, as these homes always meant "so and so's family lives here" to me - and now that is no longer true.
In only one neighborhood did we run into someone we both knew - a contemporary of my father and mother's whose husband was our pharmacist - she was out working in her garden and looked almost exactly the same to me - even 40 years after I had seen her on a regular basis.
She and her husband had five children - all the ages of one of us (we are eight children), and she briefly caught us up on them. She also said that her husband just loves the internet and spends hours on it every day, mostly writing stinging letters about something or the other to the local paper. Dad emphatically told her that he will not go near a computer.
Remarkably - she asked him if he still fixed TVs because she had one that needed fixing. Dad told her that she could buy a new one for just a little more than what it would cost to fix that old one.
We commented on other homes that were damaged in the recent hurricanes and how strange it was to him that one home would be damaged and the ones on either side would be unscathed. He shook his head and put his hand over his mouth - one of his habits learned from his mother Fanny Ella.
"There's TWO reasons I am even still alive," he mused. "One is the good genes from my mother (she lived to be 90), and the other is that I exercised most of my life (not only was Dad a professional baseball player, but also , he ran miles and miles around the NDHS track and then rode a stationary bike well into his 60s)."
I had to agree with him there. His own father died at 68, and at 80, Dad is by far the longest-lived male in the family line.
Gives me hope.
In fact, the whole visit gave me hope. Especially the part back at the house where Dad showed off how affectionate his adopted Cat "Charley One Nut" could be. Sure enough, that cat nuzzled Dad as if Dad were his actual father, and it warmed me inside to see Dad enjoy this show of affection from this cat.
I left when my baby sister came by to retrieve me, but not without nuzzling Dad myself. He reached up and grabbed my head as I buried it in his neck. "Come back and visit again soon," he mumbled.
I know I will.
Dad (as most of you know him) was in fine form - his acerbic wit slashed left and right, crossing all boundaries of political correctness - with a huge dose of fatalistic self-pity thrown in for good measure - in other words - typical Dad.
"I aint interested in any of these 'lifetime guarantees' people mention to me," he grumbled at one point. He's 80.
His funniest story was of his visit to a local grocery store. Since the hurricane hit, he gets some help with special food coupons, but they can only be spent for human food (no alcohol, no tobacco, etc). But he loves his three cats ("I would have 12 if I could, and build 'em a big cathouse in the back yard"), and so tried to purchase some salmon cat food for them.
The clerk would have none of it. "Sorry sir," he said she told him. "You cannot purchase pet food with these special food coupons, only human food."
"But these are my favorite - I eat these - this has been part of my diet for a long time" he said he told her - to no avail. Just like Dad - trying to slip something past someone in authority. And he wonders where we get that streak of anti-authoritarian behavior from time to time.
My favorite part of the visit was our tour around town in his truck. After he sat in the front passenger seat, he put on a big white straw cowboy hat that he had in the back jumpseat of his truck, and the sudden sight of him wearing it caught me by surprise and I laughed out loud.
He didn't even change expression as I laughed so hard I could not drive. In his 80 years he has NEVER possessed even one molecule in a cowboy bent - but he wore that hat as I chauffeured him around. He actually looked fine in it.
"Moe gave me this hat, and I like it," he stated simply, refering to a son-in-law. I am still smiling at the sight of Dad in a cowboy hat (a big one). Made him look like a father of a member of the Village People. Thanks for that laugh, Moe.
During our ride he showed me the new ballparks out at the Recreation Center Area on Standard Mill Road in southwest part of town. It's a phenomenal sight - all those new ballparks for the children of our hometown to enjoy.
I even rode by the park where I played Little League (under his coaching tutelage) and saw a baseball laying in the grass near home plate. I retrieved it and then stood on the same exact mound where I stood 41, 42, 43, 44, and 45 years ago and pitched.
Then I walked over to the shortstop area, where I played when I was not pitching. I got a bit of that old feeling inside for a moment. It felt great - and I felt myself checking my position relative to third base and second base - just as I did those many years ago.
Those were some of my glory years and part of Dad's as well : he coached so many pennant winners that there was a collective sigh of relief from the other coaches when he retired from coaching our hometown boys - which he did for more than 20 years.
He commented on the people in the cemetery. "I just want my ashes put in some garden, mixed up with good compost," he said. He recently donated his body to science, so he may ultimately get his wish.
"Your brother the chef just started a new job at Old Time Cafe," Dad informed me. "It's the best place to get a plate lunch these days in this town," he said.
We then tried to find a childhood friend of mine that once lived across the street from our home, and we did not guess (but found out later) that he'd moved, along with his 87-year old mother, to a home just behind the Methodist Church, on 4th Street. I made a mental note to visit E.W. and mom R.W. later.
We went by Dad's former business location on the west side of town. You could still clearly see his name on the sign out front, although the present owners tried to paint over it. Dad said it was about to become a church hall.
Each time we passed a home where someone he knew once lived but has now died, he mentioned that fact. "Heck almost nobody I knew 52 years ago when I moved here is still alive," he mused. I tried to change the subject.
He also pointed out homes that used to house a certain family - sometimes over several generations - but has now been sold to a new family - and I found this unsettling, as these homes always meant "so and so's family lives here" to me - and now that is no longer true.
In only one neighborhood did we run into someone we both knew - a contemporary of my father and mother's whose husband was our pharmacist - she was out working in her garden and looked almost exactly the same to me - even 40 years after I had seen her on a regular basis.
She and her husband had five children - all the ages of one of us (we are eight children), and she briefly caught us up on them. She also said that her husband just loves the internet and spends hours on it every day, mostly writing stinging letters about something or the other to the local paper. Dad emphatically told her that he will not go near a computer.
Remarkably - she asked him if he still fixed TVs because she had one that needed fixing. Dad told her that she could buy a new one for just a little more than what it would cost to fix that old one.
We commented on other homes that were damaged in the recent hurricanes and how strange it was to him that one home would be damaged and the ones on either side would be unscathed. He shook his head and put his hand over his mouth - one of his habits learned from his mother Fanny Ella.
"There's TWO reasons I am even still alive," he mused. "One is the good genes from my mother (she lived to be 90), and the other is that I exercised most of my life (not only was Dad a professional baseball player, but also , he ran miles and miles around the NDHS track and then rode a stationary bike well into his 60s)."
I had to agree with him there. His own father died at 68, and at 80, Dad is by far the longest-lived male in the family line.
Gives me hope.
In fact, the whole visit gave me hope. Especially the part back at the house where Dad showed off how affectionate his adopted Cat "Charley One Nut" could be. Sure enough, that cat nuzzled Dad as if Dad were his actual father, and it warmed me inside to see Dad enjoy this show of affection from this cat.
I left when my baby sister came by to retrieve me, but not without nuzzling Dad myself. He reached up and grabbed my head as I buried it in his neck. "Come back and visit again soon," he mumbled.
I know I will.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Happy Birthday Christopher Paris
Happy Birthday to the Best Boy in the Whole World
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
(Count the exclamation points )
I miss you and hope to see you soon !
I love you more than there are tiny water droplets on a foggy morning !
Your Dad - Joseph
I miss you and hope to see you soon !
I love you more than there are tiny water droplets on a foggy morning !
Your Dad - Joseph
I yam what I yam
Popeye's signature and confidently self-aware statement always reminded me of one of my favorite foods : the sweet potato, or yam*(click on title of this entry to learn the difference).
And today I am going to let you in on a secret that you will thank me for repeatedly if you have any taste for the orange-fleshed vegetable at all.
