Food from My Geographical Area That I Don't Like

The Long & Short Reviews challenge for this week is another easy one: "local" food that I don't like.

That would be the things people started eating, and made "traditional," due to hunger, or to disguise the nastiness of spoiled food...

1. Wine

When fruit juice starts to go bad, the fructose and water in it ferment into alcohol, and it becomes wine. To some people wine smells and tastes good. Better them than me. Most people in my part of the world don't drink wine, but some people, who raise wine grapes, want to expand the market for wine.

2. Vinegar

When fruit juice goes completely bad, the alcohol decays into acid, and it becomes vinegar.  To some people vinegar is at least useful as a preservative. To me food that's been preserved in vinegar smells  and tastes as if it's not been preserved at all. It's nasty. Bury it. But many people of German or French descent seem to feel that they need some vinegar mixed into something with every meal.

3. Cheese

Long ago people discovered that milk in the stomach of a young animal absorbs rennet and curdles into cheese. Some people believe that cheese, being partly digested milk in which the lactose has already started to break down, is easier to digest than milk. My body disagrees with this theory. I can digest a little milk or cream from time to time, but no cheese.

4. Mayonnaise

If you beat enough air into clear oil and vinegar, they form a white substance that looks like cream and tastes like vinegar. Some people want a little of this stuff on every salad and sandwich they eat; some can make a sandwich of bread and mayonnaise alone. They may have every single bit of mine.

5. Salad Dressing

In addition to mayonnaise there are at least a hundred other concoctions made of oil and vinegar that some people like to use to "dress" a salad. I prefer my salad naked. Vegetables are better with neither oil nor vinegar. If you want to add calories from healthy fat, mix nuts or meat into the salad. If you want to coat things with liquid, use juicier vegetables.

6. Potato Salad

People of German descent traditionally cooked potatoes, let them get cold, coated them with oil and vinegar, and mixed them with other vegetables and/or meat to form what they call a potato salad. To me, there are potatoes, which taste best when they're piping hot, and there are salads, which taste best when they're room temperature or chilled, and these two separate things belong in separate dishes.

7. Sauerkraut

People of German descent traditionally preserved cabbage by letting it ferment. When I was a child some people paid debts to my parents, partly, in jars of sauerkraut. The'rents accepted those jars with gratitude, buried the contents, then cleaned and reused the jars. For all of us, cabbage is good when it's fresh and raw, and then you wait till next year to enjoy cabbage again.

8. Pork

Many people in my part of the world would raise a pig, or pigs, until they were about a year old and big enough to be dangerous. Then they'd kill the pig and cook the meat in various ways, supposed to kill all the germs and worms that a pig naturally contains, and eat the preserved pig's body as their primary form of meat all through the next year. It was economical all right, and some parts of a preserved pig don't even taste bad, but I've always thought Moses must have had some very good reason to tell people not to do this. Pigs can share a lot of diseases with people.

9. Buttermilk Biscuits

When fresh milk stands for a few hours, before it starts to go bad, it separates into cream that can be churned into butter, and a defatted, sour-tasting, lumpy milk residue known as buttermilk. (This is real buttermilk. Supermarket buttermilk is fermented with chemicals so that it looks and tastes similar, and you can sour milk with a bit of lemon juice so that it works similarly in baking, but those are not the real thing.) A few people like to drink buttermilk. Most people use it in cooking, to react with baking soda and leaven breads. The simplest form of bread made with baking soda and buttermilk, mixed in with flour, salt, and butter or lard, is known as buttermilk biscuits. It does not look or taste like the biscotti or other sweet cakes European and British people call biscuits. Buttermilk biscuits are like real Southern cornbread, only made with white wheat flour instead of cornmeal. I actually like the taste of buttermilk biscuits but I don't digest them, because wheat, and I was always taught that they're pure junk calories--the nutrition in wheat is in the bran that's been sifted out of that white flour.

10, Blackberries

Blackberries don't taste bad and there's no special reason to avoid them. I don't like to bother with them because, in the orchard, they come in between raspberries, wineberries, cherries, and blueberries, not to mention ground-cherries, and interfere with picking, eating, and preserving these fruits that I like much better. If blackberries only ripened in midwinter, I'd like them. (In late autumn, nut season, I have similar feelings about black walnuts. They're not bad at all, except that, coming at the same time when so  many other nuts are so much better, they're sort of boring.) Generally anything edible that grows fresh out of the ground is acceptable, but some things that grow fresh out of the ground are more delicious than others.

Foods from My Geographic Area That I Like

Most of the foods from the Point of Virginia that I like best are wild things that grow here naturally. It feels natural to think of them in the order they appear on the calendar.

1. Maple syrup

All maple trees have sweet sap that can be boiled down into syrup. Acer saccharum, the Sugar Maple, which grows best further north, tends to have the most sugary, least "mapley" flavor. It does grow in Virginia, but not so abundantly as Acer rubrum, A. nigrum, A. saccharinum, and the introduced A. platanoides. Syrup fom these trees used to be considered less valuable because it tastes more "mapley." If you like a distinctive maple flavor, this is good news, because your woodlot probably has enough of these maple species that are big enough to be tapped for syrup. (Only tap trees that are considerably wider than your five-gallon bucket.)

