"G"

Grow Your Own -- Okay, so maybe when I was in college, Grow Your Own had a slightly different meaning for me. But now, I mean Grow Your Own Food. What else you may grow in the borders, in between the sunflowers, and purely, of course, for medicinal purposes, is entirely your own business. As I've written before, however (here, and here), local and home-based agriculture are not just for food snobs and hobbyists. There are practical reasons to be close to the source of your food, to know how to provide some of your own food, and to understand what growing is all about. Our entire agricultural system today eats oil. It eats oil in the form of pesticides and fertilizers, farm equipment and processing plants, plastic packaging, refrigeration, and shipping. We eat oil. The oil is finite, and when it goes into decline, suddenly all of us who have been eating oil will have to find something else to eat. It might be a long time before this becomes an issue for those of us living in cities right now. Or, it might be tomorrow. Food shortages can come up unexpectedly. Disasters can happen. Bird Flu can impede the flow of goods and services through the country.

Most of us won't grow all our own food, not now, and probably not ever. But food is life, and it's smart to know a few ways to get it that don't involve the supermarket.

This ends the nutso-Peak-Oil-freak survivalist portion of the blog entry (at least until the Grain Mill entry below.)         
Genius -- I was going to write a big, thoughtful post on Gifted Education, which everyone (meaning Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias, I guess) was talking about a few weeks ago. And also about geniuses, and IQ tests. But I dunno, I have a headache, and also I'm lazy. So here's the dummies version of my genius post: I have a friend. This friend appeared to be a pretty bright kid, so when she was six her school system sent her to an educational psychologist to get her IQ tested. They told her parents what her IQ was, and stuck her in a gifted student program. For one day a week she got to cut out of regular, tedious elementary school classes and go hang out with other smart kids doing actual interesting work. The regular teachers resented this, and it made them not like the 'gifted' kids so much. But the gifted kids were pretty grateful to have that one day of sanity a week. Certainly that program helped some of the gifted kids not lose interest in learning, so they went on to do interesting and important things in the future. It didn't make the rest of school bearable, exactly, but it did keep a spark alive. The other kids in school, the not-gifted ones, they got screwed, because school sucked for them too, and they didn't have a special program to remind them that learning didn't have to be like that. Some of those kids went on to like learning anyway, and they grew up and did interesting and important things. Some of the gifted kids, and some of the non-gifted kids, grew up to like learning but still haven't done anything particularly important in their lives, even if lots and lots of their college classmates have. So was the gifted program a waste of time? Would the same proportion of gifted kids 'give back' to society by doing extra-important stuff, whether or not there was a gifted program? Is 'gifted-ness', in any case, the thing that makes the difference between those who do important useful things, and those who just write minor blogs and grow tomatoes?

I have no idea.

Oh, and about geniuses. The thing about IQ tests is that they test how smart you are compared to other people your own age. My friend was tested when she was about 6. It's not very hard to be a hell of a lot smarter than other 6 year olds. Later, my friend's parents told her what her so-called IQ was (god only knows why they would tell her such a thing!), and man, she was some kind of super-duper genius.

Except that I'm pretty sure she wasn't. I'm pretty sure she was just a smart person, but not the kind of smart person destined to make a real dent in the world, by dint of being, well, actually a genius. I'm pretty sure that, whatever those tests measure, people aren't really geniuses until they pony up the genius goods.

Gore, Al -- The man who was supposed to be our president. He gave a speech today. I admit I haven't read it yet, but everyone tells me it kicks ass, so I'll recommend it to you anyway.

Grain MIll - In November, I bought a grain mill. It makes flour from grains, beans, and seeds. I use it to make wheat flour from whole wheat berries, oat flour from oat groats, rye flour from rye berries, flaxseed meal from flaxseeds... you get the idea. It has a motor, and it came with a hand crank too, for non-electric use. The hand crank is fun to use, but it actually takes a hell of lot of energy to grind enough grain to make a loaf of bread, so I use the motor.

The thing you should know about home grain mills is that people who buy them are some combination of: whole-grain bread fanatics, back-to-the-land self-sufficiency nuts, Mormons, hippies, and survivalists. What, you may ask, are Mormons doing in this list? It turns out that the Church of Latter-Day Saints advises all its members to store a full year's supply of food for their family at all times. A full year. This is called Provident Living. I haven't exactly figured out why the Mormons think this is so important, but they do, and so they are really big on grain mills.

What, you may ask, does a grain mill have to do with storing a full year's supply of food?

And the answer is: OXIDATION.

Atkins notwithstanding, humans have survived since the dawn of agriculture primarily on domesticated grains. Grains are seeds. Whole, unbroken seeds can live a long long time in a state of suspended animation, waiting for the right time to sprout and grow. The insides of whole, unhulled grains are protected from the air. Their oils do not go rancid. Their nutrients do not degrade. The moment you break that seal, the food value of that grain starts to decline.

So people who want to store lots and lots of food for a long time store it, in large part, as whole, dry grains, seeds, and beans. Then they grind it when ready to use it.

Anyway, I don't have 500 pounds of wheat berries stuck in my basement. (Not yet, anyway). The main reason I wanted a grain mill is because grinding your own flour is a culinary revelation. The first time I tasted a loaf of bread I'd made with 100% home-ground whole wheat, I really could not believe it. I realized then that I had never actually eaten a loaf of whole-wheat bread that wasn't made with at least slightly rancid flour.

If you want to eat whole grains, and you prefer them to be not rancid, pretty much the only way to do it is to get them whole and grind them up yourself. It's weird, but it's not hard to do. So yes, I am a psycho-whole-grain bread fanatic. And a little bit of a hippie. And a little bit of a survivalist and a little bit of a self-sufficiency nut. But not a Mormon.

Guantanamo - Oh, Guantanamo, what can I say about you? You sound like the name of a place in a beautiful song, but you're not. You're not our in our country, but you're not in anyone else's country either. You are a no-man's-land, an island of the lost. We're not sure who you house, or what you do to them, or when and if you'll ever let them go. But what we know is not promising. You have psychiatrists who help to torture people. Your former commander has just decided not to testify against himself. Your prisoners are all on hunger strikes. Some of your prisoners have been found innocent, although you forgot to tell their lawyers, and you can't find anyone else who wants them, so they are your prisoners still. You released some of your prisoners, who then complained that you tortured them. Oh no, you said, they like to lie, those people. Except that it turned out that the FBI corroborated most of what those people said. Guantanamo, you are a blot upon my soul. You are a mote in my eye. A cancer in my belly. A black cloud in my sky. Every day you infect me, you spread your poison through me. You have made me a torturer, and I cannot forgive you, and I cannot forgive myself.