Grab a pencil. Tell your friends and relatives. Be prepared for "thank you's" aplenty.
I have found a man who grows sweet potatoes as a sideline - and does it organically ("I can't afford to do it any other way - plus it's the right thing to do," he says), and charges - hold onto your hat - an incredibly low price when you buy them in bags of 20 pounds of sweet potatoes each.
The way these treasures taste, that's about a three-day supply.
His name is Mr. Clifton Allen. He is one of those "good men" who works extremely hard at his regular job (he's a maintenance supervisor at Borden's Inc. in Lafayette, Louisiana) PLUS he goes home after a hard day and toils extremely hard at creating several organically-grown crops each year (okra and sweet potatoes this year).
Now his 2005 crop of okra is LONG gone, but you still have a chance to buy some of his incredibly sweet and full yams if you act quickly (and just in time for Thanksgiving).
Here's what you do :
Call (or just drop by) the Lafayette main office of Borden, Inc. (337-232-5172, 1308 Bertrand Drive = just north of University Medical Center ) during the day Tuesday through Saturday and ask to speak to Mr. Clifton Allen back in maintenance.
You might have to leave a message for him to call you back. He will take your order (the potatoes come in 20-pound bags and sell for an unbelievably low price - but he reserves the right to raise his prices - so order soon !), fill a bag full of sweet potatoes at his home overnight, and bring those wonderful spuds to work with him at Borden's the next day or two, where you can drop by, pay him, and pick them up.
This man is straightforward, honest, hard-working, and wants to do the right thing no matter what. So tip him or face eternal bad karma.
His good karma is so powerful that his son just returned from an entire year serving in Iraq with the 256th Louisiana National Guard as a Baghdad Airport road guard (one of the most dangerous jobs over there) and returned healthy and wiser (we hope wealthy one day, too, as he is studying at UL-L to enter the medical profession).
Today - I popped a few of the sweet potatoes he sold me into the over at 400 degrees and let 'em bake for about an hour after brushing them with olive oil. Testing them with a toothpick let me know they were ready - and I only added real butter but others have tried a touch of salt and cayenne pepper and entered nirvana soon thereafter.
These premium sweet potatoes are neither stringy nor dry, and their full, sweet, yet hearty taste will stay with you (in a good way) long after you have finished eating more than your share for one sitting.
I know this from personal experience.
And I yam what I yam.
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SWEET POTATO AND A YAM?
Several decades ago when orange flesh sweet potatoes were introduced in the southern United States producers and shippers desired to distinguish them from the more traditional white flesh types. The African word "nyami" referring to the starchy, edible root of the Dioscorea genus of plants was adopted in its English form, "yam". Yams in the U.S. are actually sweet potatoes with relatively moist texture and orange flesh. Although the terms are generally used interchangeably, the U.S. Department of Agriculture requires that the label "yam" always be accompanied by "sweet potato."
The versatile sweet potato is ideal fare for the health - conscious food consumer. With the ever-growing interest in health and natural foods, the sweet potato is quickly finding its place in the family weekly diet the year around. The sweet potato blends with herbs, spices and flavorings producing delicious dishes of all types. From processed baby foods to the main dishes, casseroles, salads, breads and desserts, sweet potatoes add valuable, appetizing nutrients and color to any meal.
As a main dish or prepared as a dessert, the sweet potato is a nutritious and economical food. One baked sweet potato (3 1/2 ounce serving) provides over 8,800 IU of vitamin A or about twice the recommended daily allowance, yet it contains only 141 calories making it valuable for the weight watcher. This nutritious vegetable provides 42 percent of the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) for vitamin C, 6 percent of the RDA for calcium, 10 percent of the RDA for iron, and 8 percent of the RDA for thiamine for healthy adults. It is low in sodium and is a good source of fiber and other important vitamins and minerals. A complex carbohydrate food source, it provides beta carotene which may be a factor in reducing the risk of certain cancers.
For the most food value, choose sweet potatoes of a deep orange color.
When buying sweet potatoes, select sound, firm roots. Handle them carefully to prevent bruising. Storage in a dry, unrefrigerated bin kept at 55-60 degrees F. is best. DO NOT REFRIGERATE, because temperatures below 55 degrees F. will chill this tropical vegetable giving it a hard core and an undesirable taste when cooked.
Wash cured sweet potatoes and bake or boil until slightly soft. If boiled, drain immediately. Thoroughly cool the baked or boiled sweet potatoes. Wrap individually (skins left on) in freezer film or foil and place in plastic freezer bags. Seal, label and freeze.
Most sweet potato dishes freeze well. Save time and energy by making a sweet potato dish to serve and one to store in the freezer.
Helpful Hints:
* Bake a large pan of sweet potatoes at the same time. This saves time and energy. Freeze for later use or store the sweet potatoes in the refrigerator for 7 to 10 days.
* Freshly dug or uncured sweet potatoes are better boiled and used in dishes that include fruits or syrups. The curing process makes the sweet potato sweeter and improves the cooking quality.
* Canned or frozen sweet potatoes may be substituted for the fresh form in any recipe calling for cooked sweet potatoes as the starting point. Canned sweet potatoes are generally smaller in diameter because of their better canning qualities. Six to eight canned sweet potatoes are approximately the equivalent of four medium fresh sweet potatoes. One can use the measurement relationship below as a guideline.
Fresh Canned Cooked & Mashed
2 medium
sweet potatoes 3 to 4 1 1/4 cups
3 medium 1 pound can 2 cups
4 medium
(23 ounces) 3 quart cans 2 l/2 cups
* To reduce calories in your favorite sweet potato recipe, experiment with the recipe by reducing the sugar or fat by using the next lower measure on the measuring cup. For example, when a recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar or fat, reduce the amount to 3/4 cup. For 3/4 cup, reduce it to 2/3 cup, and so on.
* Sweet potatoes make an attractive house plant. To grow a sweet potato vine, use a jar with an opening that will support it. Place the sweet potato in a jar of water with its narrow end down. Put the jar in a warm, dark place and keep the jar filled with water. New roots willstart to grow, and in about 10 days, the stem will start to grow. As soon as this happens, put the jar in a sunny window. As the vine grows, it can be left to trail or trained to climb.
Sweet potatoes can be baked, boiled, fried, broiled, canned or frozen. They can also be cooked in the microwave oven.
Before cooking sweet potatoes, scrub skin and trim off any bruised or woody portions.
If you are cutting calories, serve a plain sweet potato, cut down on margarine or butter and use skim milk or unsweetened orange juice as liquid when you prepare mashed sweet potatoes.
Remember, it is what you add to the sweet potato that increases calories.
1 small, baked in skin ...............................141 calories
3 1/2 ounces, candied................................168 calories
3 1/2 ounces, canned, syrup pack.........114 calories
A freshly baked or boiled sweet potato is delicious and nutritious. You need only to add a pat of butter or serve it plain. Don't feel that you must add high-calorie ingredients to make the sweet potato acceptable.
Rub a little fat or oil over clean and dry sweet potatoes of uniform size. Place on baking sheet and bake at 400 degrees F. until soft, 30 to 50 minutes, depending on size. Sweet potatoes that are greased before baking peel easily.
Boiled Sweet Potatoes: Drop clean sweet potatoes into enough boiling water to cover them. Cover pan and return water to boiling as quickly as possible. Lower heat and cook until tender. Drain at once. Peel and season with butter and salt to taste. Use 1 medium sweet potato per person. Boiled sweet potatoes can be used for pies, cookies, casseroles, glazed, candied or frozen.