The secret to harvesting maple sap south of Vermont is that the sap rises earlier in the year. Sometimes it starts in the January thaw. Often we get a freeze in between maple sap harvests. 

The secret to converting that watery, just faintly sweet, sap into syrup is abundant supplies of cheap fuel and patience. Approximately forty gallons of sap make a pint of syrup. You'll be boiling down sap for days. Indigenous people boiled sap in big pots over open fires, but you can economize a little bit on patience by putting a good wood stove  in a shed. 

2. Rock lettuce

This aquatic plant grows whenever the water is not actually freezing. It tastes cool, fresh, and juicy, like the very best leaf lettuce, only better. It grows only in minimally polluted streams, so most people no longer have it. If you can find it, you're blessed.

3. Morel mushrooms

Like other mushrooms, they grow as a big underground network of fungus roots, popping up their reproductive parts when the weather is warm and damp. Unlike some other mushrooms, morels "bloom" above ground only once a year, usually in April. 

If you have a morel patch in your wood lot, you know it. The question is whether you want to be the first to pounce and devour, or want to share the pleasure with friends. 

Another morel fun fact: Nobody in the Point of Virginia actually says "moh-rell." Every family seems to have its own nickname for these mushrooms. "Sponge mushrooms" seems logical but is not really ideal, because it includes the Great Sponge Mushroom, which is mildly toxic. My elders called them "mullets," which I've been told was typical for Irish families. Many people in town call them "dry land fish." You do soak them in saltwater, roll them in cornmeal, and fry them like fish, and the process gives them a flavor that reminds people of fish--I wonder why? 

Another: If you're one of those European types who like to drink alcohol with meals, you will not enjoy morels. They contain a phytochemical that reacts with alcohol in the stomach to have a purgative effect.

Another: If the land where they grew has been sprayed with glyphosate or even exposed to glyphosate vapor drift, don't eat morels. They absorb and retain the poison and will bring on whatever glyphosate reactions you have. 

Another: Chanterelles are another unmistakable-looking wild mushroom that grow here. Many people rave over their flavor. My family never picked or ate them...so I still wouldn't know!

4. Violets

Picking violets only makes them bloom more exuberantly, so it's nice to know that they're safe and healthy to eat. Some people like to candy violet blossoms in sugar, which at least looks pretty. I like to pick and nibble on up to ten blossoms at a time, out in the not-a-lawn. Depending on when and where they grew violets can be super nutritious, such that overindulgence could even cause an imbalance, so use moderation. 

5. Strawberries

When nature intended strawberries to be eaten, they're red all the way through, and being warmed by the sun brings out their sweetness. You don't need to do another thing to them except wash off any soil that may adhere. 

In May, however, when both "June bearers" and "ever-bearers" produce the greatest number of berries, you may have enough berries to freeze, and after freezing and thawing you will want to do something creative with them. They still make a delicious dessert cut up and served in their own rich red juice (try not to pick or eat strawberries before they're red all the way through) with just a sprinkle of sugar to compensate for what's been lost to time, but people tend to like to play with frozen strawberries. So serve them on shortcakes, or stir them right into the batter of layer cakes, or stir them into gelatin and serve them as pie. (Gluten-free pies can have cornflake or crisp rice crumb crusts, but strawberries go well with crushed nut crusts.)

Not so much fun fact: strawberries have a somewhat spongy structure, with seeds growing right out through the surface and no clearly defined peel, and they soak up glyphosate like little sponges. If they've been exposed to vapor drift, don't eat them.

6. Blueberries and Huckleberries

Technically blueberries and huckleberries belong to different species; they don't crossbreed and have different numbers of seeds inside each berry. Who cuts into these tiny fruits to count the berries? An older explanation was that blueberries grow on bushes you bought from the seed company and planted and tended, whereas huckleberries just grow wild on the hills. Except, of course, that some people transplant wild huckleberries into gardens, and sometimes feral blueberry bushes grow on the hills near the sites of houses that burned down or fell in long ago. Anyway they taste good and are good for the eyes. 

7. Cherries

Wild cherries are small and seedy and useful mostly as medicine. When they've been boiled soft and the seeds have been sieved out, wild cherries turn to a thick pulpy syrup that is mixed with honey, poured out on platters, left to firm up between sheets of waxed paper, then cut up in little lozenge shapes and eaten as cough lozenges. 

Cherries that grew on trees someone bought from the seed company are bigger and juicier and can be eaten as fruit, though it's nice to cut them in half and make sure they're not harboring any tiny insect pests. Fresh cherries need no sugar. Split, pit, devour.

Cherries also freeze well, or they can be cooked thick and canned as "preserves," for use in pies later in the year. Cherry pies do need sugar. Our local honey tends to have a strong flavor of its own on which I've never been keen. Cherries have enough flavor authority to stand up to local honey, so you can use honey in a cherry pie I'm likely to pronounce good...at least if none of the flowers the bees visited had been exposed to glyphosate, you could.

8. Wineberries

Wineberries are a lazy picker's ideal for raspberries--bigger, brighter, sweeter, growing on those ferocious-looking brambles that discourage most insects. 

Another fun fact about raspberries: They come in three colors--red, black, and yellow. My favorites are the yellow ones.