Deep Fat French Fried Sweet Potatoes: Pare and cut into length-wise strips, about 1/2 inch thick. Heat oil in fryer to 365 degrees F. Keep fry basket in fat as it heats.
Raise basket and add enough sweet potato strips to cover bottom of basket. Lower basket slowly into hot fat. If fat bubbles much, lift and lower basket until bubbling subsides. Fry until sweet potato strips are brown and tender. Remove from hot oil and drain onto paper towels. Sprinkle with salt, if desired. Spread sweet potatoes on baking sheet and place in a warm oven while others are being cooked.
Charcoal Broiled Sweet Potatoes: Rub a little fat over clean sweet potato skins. Wrap double foil loosely around sweet potatoes. Cook in coals for about 45 minutes. Keep warm on edge of grill.
Skillet Sweet Potatoes: In large deep skillet, heat 1 1/2 inch deep vegetable oil to 365 degrees F. Add sweet potato strips to cover bottom of skillet; fry 5 minutes or until brown and tender. Remove from hot oil and drain on paper towels. Sprinkle with salt or powdered sugar.
Microwave Sweet Potatoes: For best results, choose uniform size sweet potatoes. Pierce washed sweet potatoes with a fork. Place on paper towel on shelf of microwave oven 1 inch apart. Turn sweet potatoes over and rearrange after half of cooking time. Cook on HIGH power level. Cooking time will vary, depending on the number of sweet potatoes.
Sweet Potatoes Minutes
1 - 4 to 6
2 - 6 to 8
3 - 8 to 12
4 - 12 to 16
5 - 16 to 20
Sweet potatoes may still feel firm when done. Let stand 5 minutes to soften.
Candied Sweet Potatoes
6 medium sweet potatoes
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
3 tablespoons butter
Scrub sweet potatoes thoroughly. Drop them in enough boiling salted water to cover sweet potatoes. Cover pan. Lower heat and cook 15 to 20 minutes. Drain; peel sweet potatoes and cut into 1/2 inch slices. Put into buttered baking dish. Combine sugar, water and butter. Boil 2-3 minutes, then pour over cooked, sliced sweet potatoes. Bake at 350 degrees F. for about 30 minutes or until lightly brown. Spoon syrup over sweet potatoes several times while baking. Lemon juice or lemon slices on top of sweet potatoes while baking will improve flavor and help retain their bright color. Yield: 6 servings
SWEET POTATO BUTTER
2 Garlic cloves
Freshly ground Pepper to taste
2 Sweet Potatoes
Fine Sea Salt to taste
2 medium Carrots
2 Tablespoons chopped Parsley
1/2 to 3/4 Cup Vegetable broth
2 Tablespoons chopped Cilantro (Optional)
1 Tablespoon extra-virgin Olive Oil
Put unpeeled garlic cloves on aluminum foil and bake at 350 degrees F. in oven or toaster oven for about 10 minutes, until soft.
Microwave or boil unpeeled potatoes until done. Peel carrots, cut into large chunks and microwave or boil until soft.
Drain carrots, peel potatoes and put both in a food processor. Squeeze in the baked garlic. Add 1/2 cup broth and blend. With motor running, add oil and keep blending, adding more broth until puree is fairly smooth and full.
Add salt and pepper to taste. Dip can be made as long as a day in advance, covered and refrigerated. Bring to room temperature for serving and stir in the optional herbs right before serving with raw vegetables and bread sticks.
Makes 6 servings.
SWEET POTATO PECAN PIE (Makes one 9-inch pie)
1 (9 - inch) unbaked pastry shell
1 pound (2 medium) sweet potatoes (yams!), cooked and peeled
1/4 cup margarine or butter
1 (14 - ounce) can Eagle Brand Sweetened Condensed Milk, (NOT evaporated milk)
1 teaspoon grated orange rind
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
Pecan Topping
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In large mixer bowl, beat hot sweet potatoes with margarine until smooth. Add remaining ingredients except pastry shell and Pecan Topping; mix well. Pour into pastry shell. Bake 30 minutes. Remove from oven; spoon Pecan Topping evenly over top. bake 20 to 25 minutes longer or until golden brown. Cool. Serve warm or chilled. Refrigerate leftovers.
Pecan Topping: In small mixer bowl, combine 1 egg, 3 tablespoons dark corn syrup, 3 tablespoons firmly packed light brown sugar, 1 tablespoon margarine or butter, melted, and teaspoon maple flavoring; mix well. Stir in 1 cup chopped pecans.
###
And today I am going to let you in on a secret that you will thank me for repeatedly if you have any taste for the orange-fleshed vegetable at all.
Grab a pencil. Tell your friends and relatives. Be prepared for "thank you's" aplenty.
I have found a man who grows sweet potatoes as a sideline - and does it organically ("I can't afford to do it any other way - plus it's the right thing to do," he says), and charges - hold onto your hat - an incredibly low price when you buy them in bags of 20 pounds of sweet potatoes each.
The way these treasures taste, that's about a three-day supply.
His name is Mr. Clifton Allen. He is one of those "good men" who works extremely hard at his regular job (he's a maintenance supervisor at Borden's Inc. in Lafayette, Louisiana) PLUS he goes home after a hard day and toils extremely hard at creating several organically-grown crops each year (okra and sweet potatoes this year).
Now his 2005 crop of okra is LONG gone, but you still have a chance to buy some of his incredibly sweet and full yams if you act quickly (and just in time for Thanksgiving).
Here's what you do :
Call (or just drop by) the Lafayette main office of Borden, Inc. (337-232-5172, 1308 Bertrand Drive = just north of University Medical Center ) during the day Tuesday through Saturday and ask to speak to Mr. Clifton Allen back in maintenance.
You might have to leave a message for him to call you back. He will take your order (the potatoes come in 20-pound bags and sell for an unbelievably low price - but he reserves the right to raise his prices - so order soon !), fill a bag full of sweet potatoes at his home overnight, and bring those wonderful spuds to work with him at Borden's the next day or two, where you can drop by, pay him, and pick them up.
This man is straightforward, honest, hard-working, and wants to do the right thing no matter what. So tip him or face eternal bad karma.
His good karma is so powerful that his son just returned from an entire year serving in Iraq with the 256th Louisiana National Guard as a Baghdad Airport road guard (one of the most dangerous jobs over there) and returned healthy and wiser (we hope wealthy one day, too, as he is studying at UL-L to enter the medical profession).
Today - I popped a few of the sweet potatoes he sold me into the over at 400 degrees and let 'em bake for about an hour after brushing them with olive oil. Testing them with a toothpick let me know they were ready - and I only added real butter but others have tried a touch of salt and cayenne pepper and entered nirvana soon thereafter.
These premium sweet potatoes are neither stringy nor dry, and their full, sweet, yet hearty taste will stay with you (in a good way) long after you have finished eating more than your share for one sitting.
I know this from personal experience.
And I yam what I yam.
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SWEET POTATO AND A YAM?
Several decades ago when orange flesh sweet potatoes were introduced in the southern United States producers and shippers desired to distinguish them from the more traditional white flesh types. The African word "nyami" referring to the starchy, edible root of the Dioscorea genus of plants was adopted in its English form, "yam". Yams in the U.S. are actually sweet potatoes with relatively moist texture and orange flesh. Although the terms are generally used interchangeably, the U.S. Department of Agriculture requires that the label "yam" always be accompanied by "sweet potato."