9. Tomatoes

Properly grown, vine-ripened tomatoes are too soft to be sold in supermarkets. Like strawberries, they have more flavor (and nutrients) than the kind you can buy in supermarkets. If not exposed to any poison spray vapor drift they don't need to be peeled--if anything the peels may help the fruit pulp cohere--and are best eaten from a bowl, with a spoon. 

"Tomato" may be a name for a shade of red, but tomatoes can also be orange, yellow, pink, or even deep aubergine ("purple") when ripe. They also come in a range of sizes and shapes. People in the Point of Virginia usually plant a mix of familiar and novelty tomatoes, partly to get a mix of resistance to different insects and fungi--if you plant twenty different kinds of tomatoes you should at least get to eat one kind--and partly to have a topic for "small talk." 

Many people have favorite kinds of tomatoes, and although I like any fully ripe,  soft tomato, lightly salted, I should mention that my father's favorite was Yellow Pink Centers. These are wonderfully ugly tomatoes. They grow in a flattened oblong shape with deep wrinkles along slicing lines that will, if followed, yield uneven slices. The predominant color of the rind is yellow, when the fruits are ripe, with a deep pink blush under the skin near the core, but green, orange, and red patches are usually also present. The fruit pulp is extremely delicate. The flavor is sweet; salting these tomatoes is like salting melons, something people do only to emphasize the sweet taste. Vine-ripened red tomatoes are both the predominant flavor and the "dressing" in salads, but Yellow Pink Centers really do seem to need a bowl and spoon all to themselves.

10. Cucumbers

Almost as easy to grow as beans, cucumbers ripen at the same time as tomatoes and work well with tomatoes in salads. You can buy varieties that look and taste similar to the ones sold in supermarkets but it's always worth planting a few "lemon cucumbers," which are short, thick, pale cucumbers--they don't really look like lemons but they invite comparisons--with a special flavor of their own.

We're not even halfway through the growing season yet, but ten favorites ought to be enough.

The Famous 25 Lost Candy Bars of the 1970s

People are googling for the recipes for the "lost" candy bars of our childhood, and not getting a nice printable article on the subject--only tedious videos. This web site will now fill an information need:

First...it's not true that there were 25 candy bars that were banned. About twenty candy bar wrappers were banned in 1976 because they were made with dyes that tended to seep into the food inside (it was not always or only candy). The companies could have repackaged the candy bars, and did try with a few brands, but decided these candy bars weren't big sellers anyway. In some cases they were clearly weaker competitors with brands that are still selling well. 

But a few of these candy bars might be brought back, with better branding and packaging.

1. Ayds 

These chocolates were marketed as weight loss "aids," not candy, although candy is what they were. They were made with artificial sweeteners and chemicals that were fairly toxic. They sold well to dieters, and were reformulated a few times, but then a new wave of attention to a disease called AIDS killed the brand forever. 

2. Candy Cigarettes 

Cinnamon candies with bright red tips, designed to attract children to the body language associated with smoking cigarettes? Well, that idea didn't fly for long. I don't remember a difference in the flavor between Cigarettes and ordinary Red Hots. Then again I didn't like either one...

3. Space Dust

Same sort of thing as Pop Rocks: lumps of sugar, artificially flavored and colored to suggest fruit, that fizzed on contact with saliva. They just weren't as strong a competitor because parents had heard scary stories about "angel dust" and thought Space Dust was a gateway, horrors. Loss to society? Nil. We still have Pop Rocks.

4. Big Time 

Thicker, peanut-enhanced version of the Milkshake bar, q.v. This one might be brought back.

5. Butternut 

Butternuts are a native American tree species, with edible nuts, in the walnut family but (I think) much nicer tasting than any other walnuts. Butternut candy bars did not contain butternuts, which would have been one valid reason to ban them (false advertising), but the candy was never banned. I never actually saw one; they weren't a nationally popular brand. They are described as like Snickers with more peanuts. Like the majority of candies that disappeared in the mid-1970s, they came in wrappers with red, yellow, or violet colors that were banned for adding toxicity to the candy, and the company decided not to try different packaging as the candies weren't doing as well anyway. Apparently people who had the choice preferred a higher ratio of sugar to peanuts, as in Snickers.

6. Caravelle

Caramel, lightened with crisped rice and/or pecans, wrapped in chocolate, sold fairly well but not so well that the company bothered designing new wrappers for them. 

7. Charleston Chew

Sticky chewy taffy that just might pull out the fillings from teeth that might have got cavities from chewing on too much sugar, already. Some people did like it. Charleston Chew was sold as a long strip of candy guaranteed to make a disgusting sticky mess. Then a different manufacturer bought the brand and repackaged it as bite-sized candies wrapped in chocolate, a little less messy, though when it got into the hands of children... Anyway, although some people liked this confection, more people hated it. It was banned, because the strawberry flavor was actually made with a toxic red dye, but was brought back with a red dye that seemed safer. It just didn't sell as well as other candies.

8. Cherry Humps

The idea might be revived, but they'd need a new name. The original idea was simply chocolate-covered cherries sold as candy bars at checkout counters. The cherries were preserved in "cordial" and wrapped in chocolate. Whole cherries formed little bumps in the chocolate bar. They were dyed red. The FDA objected to the dye. No dye, or a safer dye, didn't sell so well The company tried using chopped cherry bits in cherry-flavored pink nougat to fill chocolate bars. That didn't sell very well either. Apparently customers were emotionally attached to those dyed cherries. Today's customers have not formed such attachments...but real cherries aren't cheap. Fake cherries? Meh. I wouldn't buy them. It would have to be real cherries and, for me to buy candy bars, the price would need to drop back to 50 cents for the small bar, $1 for the large one.

9. Chicken Dinner 

The brand was patented about a hundred years ago, when many people thought of salt pork as their primary source of protein (which meant they were actually getting their protein from whole grains and beans, salt pork being mostly fat) and a chicken dinner as a special treat. So, this candy bar was the special dessert treat to be served with the chicken dinner. The chocolate bar was filled with peanuts and caramel, a recipe that worked better as Snickers.

10. Chocolite

Another candy marketed to dieters, this one consisted of real chocolate with air whipped into it so you ingested less chocolate, thus fewer calories and less fat and sugar, with the same size chocolate bar you were in the habit of buying. Europeans actually like this; they buy similar treats called Aero Bars. Chocolite was not a big seller in the US. Perhaps if it cost less than solid chocolate bars, in proportion to the amount of chocolate it contained, the brand might be revivied.

11. Coconut Grove

Wads of heavily sweetened coconut dipped in chocolate, not unlike Mounds. This idea might be revived by someone who doesn't mind that peanuts outsell coconuts in the US. Some people did like the coconut alternative, and still do.

12. Cristy

'Another peanut-nougat-chocolate bar that didn't sell as well as Snickers.

13. Denver Sandwich

I never heard of it, but apparently some people out West liked this version of peanuts, nougat, caramel, and sometimes crispy wafers in a chocolate shell. In the Eastern States we still have Snickers and Twix.

14. Hollywood

Another version of nougat, caramel, and peanuts covered in chocolate in a banned bright red package. I remember eating this one and thinking it wasn't as good as Snickers.

15. Marathon

Just caramel covered in chocolate made a cheap enough bar that the company could afford to make it much longer than competing chocolate bars. As a teenaged candy connoisseur I thought it was boring, but some people did like sticky caramel.

16. Milkshake

This one and the spin-off Big Time brand really were unique. They were made of malted-milk-flavored nougat. Nobody else ever replicated the recipe. It's thought to have involved special processing equipment that was destroyed by a fire. The malted nougat was covered in caramel, then in chocolate. The package was banned for being made with toxic dyes, but the company repackaged the candies and were able to sell them in the late 1970, before the fire.

17. No Jelly

Basically a peanut granola bar that just begged to be slathered with jelly or jam. The package was banned. The candy was fine; newer versions of it are on the market now.

18. PB Max

Peanut butter oatmeal cookies, with peanut butter filling, covered in chocolate...the brand survived into the 1980s but just didn't sell as well as similar cookies that were packaged as cookies.

19. Powerhouse

Caramel, peanuts, and chocolate fudge wrapped in chocolate. The wrapping was banned; the company was able to sell the candy in a different package until a corporate merger prompted the decision that it wasn't selling as well as Snickers.

20. Reggie

Caramel and peanuts coated with chocolate sold as round, baseball-shaped souvenirs of baseball star Reggie Jackson during Jackson's active career. He retired about the time the company had to repackage the candy, so they didn't bother.

21. Seven Up

There were several different versions, some cheaper than others, of the chocolate bar consisting of seven distinct bite-sized pieces of chocolate wrapped around different fillings, to be eaten one piece at a time or more than one at a time. The most common version had mint, nougat, butterscotch, fudge, coconut, buttercreme, and caramel fillings. Other fillings included peanuts, chopped brazilnuts, almond pralines, butterscotch, dark chocolate "truffle" candy, vanilla custard, Irish Cream, pistachio nougat, maple toffee, peanut butter, and pineapple. The FDA banned one wrapper and some of the sweeteners used with some of the fillings. Still, these chocolate bars were popular and survived repackaging easily--they'd been repackaged to advertise new flavor mixes several times before. What they did not survive was a lawsuit for copyright infringement. The company tried marketing chocolate bars with sections of different fillings in the 19808s and 1990s, but seven seemed to be the magic number for bites of different candy and apparently nobody wanted to try renaming the candy anything like "Sampler Seven." 

22. Snik Snak

Wafers layered with chocolate, like Twix. People who lived in places where this alternative brand was sold say it was different from Twix. I wouldn't know. 

23. Triple Decker

Layers of milk chocolate, white chocolate, and dark chocolate, on top of each other and all covered in dark chocolate, so that the different kinds of chocolate melted together in the mouth when people bit into one very thick bar of pure chocolate. Some people liked the candy (I don't think I ever saw it), but changing the wrapper was the least of the company's worries. The dark chocolate coating tended to stick to whatever wrapper they used. Some people thought the texture of the chocolate needed to be lightened with nuts. That wasn't easy to make work, either. The idea of just packaging three separate thin bars of chocolate in a stack, so that people could bite into them together or separately, doesn't seem to have been considered. 