The versatile sweet potato is ideal fare for the health - conscious food consumer. With the ever-growing interest in health and natural foods, the sweet potato is quickly finding its place in the family weekly diet the year around. The sweet potato blends with herbs, spices and flavorings producing delicious dishes of all types. From processed baby foods to the main dishes, casseroles, salads, breads and desserts, sweet potatoes add valuable, appetizing nutrients and color to any meal.
As a main dish or prepared as a dessert, the sweet potato is a nutritious and economical food. One baked sweet potato (3 1/2 ounce serving) provides over 8,800 IU of vitamin A or about twice the recommended daily allowance, yet it contains only 141 calories making it valuable for the weight watcher. This nutritious vegetable provides 42 percent of the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) for vitamin C, 6 percent of the RDA for calcium, 10 percent of the RDA for iron, and 8 percent of the RDA for thiamine for healthy adults. It is low in sodium and is a good source of fiber and other important vitamins and minerals. A complex carbohydrate food source, it provides beta carotene which may be a factor in reducing the risk of certain cancers.
For the most food value, choose sweet potatoes of a deep orange color.
When buying sweet potatoes, select sound, firm roots. Handle them carefully to prevent bruising. Storage in a dry, unrefrigerated bin kept at 55-60 degrees F. is best. DO NOT REFRIGERATE, because temperatures below 55 degrees F. will chill this tropical vegetable giving it a hard core and an undesirable taste when cooked.
Wash cured sweet potatoes and bake or boil until slightly soft. If boiled, drain immediately. Thoroughly cool the baked or boiled sweet potatoes. Wrap individually (skins left on) in freezer film or foil and place in plastic freezer bags. Seal, label and freeze.
Most sweet potato dishes freeze well. Save time and energy by making a sweet potato dish to serve and one to store in the freezer.
Helpful Hints:
* Bake a large pan of sweet potatoes at the same time. This saves time and energy. Freeze for later use or store the sweet potatoes in the refrigerator for 7 to 10 days.
* Freshly dug or uncured sweet potatoes are better boiled and used in dishes that include fruits or syrups. The curing process makes the sweet potato sweeter and improves the cooking quality.
* Canned or frozen sweet potatoes may be substituted for the fresh form in any recipe calling for cooked sweet potatoes as the starting point. Canned sweet potatoes are generally smaller in diameter because of their better canning qualities. Six to eight canned sweet potatoes are approximately the equivalent of four medium fresh sweet potatoes. One can use the measurement relationship below as a guideline.
Fresh Canned Cooked & Mashed
2 medium
sweet potatoes 3 to 4 1 1/4 cups
3 medium 1 pound can 2 cups
4 medium
(23 ounces) 3 quart cans 2 l/2 cups
* To reduce calories in your favorite sweet potato recipe, experiment with the recipe by reducing the sugar or fat by using the next lower measure on the measuring cup. For example, when a recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar or fat, reduce the amount to 3/4 cup. For 3/4 cup, reduce it to 2/3 cup, and so on.
* Sweet potatoes make an attractive house plant. To grow a sweet potato vine, use a jar with an opening that will support it. Place the sweet potato in a jar of water with its narrow end down. Put the jar in a warm, dark place and keep the jar filled with water. New roots willstart to grow, and in about 10 days, the stem will start to grow. As soon as this happens, put the jar in a sunny window. As the vine grows, it can be left to trail or trained to climb.
Sweet potatoes can be baked, boiled, fried, broiled, canned or frozen. They can also be cooked in the microwave oven.
Before cooking sweet potatoes, scrub skin and trim off any bruised or woody portions.
If you are cutting calories, serve a plain sweet potato, cut down on margarine or butter and use skim milk or unsweetened orange juice as liquid when you prepare mashed sweet potatoes.
Remember, it is what you add to the sweet potato that increases calories.
1 small, baked in skin ...............................141 calories
3 1/2 ounces, candied................................168 calories
3 1/2 ounces, canned, syrup pack.........114 calories
A freshly baked or boiled sweet potato is delicious and nutritious. You need only to add a pat of butter or serve it plain. Don't feel that you must add high-calorie ingredients to make the sweet potato acceptable.
Rub a little fat or oil over clean and dry sweet potatoes of uniform size. Place on baking sheet and bake at 400 degrees F. until soft, 30 to 50 minutes, depending on size. Sweet potatoes that are greased before baking peel easily.
Boiled Sweet Potatoes: Drop clean sweet potatoes into enough boiling water to cover them. Cover pan and return water to boiling as quickly as possible. Lower heat and cook until tender. Drain at once. Peel and season with butter and salt to taste. Use 1 medium sweet potato per person. Boiled sweet potatoes can be used for pies, cookies, casseroles, glazed, candied or frozen.
Deep Fat French Fried Sweet Potatoes: Pare and cut into length-wise strips, about 1/2 inch thick. Heat oil in fryer to 365 degrees F. Keep fry basket in fat as it heats.
Raise basket and add enough sweet potato strips to cover bottom of basket. Lower basket slowly into hot fat. If fat bubbles much, lift and lower basket until bubbling subsides. Fry until sweet potato strips are brown and tender. Remove from hot oil and drain onto paper towels. Sprinkle with salt, if desired. Spread sweet potatoes on baking sheet and place in a warm oven while others are being cooked.
Charcoal Broiled Sweet Potatoes: Rub a little fat over clean sweet potato skins. Wrap double foil loosely around sweet potatoes. Cook in coals for about 45 minutes. Keep warm on edge of grill.
Skillet Sweet Potatoes: In large deep skillet, heat 1 1/2 inch deep vegetable oil to 365 degrees F. Add sweet potato strips to cover bottom of skillet; fry 5 minutes or until brown and tender. Remove from hot oil and drain on paper towels. Sprinkle with salt or powdered sugar.
Microwave Sweet Potatoes: For best results, choose uniform size sweet potatoes. Pierce washed sweet potatoes with a fork. Place on paper towel on shelf of microwave oven 1 inch apart. Turn sweet potatoes over and rearrange after half of cooking time. Cook on HIGH power level. Cooking time will vary, depending on the number of sweet potatoes.
Sweet Potatoes Minutes
1 - 4 to 6
2 - 6 to 8
3 - 8 to 12
4 - 12 to 16
5 - 16 to 20
Sweet potatoes may still feel firm when done. Let stand 5 minutes to soften.
Candied Sweet Potatoes
6 medium sweet potatoes
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
3 tablespoons butter
Scrub sweet potatoes thoroughly. Drop them in enough boiling salted water to cover sweet potatoes. Cover pan. Lower heat and cook 15 to 20 minutes. Drain; peel sweet potatoes and cut into 1/2 inch slices. Put into buttered baking dish. Combine sugar, water and butter. Boil 2-3 minutes, then pour over cooked, sliced sweet potatoes. Bake at 350 degrees F. for about 30 minutes or until lightly brown. Spoon syrup over sweet potatoes several times while baking. Lemon juice or lemon slices on top of sweet potatoes while baking will improve flavor and help retain their bright color. Yield: 6 servings
SWEET POTATO BUTTER
2 Garlic cloves
Freshly ground Pepper to taste
2 Sweet Potatoes
Fine Sea Salt to taste
2 medium Carrots
2 Tablespoons chopped Parsley
1/2 to 3/4 Cup Vegetable broth
2 Tablespoons chopped Cilantro (Optional)
1 Tablespoon extra-virgin Olive Oil
Put unpeeled garlic cloves on aluminum foil and bake at 350 degrees F. in oven or toaster oven for about 10 minutes, until soft.
Microwave or boil unpeeled potatoes until done. Peel carrots, cut into large chunks and microwave or boil until soft.
Drain carrots, peel potatoes and put both in a food processor. Squeeze in the baked garlic. Add 1/2 cup broth and blend. With motor running, add oil and keep blending, adding more broth until puree is fairly smooth and full.
Add salt and pepper to taste. Dip can be made as long as a day in advance, covered and refrigerated. Bring to room temperature for serving and stir in the optional herbs right before serving with raw vegetables and bread sticks.
Makes 6 servings.
SWEET POTATO PECAN PIE (Makes one 9-inch pie)
1 (9 - inch) unbaked pastry shell
1 pound (2 medium) sweet potatoes (yams!), cooked and peeled
1/4 cup margarine or butter
1 (14 - ounce) can Eagle Brand Sweetened Condensed Milk, (NOT evaporated milk)
1 teaspoon grated orange rind
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
Pecan Topping
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In large mixer bowl, beat hot sweet potatoes with margarine until smooth. Add remaining ingredients except pastry shell and Pecan Topping; mix well. Pour into pastry shell. Bake 30 minutes. Remove from oven; spoon Pecan Topping evenly over top. bake 20 to 25 minutes longer or until golden brown. Cool. Serve warm or chilled. Refrigerate leftovers.
Pecan Topping: In small mixer bowl, combine 1 egg, 3 tablespoons dark corn syrup, 3 tablespoons firmly packed light brown sugar, 1 tablespoon margarine or butter, melted, and teaspoon maple flavoring; mix well. Stir in 1 cup chopped pecans.
###
Monday, November 07, 2005
Rain Dance
OK - so I admit it's unusual for me to have TWO posts on the same subject so close in time to one another.
Get over it.
You see, it rained again Sunday, after previously having gone 36 days WITHOUT rain from Sept 25 - Oct 31, and the show put on by the neighborhood rain idiot was too funny NOT to report in my blog.
And what a show it is !
First, this obsessed guy sets out a bunch of 15-gallon rubbermaid containers under the eaves of his home, under the drip line.
He supplements these with a bunch of 5-gallon white buckets, no doubt gleaned from a trash pile somewhere, for he is a recycler for sure. He supplements THESE with a healthy scooping up of a dozen or so gallon-and-half plastic ice cream containers that once held giant portions of chocolate or Neapolitan or some other basic flavor.
No Ben & Jerry aficionado is he. But you can tell he loves ice cream by the extra 15-20 pounds he carries.
In addition to those three sizes of water-catchers, he has a couple of odd pieces: a blue-speckled "campfire pot," an aluminum candy dish, two twenty-gallon rubbermaid box-like containers, a two-gallon rectangular mop bucket, and a twelve-foot long and one-foot wide piece of roof tin that he saved from when he fixed up his roof a few years ago.
Now he positions this piece of tin (which is ribbed and grooved) precariously on the edge of one of those white buckets, which he's positioned on the second of his four front steps (that's why all of his neighbors can easily see it), and aligns it to catch water dripping in 12-foot long sheets off the roof - and as the water is collected it then trickles downhill into one of those 20-gallon containers on the ground, upon which he placed the other edge of the tin piece.
Now all of of this was an ingenious but spectacularly Rube Goldbergian plan just to collect a bit of rainwater.
I half expected to see mice and squirrels and birds and cats and dogs brought into his scheme before too long - as he has religiously fed all of those critters under the far edge gable of his home where water does not fall and they no doubt will feel some obligation to help him eventually.
I thought the show was over after he set up this intricate system for capturing rainwater - but no. Once it actually started raining - he went to work in earnest to maximize his catch.
First he let it rain for about ten minutes before springing into action. He had disappeared for those ten minutes inside of his home - but emerged when the gallon and a half ice cream mini-buckets were near full.
I almost laughed out loud when I saw him dressed in an old-fashioned yellow raincoat (think third grade) with cap AND galoshes AND an umbrella. No rainwater would ever touch HIS skin, that's for sure. I could see only a narrow eye slit in that yellow Mac rainhat - he looked like a poor yellow cousin of Darth Vader.
Soon he leapt into action: he poured the little ice cream buckets and other small containers that were full, into the 5 gallon buckets, which he then emptied into the larger 15 gallon containers. He seemed to be even-ing out all containers - so that at any given time all of the containers held exactly the same amount of water as measured by the distance of the water from the top rim .
I later figured out why he was constantly seeking to keep all containers at the same level level of fullness: if there were a pause in the rain, he feverishly brought all levels to be equal (again - not equal in amount of water held - but equal in terms of the distance from the top rim that the water reached).
Now, if it resumed raining (which it did, on and off), all containers would receive water without any of them overflowing (and apparently causing him visible pain as his cherished rainwater dribbled away, lost to him forever, into his soil) - and they would all end up becoming full at about the same time.
Key to note here is that - for some reason I do not understand - the rate of water coming off of his roof varied from place to place along his roof - so that his containers all filled at different rates !
Sure enough - he lost almost no water to overflowing containers - as he was constantly shifting water from the almost full containers where the water runoff was heaviest - to the less full ones. I could not take my eyes off of him during this exercise - and it WAS plenty of exercise for him, I could tell.
He even slipped and fell numerous times and even splashed water all over himself several times as he fell. That was the only water lost all day. When it had finally stopped raining - he sized up his catch and began another peculiar ritual.
He must drink a whole hell of a lot of milk. He has more than 60 gallon-sized milk jugs arranged perfectly in rows - like sentinels awaiting their call to action - under his carport.
Once it had stopped raining - or even DURING a rain, IF all containers had nearly filled up and now ALL containers were in danger of overflowing - he sprung into the action of filling those milk jugs by dunking them - two at a time - into the 15-gallon and two 20-gallon containers.
Once four jugs were filled, he scurried back under the carport with this extra catch and brought out four more milk jugs - he must have experimented with carrying more and less than four - because he always brought just four out to fill. Now the race was on to fill as many of those jugs as he could so that NO container of any size would overflow DURING the rainstorm.
More often than not he succeeded at this.
Only during an extremely long rainstorm late last summer did he manage to fill ALL containers and ALL jugs so that he had NO MORE ways of capturing any more rainwater, and once this realization dawned upon him, a look of failed dejection descended upon his countenance like I have never seen.
He sat, like a beat-up and bullied third grader in his yellow raincoat, on his front steps. I swear he was crying, but those moans could have been the wind through the trees, I am not sure.
By now I am almost certain that you have guessed the surprise ending to this story: I am that neighborhood rain idiot that loves collecting rainwater so much that I cannot help myself - I must try to catch every drop I can, and share it with my beloved plants.
Truth is, I am a rippling wind, water, and rain worshipper (try saying that five times very fast).
Have any containers hanging around your home that you're not using ?
Get over it.
You see, it rained again Sunday, after previously having gone 36 days WITHOUT rain from Sept 25 - Oct 31, and the show put on by the neighborhood rain idiot was too funny NOT to report in my blog.
And what a show it is !
First, this obsessed guy sets out a bunch of 15-gallon rubbermaid containers under the eaves of his home, under the drip line.
He supplements these with a bunch of 5-gallon white buckets, no doubt gleaned from a trash pile somewhere, for he is a recycler for sure. He supplements THESE with a healthy scooping up of a dozen or so gallon-and-half plastic ice cream containers that once held giant portions of chocolate or Neapolitan or some other basic flavor.
No Ben & Jerry aficionado is he. But you can tell he loves ice cream by the extra 15-20 pounds he carries.