24. Walnut Crush

This one was unique: chopped walnuts in white nougat with a thin outer shell of chocolate. Price may have been the reason why nobody tried repackaging this candy bar. Enough people like walnuts that it might sell, though not, of course, as fast as peanuts.

25. Whiz

Peanuts suspended in marshmallow, covered in chocolate, just might have worked if the company had worked at marketing them. Mallo Cups will never sell as well as Reese's Cups but they do sell. 

Disqualified for This List 

Mars Bars consisted of nougat, caramel, and almonds wrapped in chocolate. They don't qualify for this list because they were sold in the US into the early 1980s. In 1982 Sue Townsend had an American character who didn't recognize them and had to be told about them by other children when he visited England. This is anachronistic. Americans knew about the whole-almond bars, though perhaps American candy munchers didn't want to risk their teeth actually eating them. Or maybe it was the fatal commercial where that baritone who'd done the other commercials about Mars Bars being "out of this world," and so on, said "You get big crunchy nuts in a Mars Bar." The commercial aired around the time kids my age were discovering that "big crunchy nuts" had an alternative meaning. It always seemed to me that the candy bar died of embarrassment. Anyway it was officially discontinued in the 1980s due to declining sales, then brought back as Almond Snickers. 

As a bonus idea, one of the videos about these vanished candy bars self-advertises with a picture of a once popular dessert that was never marketed as a candy bar--white "seafoam" or "divinity" candy with chopped-up gumdrops suspended in it like stained glass. Seafoam candy was cheap, though hard to make. It was a popular party dish because it needs teamwork; someone has to pour hot syrup slowly over egg whites while someone else is beating them. In the 1970s fear that the hot syrup didn't cook the egg enough to kill possible salmonella pushed seafoam candy completely out of fashion. White nougat and white chocolate with bits of fruit jelly candy, possibly in the classic seven-bites arrangement, just might be a marketable idea.

Book Review: The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook

Title: The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook

Author: Jillian Michaels

Author’s web page: www.jillianmichaels.com

Date: 2010

Publisher: Crown / Random House

ISBN: 978-0-307-71822-8

Length: 276 pages

Illustrations: one-color drawings, not credited; black-and-white photo page at the back

Quote: “While [medication] may be an effective short-term aid to bring things under control, it fails to address the need to reverse and eliminate the most frequent under­lying cause of chronically high insulin: poor diet.”

First, for the guys: More photos of the body underneath that too-big T-shirt in the back of the book, along with information about how to buy full-color videos showing the body in action.

Now let’s dispel any illusions: The thing to remember about all those cookbooks and exercise programs featuring sleek, beautiful young people is that, if you’re not between the ages of 18 and 25, you’re not going to look like that. If you want your mature body to look like Jane Fonda’s or Jack LaLanne’s, or even like your own body before you settled down in a desk job, however, this new book just might help you.

Maybe. The trouble with all discussions of "healthy food" today is that people keep on repeating what they learned about the nutrients found in food, and ignore the fact that those nutrients are altogether irrelevant if the food contains glyphosate, since the body will reject the food violently in any case. If it looks like it just came from Old MacDonald's farm, bursting with natural wholesome goodness, and it's found in a supermarket and it doesn't have a hard shell you throw away, it is probably a glyphosate bomb and you'd probably be healthier not even walking through the "produce" section and breathing the fumes off it. Unless you know for sure that they were not exposed to "pesticide" vapor drift, don't even touch blueberries, raspberries, green leafy vegetables, apples, carrots, grapes, tomatoes, or any of your old childhood favorites. Also avoid anything that is sold or used in a hard, dry, seedlike condition--nuts, wheat or other grains, seeds, flour--unless you know for sure. Rice and wild rice are usually safe, but not guaranteed. The allium family (onions, garlic, etc.) are usually safe.

To test foods like hard-shelled tree nuts sold in their shells, oranges, melons, beans, coconuts, etc., eat one teaspoonful and wait for the early symptoms of your typical glyphosate and/or other "pesticide" reactions. If they appear, take a charcoal capsule and throw away the rest of the food. 

The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook is loaded with fun facts about recent discoveries about the effects different foods typically have on our metabolism, plus trendy recipes that...well...some of them are on the granola side, but most of them will disappear fast if you take them to a potluck dinner. A short summary of what Michaels learned about foods that affect metabolism appears on pages 3-41, with key facts repeated as sidebars next to recipes that use the recommended foods. Most of them are not on the safe list. Briefly, metabolism-boosting foods include fish, Brazil nuts, whole grains, pumpkin seed, sesame seed, almonds, spinach and other greens, whole grains, olive oil, hazelnuts, barley, beans, oats, brown rice, onions, apples, pomegranates, cooked broccoli, carrots, molasses, apples, raspberries, blueberries, grapes, rosemary, cooked tomatoes,  sweet potatoes, oranges, turkey, walnuts, and yogurt. Meats can have mixed effects on metabolism and are used sparingly in this cookbook. 