In addition to those three sizes of water-catchers, he has a couple of odd pieces: a blue-speckled "campfire pot," an aluminum candy dish, two twenty-gallon rubbermaid box-like containers, a two-gallon rectangular mop bucket, and a twelve-foot long and one-foot wide piece of roof tin that he saved from when he fixed up his roof a few years ago.
Now he positions this piece of tin (which is ribbed and grooved) precariously on the edge of one of those white buckets, which he's positioned on the second of his four front steps (that's why all of his neighbors can easily see it), and aligns it to catch water dripping in 12-foot long sheets off the roof - and as the water is collected it then trickles downhill into one of those 20-gallon containers on the ground, upon which he placed the other edge of the tin piece.
Now all of of this was an ingenious but spectacularly Rube Goldbergian plan just to collect a bit of rainwater.
I half expected to see mice and squirrels and birds and cats and dogs brought into his scheme before too long - as he has religiously fed all of those critters under the far edge gable of his home where water does not fall and they no doubt will feel some obligation to help him eventually.
I thought the show was over after he set up this intricate system for capturing rainwater - but no. Once it actually started raining - he went to work in earnest to maximize his catch.
First he let it rain for about ten minutes before springing into action. He had disappeared for those ten minutes inside of his home - but emerged when the gallon and a half ice cream mini-buckets were near full.
I almost laughed out loud when I saw him dressed in an old-fashioned yellow raincoat (think third grade) with cap AND galoshes AND an umbrella. No rainwater would ever touch HIS skin, that's for sure. I could see only a narrow eye slit in that yellow Mac rainhat - he looked like a poor yellow cousin of Darth Vader.
Soon he leapt into action: he poured the little ice cream buckets and other small containers that were full, into the 5 gallon buckets, which he then emptied into the larger 15 gallon containers. He seemed to be even-ing out all containers - so that at any given time all of the containers held exactly the same amount of water as measured by the distance of the water from the top rim .
I later figured out why he was constantly seeking to keep all containers at the same level level of fullness: if there were a pause in the rain, he feverishly brought all levels to be equal (again - not equal in amount of water held - but equal in terms of the distance from the top rim that the water reached).
Now, if it resumed raining (which it did, on and off), all containers would receive water without any of them overflowing (and apparently causing him visible pain as his cherished rainwater dribbled away, lost to him forever, into his soil) - and they would all end up becoming full at about the same time.
Key to note here is that - for some reason I do not understand - the rate of water coming off of his roof varied from place to place along his roof - so that his containers all filled at different rates !
Sure enough - he lost almost no water to overflowing containers - as he was constantly shifting water from the almost full containers where the water runoff was heaviest - to the less full ones. I could not take my eyes off of him during this exercise - and it WAS plenty of exercise for him, I could tell.
He even slipped and fell numerous times and even splashed water all over himself several times as he fell. That was the only water lost all day. When it had finally stopped raining - he sized up his catch and began another peculiar ritual.
He must drink a whole hell of a lot of milk. He has more than 60 gallon-sized milk jugs arranged perfectly in rows - like sentinels awaiting their call to action - under his carport.
Once it had stopped raining - or even DURING a rain, IF all containers had nearly filled up and now ALL containers were in danger of overflowing - he sprung into the action of filling those milk jugs by dunking them - two at a time - into the 15-gallon and two 20-gallon containers.
Once four jugs were filled, he scurried back under the carport with this extra catch and brought out four more milk jugs - he must have experimented with carrying more and less than four - because he always brought just four out to fill. Now the race was on to fill as many of those jugs as he could so that NO container of any size would overflow DURING the rainstorm.
More often than not he succeeded at this.
Only during an extremely long rainstorm late last summer did he manage to fill ALL containers and ALL jugs so that he had NO MORE ways of capturing any more rainwater, and once this realization dawned upon him, a look of failed dejection descended upon his countenance like I have never seen.
He sat, like a beat-up and bullied third grader in his yellow raincoat, on his front steps. I swear he was crying, but those moans could have been the wind through the trees, I am not sure.
By now I am almost certain that you have guessed the surprise ending to this story: I am that neighborhood rain idiot that loves collecting rainwater so much that I cannot help myself - I must try to catch every drop I can, and share it with my beloved plants.
Truth is, I am a rippling wind, water, and rain worshipper (try saying that five times very fast).
Have any containers hanging around your home that you're not using ?
Saturday, November 05, 2005
Rock Dust: Fertilizer Supreme
TWO articles on Rock Dust as a fertilizer. First one in green, second in a brown. Want some science to back this claim up ? Here's an article and study.
Rock dust grows extra-big vegetables (and might save us from global warming)
By Paul Kelbie
Spring 2005
For years scientists have been warning of an apocalyptic future facing the world. With the prospect of an earth made infertile from over-production and mass reliance on chemicals, coupled with an atmosphere polluted by greenhouse gases there seems little to celebrate. But belief is growing that an answer to some of the earth's problems are not only at hand, but under our feet.
Specialists have just met in Perth to discuss the secrets of rock dust, a quarrying by-product that is at the heart of government-sponsored scientific trials and which, it is claimed, could revitalise barren soil and reverse climate change.
The recognition of the healing powers of rock dust comes after a 20-year campaign by two former school teachers, Cameron and Moira Thomson. They have been battling to prove that rock dust can replace the minerals that have been lost to the earth over the past 10,000 years and, as a result, rejuvenate the land and halt climate change.
To prove their point, the couple have converted six acres of open, infertile land in the Grampian foothills near Pitlochry into a modern Eden. Using little more than rock dust mixed with compost, they have created rich, deep soils capable of producing cabbages the size of footballs, onions bigger than coconuts and gooseberries as big as plums.
"This is a simple answer which doesn't involve drastic life changes by anyone," Ms Thomson said. "People don't have to stop driving cars to do this, just spread some rock dust on their gardens. We could cover the earth with rock dust and start to absorb carbon in a more natural fashion which, along with reducing emissions and using a combination of other initiatives, will have a better and faster response."
Before the Thomsons began their "good life" experiment, erosion and leaching
were so severe in the glen where they set up home that nothing had been grown there for almost 50 years. The basis of their theory is simple. By spreading a thin layer of the dust over the land, they are able to mimic the earth's glacial cycles which naturally fertilise the land.
Since the last ice age three million years ago, the earth has gone through 25 similar glaciations, each lasting about 90,000 years. "We are 10,000 years into an interglacial - a hiatus between ice ages - meaning modern soils are relatively barren and artificial fertilisers are needed," Mr Thomson said.
"By spreading the dust we are doing in minutes what the earth takes thousands of years to do - putting essential minerals in the rocks back into the earth.
"Over the years the couple, who established the Sustainable Ecological Earth Regeneration (Seer) Centre charitable trust in 1997 to test their ideas, have slowly convinced others of their theory. They recently won a grant of almost £100,000 from the Scottish Executive to conduct Britain's first official rock dust trials.
The couple claim the technique may also play a significant role in the fight against climate change as calcium and magnesium in the dust converts carbon in the air into carbonates. Such is the interest in the theory that NASA in the US is examining it in preparation for growing plants on other planets.
The couple say that the rock dust means that crops don't need water to produce harvests of magnificent vegetables. "It would be perfect for Third World countries that are usually unable to grow crops because the land is so dry," Ms Thomson said. "This could hold the solution for them."
"There is no doubt that, when rock dust is mixed with compost, it has a dramatic effect on crop yields," said Alistair Lamont, president of the Chartered Institution of Waste Management, who is impressed by the Seer experiment. "Future waste strategy is going to rely heavily on the diversion of biodegradable municipal waste from landfill, and one of the treatments involved is composting so we need to find a home for that compost.
"Agricultural land is something we need to work on and the benefits of rock dust in combination with compost can be seen at the Seer Centre at harvest time. We need to get farming to take on board the value of remineralisation and re-fertilisation.
Mr Lamont added that evidence showed that, since 1940, the mineral contentof vegetables had fallen dramatically in this country. "We might be encouraged to eat a lot of vegetables but many don't contain the quantities of minerals that we need," he said.
###
Dust to Dust
From Faultline Magazine
by Ron Sullivan
Some years ago, someone gave me a videotape called Stopping the Coming Ice Age, companion to the book The End: The Imminent Ice Age And How We Can Stop It, by the late Larry Ephron. My first thought was that I’d stumbled onto a horticultural cargo cult.
The originally rational premise of the video was that atmospheric pollution and the greenhouse effect would soon result, not in global warming, but in an Ice Age. More and more fresh water deposited in the Arctic and Antarctic by an increasing number of storms would cover North America and Eurasia with glaciers. This would cool the climates of the world’s major grain-producing areas enough to render them useless. Mass starvation, war over scarce resources, etc. etc., would follow. The root cause of all this was held to be the loss of forests worldwide; as they shrink and wither, their carbon-dioxide consumption and storage capacities go with them.
The video made a pretty good case for this part of the thesis. I myself was not convinced of every detail — phytoplankton are thought to play as much role in global climate as do forests, for example — but it wasn't insulting, nor was its tone more alarming than the news it conveyed. If its plea were to save the forests as they are, I’d endorse it heartily.
However. Here’s the horticultural part, and the scary part too. The video endorsed the wholesale use of rock dust as a fertilizer, in the wildlands as well as in the garden, and the speedy mass planting of "fast-growing trees" to replace the emaciated forests.
The rock dust (also called "gravel dust") was to be ground to powder and pumped out of trucks, airplanes, and other such Great Big Vehicles, over forests worldwide. Such dumping and pumping were shown in action on the tape. I had a sympathetic asthma attack just watching them.
Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees! A lot of what makes up a forest has lungs, folks; and some other inhabitants, notably amphibians, just absorb oxygen directly through their damp skins. Lock yourself in a room with a running fan and a few cans of talcum powder, combine the two, and meditate on the result.
Also scary was the exhortation about fast-growing trees. This is a certified crisis, after all, and steps must be taken quickly or we’ll all starve to death, die in resource wars, etc. etc. Great. There aren’t enough species being swamped and crowded out of existence by weedy alien competitors; we have to get a move on and plant fast-growing things. What grows fast? Acacias and tamarisks and such, plants that are already weedy pests all over the world, partly because they grow so fast.
The reasoning behind the rock dust fetish was this: supposedly, one big cause of the forests’ decline is that "the minerals have leached out of the soil." The glaciers of the Ice Age grind the surfaces of the rocks they pass over into dust; the dust is distributed around the world by wind and water, and in a homeostatic system all this renews the "demineralized" soil and makes it fertile enough to support vigorous plant life again. The newly revived tropical forests can again turn enough carbon dioxide into oxygen to alleviate the greenhouse effect, and the planet warms up again, and the glaciers recede.
I’m not a soil scientist, but I have a few lay questions: for example, if the minerals have leached out of the soil, what’s left? Soil consists of minerals and organic matter. I see no evidence that the world’s soils’ proportion of humus is increasing. That clay in your garden is rock dust. If the video's author's meant trace elements, it would make more sense to add compost or manures, as these would contain the same elements that went into the organism they came from: this stuff doesn’t get destroyed, or transmuted by metabolism into Something Else. Molybdenum in, molybdenum out.
Of course, it wouldn’t work well as a Grand Plan to dump planeloads of manure into all the world’s forests. I don’t want to think about what that sort of weather would do to a pleasant camping holiday. Partly cloudy with scattered … never mind.
If minerals are getting leached out of soil, where are they going? Into the sea, and desalting seawater would be a more reasonable way to recover them. Sorting the sodium chloride from everything else would be interesting, as would deciding which other minerals would be useful, and which harmful, and in what proportions. Of course, the wholesale dumping of dust wouldn't allow that distinction either.
A bigger question was the environmental impact of the proposed remineralization. Without a few more of the glaciers we were supposed to be forestalling, how was this rock to be rendered into dust, and where would it come from? Granite was the recommended rock; it would have to be quarried. Where? In some renditions of the argument, the stuff was called "gravel dust." Quarrying gravel is notoriously destructive to riparian lands, which are already endangered along with their citizens. The mining and grinding would certainly not be done by hand, and the fossil fuels used — I’ve never heard of a solar-powered power shovel — would of course contribute further to the greenhouse-gas problem, among others.
The question of whether we can or should stave off a new Ice Age by scattering rock dust is one thing. I haven’t heard much of the mass-dumping proposal lately, perhaps because its proponents voiced their sense of urgency by predicting worldwide starvation by 1995 and they’re too embarrassed to talk about it with their mouths full. There’s starvation aplenty, but also plenty of evidence that the problem is more maldistribution than global scarcity.
Craig Dremann of the Redwood City Seed Company tested some popular soil additives, analyzed their content, and reported the results in his 1988 booklet Organic Fertilizers: the Truth and the B.S. He said of granite dust (aka "glacier minerals"): "…vastly over-rated as a fertilizer or soil amendment. Useless as a fertilizer and extremely damaging [because of mining, processing, and transport impacts] to the environment."
He pointed out that at the recommended concentrations for saving the world - one pound per square foot, twenty tons per acre - just treating California would require two billion tons, two billion cubic yards. (Picture a granite cube three quarters of a mile on each side. Picture Half Dome sitting next to the cube, looking dwarfed.) Dremann suggested dryly that "a wiser plan might be to more efficiently recycle the nutrients we already flush down the toilet."
Well, yes, but isn’t it always harder to rally an excited new crusade around an old idea like housekeeping? And of course that has to be done steadily every day, and not with helicopters.
###
Rock dust grows extra-big vegetables (and might save us from global warming)
By Paul Kelbie
Spring 2005
For years scientists have been warning of an apocalyptic future facing the world. With the prospect of an earth made infertile from over-production and mass reliance on chemicals, coupled with an atmosphere polluted by greenhouse gases there seems little to celebrate. But belief is growing that an answer to some of the earth's problems are not only at hand, but under our feet.
Specialists have just met in Perth to discuss the secrets of rock dust, a quarrying by-product that is at the heart of government-sponsored scientific trials and which, it is claimed, could revitalise barren soil and reverse climate change.
The recognition of the healing powers of rock dust comes after a 20-year campaign by two former school teachers, Cameron and Moira Thomson. They have been battling to prove that rock dust can replace the minerals that have been lost to the earth over the past 10,000 years and, as a result, rejuvenate the land and halt climate change.
To prove their point, the couple have converted six acres of open, infertile land in the Grampian foothills near Pitlochry into a modern Eden. Using little more than rock dust mixed with compost, they have created rich, deep soils capable of producing cabbages the size of footballs, onions bigger than coconuts and gooseberries as big as plums.
"This is a simple answer which doesn't involve drastic life changes by anyone," Ms Thomson said. "People don't have to stop driving cars to do this, just spread some rock dust on their gardens. We could cover the earth with rock dust and start to absorb carbon in a more natural fashion which, along with reducing emissions and using a combination of other initiatives, will have a better and faster response."