People on restricted diets can use this book if and when we get the bans we need; plenty of recipes are “free” from whatever natural food you’re trying to avoid, and when farmers stop spraying poison on food you may find that you can enjoy that natural food again anyway. If you’re serving these dishes to people outside the family, it’s a good idea to list the ingredients, since many of them do contain stealth allergy triggers like coconut oil and orange juice in unexpected places. There’s a good-sized section of vegan entrees. Several sauces are thickened with fruit or vegetable purees rather than simple starches. A majority of recipes are lactose-free, gluten-free, and/or casein-free, or can be made whichever of those things you require. When Michaels does use a dairy product, it’s usually yogurt, usually offered as a topping.

Vintage granola-period recipes substituted honey for sugar. In the 1980s efforts were made to debunk the myth that honey had any special nutritional benefits over sugar; both are basically sucrose, only honey has more calories, is much messier, and usually costs more. “Loaded with vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and antioxidants”? Not exactly; it contains traces of nutrients—enough to make a difference to an insect, but probably not to a human. Bees store honey made from different kinds of flowers separately and even humans can see and taste differences. Unfortunately, today nearly all honey is loaded with glyphosate and should not even be handled. 

The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook suggests agave syrup as an alternative to honey or maple syrup. Agave syrup is fairly new even to the health food market; I personally don’t live where it’s made, so I’ve never tasted it. 

More can be said for real maple syrup. It does not have to be made in Vermont. Sugar maples will grow in most of the United States (and in Canada); you just tap them at a different time of year. Maple trees that are native to areas other than Vermont  also produce syrup. “Invasive” Norway maples are excellent sources of syrup—we used to construct a little “syrup camp” and boil down sap from the Norway maple in the yard, and other maples in the woodlot, right in the shade of the tree, and it would become sweet and maple-y enough that a spoonful turned pancakes into dessert before it even became syrupy. As Noel PERRIN observed, federal standards for grading maple syrup were created at a time when the blandest, sweetest, most sugar-like syrup was considered the finest. If you’re after the more distinctive flavor and trace nutrients that help preserve male reproductive health—oh, what the heck, let’s stuff in a few keywords, real maple syrup may help prevent prostate enlargement and thus extend men’s sex lives and fertility—local maple syrup may actually be better than Vermont’s Finest. So if you like and can afford to pour maple syrup over your organic corn or buckwheat pancakes, enjoy it. (Women can safely enjoy real maple syrup too—if living with men under the influence of Jillian Michaels we may need it.) If you’re cooking or baking, however, read on.

If you’re trying to reduce the amount of sugar children eat, however, forget about the “honey is better because you use less of it in cooking” argument. What grainy, bready desserts partly sweetened with honey do for children is to activate sugar cravings without satisfying them. Mothers who cook with honey raise sugar junkies who beg, borrow, smuggle, and steal candy and sugar-saturated junkfood. I was one of the lucky little sugar junkies who found that, as an adult, exercising my legal right to eat sugary junk in front of Mother brought my sugar craving under control. I’ve known other sugar junkies who managed to ingest enough of Mom’s “healthy treats” and smuggle enough sugar to be hypoglycemic, diabetic, and/or depressed before age twenty-five.

What I’d recommend for kids is letting them fill up on plenty of raw organic vegetables before exposing them to sugar—natural or unnatural. Kids hate vegetables the way adults in our culture are typically taught to serve them—cooked limp and/or smothered in oil and vinegar. Kids love vegetables fresh from the garden and will happily snack on raw carrots, asparagus, peas, celery, cucumbers, tomatoes, spinach, and almost anything else in the organic garden. The natural sugars in raw veg satisfy children’s sugar cravings, provide plenty of fibre, and are easier for children to digest than some adults would have believed. I would let a child snack on anything I tolerated in the garden, and insist on cooking a vegetable only if the child became flatulent or complained of tummy-aches after eating it raw. If this plan didn’t keep the child from gobbling up candy and commercial desserts when those were available, I’d calm myself with the knowledge that the child was well exercised and supplied with fibre anyway.

Personally, I think vinegar works best as a cleaning product because it motivates me to keep rinsing and scrubbing away all traces of that disgusting odor, so I think there’s far too much vinegar in these recipes, but the idea of serving fruit with lemon juice instead of sugar or honey, as a salad dressing, is definitely an improvement over serving mayonnaise with added sugar.

I’d heard about the mixed benefits of raw broccoli for people with thyroid problems, and about the mixed benefits of eating phytoestrogen-rich soy products, but that millet, peaches, strawberries, pine nuts, bamboo, and peanuts “have been shown to create thyroid problems” was news to me. How does that work? Well, one thing those foods have in common is that in 2010 all of them were likely to have been "ripened" with glyphosate, which does seem to cause thyroid problems, up to and including thyroid cancer. If you have a serious thyroid or ovarian disorder, you’ll want to read the recent findings Michaels reports in this book, but bear in mind that the research was done by a process of wilfully ignoring the elephant in the room. Foods that have not caused diseases for thousands of years have started to cause diseases only when and as they've been sprayed with chemicals that have been intentionally not tested, despise evidence that their use is correlated with those diseases.

Five Frugal Dinner Recipes, #2

Continuing our series of main dishes that feed two or more people for less than $10...much fun can be had with packaged rice mixes. More advanced cooks work out their own recipes for spicy rice mixes, but here are some easy recipes to get beginners started.

Each of these recipes costs less than $10. You can afford to add at least one of the options suggested in the recipe. If feeding a multitude, add another box of rice (it could be plain brown rice) and add all the options; this will cost more than $10 but it's still a frugal way to give everyone a rich, hearty meal with some recognizable meat on the plate.

Frugal Dinner Recipe #6: Sweet & Savory Rice 

1. Great Value Canned Chicken Breast is actually canned chicken; in some cans you get mostly dark meat. Pick this out, along with the visible fat, and give them to your pets. While your pets are eating outside the kitchen, close the kitchen door and proceed. Put the chicken and its broth ($2 to 2.50) in a saucepan.

2. Stir in 1 box of Zatarain's Pineapple Coconut Rice mix. Sometimes I substitute Cilantro Lime or Yellow rice mix. Each of these costs $2 or less. Stir well and turn on the heat.

3. Open 1 can of Del Monte Pineapple in Heavy Syrup. If you're a baby-boomer you will note right away that it's not heavy syrup, which was viscous and tended to scorch. It is light syrup. Anyway, drain the syrup into the pan. If you have bite-sized pieces of pineapple, dump them in. If rings, cut them into bite-sized pieces, then dump. Add water and/or fruit juice and/or fruit soda to make a total of 2 cups of liquid. (If you don't know what that looks like in your saucepan, drain the chicken broth and pineapple juice into a measure and fill it.)

4. Time cooking for 20 minutes after it boils.

5. Pass salt or soy sauce. Great Value canned goods tend to be undersalted. 

6. You can substitute leftover chicken or turkey from your own cold roast, if you have one. Depending on how local the suppliers are you may be able to get fresh chicken or turkey, or chicken or turkey sausages, for $2 to $2.50 

7. You can add an onion and/or bamboo shoots, horsechestnut slices, or sliced radish or jica fama for a more savory meal, and/or a can of mandarin oranges, peaches, or pears, a little fresh peeled or preserved ginger, kumquats if you have a tree, and/or almonds, cashews, or litchis, for a sweeter meal. 

Frugal Dinner Recipe #7: Spanish Rice

1. Start with about a cup of cooked, boned, defatted meat of whatever kind appeals to you. In Spain it could be a leg of lamb or goat kid, hare or rabbit, pork, or beef, probably more often than chicken, which is what I usually use. Pick it off the bones of a rotisserie chicken, or use a can of chicken chunks as above. You could also press, marinate, slice, and fry some extra-firm tofu for a vegan meal. Or use a can of mackerel or tuna. Depending on your protein, add it to the rice before cooking or cook separately.

2. For the rice heat 1 pound of Great Value canned tomatoes and 1 cup water, or a 24-ounce can of tomatoes, as available (or use tomatoes from your garden).If using meat cooked in water, add that water, which has now become broth, to the tomatoes. Stir in 1 box of Zatarain's Spanish Rice mix. You can also chop in an onion, shallot, or a spoonful of garlic, and/or any parsley or cilantro stems you have lying about, and/or olives, either sweet or hot peppers, a carrot, even celery if you have some celery that you know is unsprayed. Heat rice and vegetables.

3. When it boils, cover the rice and cook for 20 minutes. Spanish Rice is supposed to be on the soupy side

Frugal Dinner Recipe #8: Packaged Rice and Beans

1. You may have noticed how many recipes advise you to rinse and drain canned beans. Do this if you are on a low-sodium diet. Otherwise, it's not necessary. Bean broth thickens slightly as it cools. This thicker liquid contains protein and nutrients from the beans and is safe to eat in dishes where, like this one, it soaks into the rice anyway. Measure 2 cups of bean broth and/or leftover meat and/or vegetable broth from the refrigerator and/or plain water.

2. Stir in 1 package Tony Chachere's Red Beans & Rice mix (under $2). 

3. Add 2 to 4 cans Great Value beans (less than $1 each), depending on how many people you want to feed and/or how many servings you want to freeze. If using a large enough pan you can chop in any clean carrots, celery, peppers, and/or tomatoes you want to add, and garlic and/or onion to taste. Chop carrots as finely as possible so they can cook in 20 minutes.

4. Let it simmer for 20 minutes after it boils.

5. Pass chopped sweet onions, parsley and/or cilantro and/or other herbs from the garden, tomatoes, chives, radishes, even cucumber slices, as available, with bowls of hot rice and beans. 

6. Rice and beans are a complete protein but you can serve meat with them, on the side fresh from the grill, or reheated and simmered in with the rice and veg, if you really want to.

Frugal Dinner Recipe #9: Dirty Rice 

1. Zatarain's Dirty Rice mix is seriously "dirtied" with pepper and spices and must be cooked with meat and vegetables, I think, to be edible. Tony Chachere's is milder but still benefits from cooking with meat and veg. Pick a package. Either one costs about $2.

2. Pick a protein. In the same way Spanish people eat Spanish Rice with almost any protein, Cajuns eat Dirty Rice with almost any protein. If using Zatarain's rice, read "plain ground meat" for sausage--it will absorb salt, pepper, and sage from the rice mix. If using any meat that is not fully cooked leftovers, brown until all red or pinkish color is gone.