Before the Thomsons began their "good life" experiment, erosion and leaching
were so severe in the glen where they set up home that nothing had been grown there for almost 50 years. The basis of their theory is simple. By spreading a thin layer of the dust over the land, they are able to mimic the earth's glacial cycles which naturally fertilise the land.
Since the last ice age three million years ago, the earth has gone through 25 similar glaciations, each lasting about 90,000 years. "We are 10,000 years into an interglacial - a hiatus between ice ages - meaning modern soils are relatively barren and artificial fertilisers are needed," Mr Thomson said.
"By spreading the dust we are doing in minutes what the earth takes thousands of years to do - putting essential minerals in the rocks back into the earth.
"Over the years the couple, who established the Sustainable Ecological Earth Regeneration (Seer) Centre charitable trust in 1997 to test their ideas, have slowly convinced others of their theory. They recently won a grant of almost £100,000 from the Scottish Executive to conduct Britain's first official rock dust trials.
The couple claim the technique may also play a significant role in the fight against climate change as calcium and magnesium in the dust converts carbon in the air into carbonates. Such is the interest in the theory that NASA in the US is examining it in preparation for growing plants on other planets.
The couple say that the rock dust means that crops don't need water to produce harvests of magnificent vegetables. "It would be perfect for Third World countries that are usually unable to grow crops because the land is so dry," Ms Thomson said. "This could hold the solution for them."
"There is no doubt that, when rock dust is mixed with compost, it has a dramatic effect on crop yields," said Alistair Lamont, president of the Chartered Institution of Waste Management, who is impressed by the Seer experiment. "Future waste strategy is going to rely heavily on the diversion of biodegradable municipal waste from landfill, and one of the treatments involved is composting so we need to find a home for that compost.
"Agricultural land is something we need to work on and the benefits of rock dust in combination with compost can be seen at the Seer Centre at harvest time. We need to get farming to take on board the value of remineralisation and re-fertilisation.
Mr Lamont added that evidence showed that, since 1940, the mineral contentof vegetables had fallen dramatically in this country. "We might be encouraged to eat a lot of vegetables but many don't contain the quantities of minerals that we need," he said.
###
Dust to Dust
From Faultline Magazine
by Ron Sullivan
Some years ago, someone gave me a videotape called Stopping the Coming Ice Age, companion to the book The End: The Imminent Ice Age And How We Can Stop It, by the late Larry Ephron. My first thought was that I’d stumbled onto a horticultural cargo cult.
The originally rational premise of the video was that atmospheric pollution and the greenhouse effect would soon result, not in global warming, but in an Ice Age. More and more fresh water deposited in the Arctic and Antarctic by an increasing number of storms would cover North America and Eurasia with glaciers. This would cool the climates of the world’s major grain-producing areas enough to render them useless. Mass starvation, war over scarce resources, etc. etc., would follow. The root cause of all this was held to be the loss of forests worldwide; as they shrink and wither, their carbon-dioxide consumption and storage capacities go with them.
The video made a pretty good case for this part of the thesis. I myself was not convinced of every detail — phytoplankton are thought to play as much role in global climate as do forests, for example — but it wasn't insulting, nor was its tone more alarming than the news it conveyed. If its plea were to save the forests as they are, I’d endorse it heartily.
However. Here’s the horticultural part, and the scary part too. The video endorsed the wholesale use of rock dust as a fertilizer, in the wildlands as well as in the garden, and the speedy mass planting of "fast-growing trees" to replace the emaciated forests.
The rock dust (also called "gravel dust") was to be ground to powder and pumped out of trucks, airplanes, and other such Great Big Vehicles, over forests worldwide. Such dumping and pumping were shown in action on the tape. I had a sympathetic asthma attack just watching them.
Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees! A lot of what makes up a forest has lungs, folks; and some other inhabitants, notably amphibians, just absorb oxygen directly through their damp skins. Lock yourself in a room with a running fan and a few cans of talcum powder, combine the two, and meditate on the result.
Also scary was the exhortation about fast-growing trees. This is a certified crisis, after all, and steps must be taken quickly or we’ll all starve to death, die in resource wars, etc. etc. Great. There aren’t enough species being swamped and crowded out of existence by weedy alien competitors; we have to get a move on and plant fast-growing things. What grows fast? Acacias and tamarisks and such, plants that are already weedy pests all over the world, partly because they grow so fast.
The reasoning behind the rock dust fetish was this: supposedly, one big cause of the forests’ decline is that "the minerals have leached out of the soil." The glaciers of the Ice Age grind the surfaces of the rocks they pass over into dust; the dust is distributed around the world by wind and water, and in a homeostatic system all this renews the "demineralized" soil and makes it fertile enough to support vigorous plant life again. The newly revived tropical forests can again turn enough carbon dioxide into oxygen to alleviate the greenhouse effect, and the planet warms up again, and the glaciers recede.
I’m not a soil scientist, but I have a few lay questions: for example, if the minerals have leached out of the soil, what’s left? Soil consists of minerals and organic matter. I see no evidence that the world’s soils’ proportion of humus is increasing. That clay in your garden is rock dust. If the video's author's meant trace elements, it would make more sense to add compost or manures, as these would contain the same elements that went into the organism they came from: this stuff doesn’t get destroyed, or transmuted by metabolism into Something Else. Molybdenum in, molybdenum out.
Of course, it wouldn’t work well as a Grand Plan to dump planeloads of manure into all the world’s forests. I don’t want to think about what that sort of weather would do to a pleasant camping holiday. Partly cloudy with scattered … never mind.
If minerals are getting leached out of soil, where are they going? Into the sea, and desalting seawater would be a more reasonable way to recover them. Sorting the sodium chloride from everything else would be interesting, as would deciding which other minerals would be useful, and which harmful, and in what proportions. Of course, the wholesale dumping of dust wouldn't allow that distinction either.
A bigger question was the environmental impact of the proposed remineralization. Without a few more of the glaciers we were supposed to be forestalling, how was this rock to be rendered into dust, and where would it come from? Granite was the recommended rock; it would have to be quarried. Where? In some renditions of the argument, the stuff was called "gravel dust." Quarrying gravel is notoriously destructive to riparian lands, which are already endangered along with their citizens. The mining and grinding would certainly not be done by hand, and the fossil fuels used — I’ve never heard of a solar-powered power shovel — would of course contribute further to the greenhouse-gas problem, among others.
The question of whether we can or should stave off a new Ice Age by scattering rock dust is one thing. I haven’t heard much of the mass-dumping proposal lately, perhaps because its proponents voiced their sense of urgency by predicting worldwide starvation by 1995 and they’re too embarrassed to talk about it with their mouths full. There’s starvation aplenty, but also plenty of evidence that the problem is more maldistribution than global scarcity.
Craig Dremann of the Redwood City Seed Company tested some popular soil additives, analyzed their content, and reported the results in his 1988 booklet Organic Fertilizers: the Truth and the B.S. He said of granite dust (aka "glacier minerals"): "…vastly over-rated as a fertilizer or soil amendment. Useless as a fertilizer and extremely damaging [because of mining, processing, and transport impacts] to the environment."
He pointed out that at the recommended concentrations for saving the world - one pound per square foot, twenty tons per acre - just treating California would require two billion tons, two billion cubic yards. (Picture a granite cube three quarters of a mile on each side. Picture Half Dome sitting next to the cube, looking dwarfed.) Dremann suggested dryly that "a wiser plan might be to more efficiently recycle the nutrients we already flush down the toilet."
Well, yes, but isn’t it always harder to rally an excited new crusade around an old idea like housekeeping? And of course that has to be done steadily every day, and not with helicopters.
###
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