3. Stir in 2 cups of water, the rice mixture, and any tomatoes, sweet onions, sweet bell peppers, clean celery, or other savory vegetables you might want to use up.

4. Let it simmer for 20 minutes after it boils.

5. To feed extra people or freeze extra portions, serve small bowls and fill up with fresh cut lettuce, onion, tomato, cucumber, radish, sunflower seeds, pecans, parsley, cilantro, wild garlic, or other raw vegetables and/or nuts as available.

Frugal Dinner Recipe #10: Poverella 

1. This web site is not going to advise eating any freshwater or saltwater shellfish, although a quick harvest of just a few of each kind that is locally available is traditional in Spanish paella. Many people like shellfish and they're often loaded with nutrients; they're also susceptible to bacteria and parasites. It's your choice, If you don't want to worry about shellfish, buy a can or package of fish and flake it. A can of tuna or mackerel costs about $2.

2. Boil water to cook 1 package of Zatarain's or Mahatma yellow rice (less than $2). While the water boils, cut up onion, garlic, tomatoes (you can use tomato juice as part of the water), drain a can of black beans (less than $1), and shell or open a can of green peas (less than $1), as wanted. 

3. Add rice, veg, and fish to boiling water, Cover and cook about 20 minutes after it boils.

Wal-Mart, What's in the Corn?

"Roundup Ready" corn, I was glad to learn, is a stupid mistake of the past. One of the most deservingly detested GMO crops of all time, this strain of corn was produced by splicing genes from Escherichia coli, bacteria often blamed for "food poisoning," into corn so that the corn plant survives heavy spraying with glyphosate. 

How was it possible not to know that this was a bad idea?

In the 1990s US-based Monsanto held a patent on glyphosate. However, the first "Roundup Ready" corn was tested overseas, on poorer people who had less legal recourse than US citizens. The corporation knew the corn was likely to make people sick. Well, it did. E. coli is more often fatal to a larger minority of the population than COVID-19 ever was. The company kept testing, sickening whole towns in the Philippines and elsewhere, until they found a strain of E. coli that seemed relatively weak. The genetically modified corn was then drenched in glyphosate from before planting right up to harvest time, and it made people sick, though usually not as acutely as E. coli itself did. 

So-called corn allergies weren't common before the 1990s. They became common in the 2010s, when the original patent expired and chemical manufacturers were selling glyphosate at competitive prices. Most of the "allergies" were probably glyphosate sensitivity. By 2020, food producers were looking for corn that was neither sprayed with glyphosate nor bioengineered to be sprayed with glyphosate. Corn-based foods became relatively safe to eat. Southerners rejoiced that we could safely make cornbread with Martha White, White Lily, and similar beloved corn meal brands, once again. Those of us who were gluten-intolerant (probably fewer than a tenth as many Americans as went gluten-free and found that not eating glyphosate-soaked wheat relieved their chronic conditions) were getting tired of rice being the only grain we could eat, and started buying canned and frozen corn again. Because stores had had a hard time selling canned corn in the 2010s, it had become very economical. 

A large amount of the corn raised in the United States is still Roundup-Ready and still treated with glyphosate. It was so treated even when Bayer, which now owns Monsanto, released a glyphosate-free brand of "Roundup" herbicide spray "for farm use." In 2024 and 2025 customer complaints caused the formula for this chemical disaster to be changed. Some small farmers, unaware of the changes, bought Roundup-Ready corn, sprayed it with Roundup, and got a small part of what they deserved as the glyphosate-tolerant plants died of exposure to diquat, dicamba, or other poisons. This year, bitter clingers are getting their glyphosate back, and we must all try to laugh when they describe their wives and daughters giving birth to babies with useless eye stalks flopping out of bare sockets in little bare skulls. 

(One of my cat Silver's Seralini kittens was born like that. Mercifully it never breathed. I pickled it in alcohol with the intention of exhibiting it in the Friday Market that summer; the next strain of COVID kept the market from reopening and eventually I burned the body.) 

Those still clinging to glyphosate know by now that even the US government has agreed that the stuff promotes cancer and aggravates just about every chronic condition known to humankind, including the ones that ought to be fully controllable by merely modifying our lifestyle in such a way as to give up all social eating for as long as we live. They know, although they may try to pretend otherwise. The more arrogantly they bray about "the (outdated, disproven) science," the more certain we can be that they know. They deserve no pity. Real farmers, who have been struggling to do without glyphosate and other poisons since at least 2018 or 2020, deserve sympathy and support, as do the old people who are now dying from cancer after years of trying to believe that glyphosate was safe and effective and the symptoms they had after spraying it were unimportant, but the bitter clingers to glyphosate deserve to be denied treatment when they develop cancer.

But the corn monocroppers are clinging, and they are getting away with it, because the majority of the corn grown in the US is either not used as food for humans, or else processed in ways that seem to eliminate most glyphosate residues. Before it has soaked into plants or plant parts glyphosate is pathetically soluble, easily washed into the water supply where it does no "good" to the lazy farmer after just a little shower of rain; when corn is made into high-fructose corn syrup or monosodium glutamate, those processes apparently get rid of the glyphosate inside the kernels.

Photo from New York Animal Agriculture Coalition, by way of Google.

Corn meal is made from "field" corn, which is less sweet than "sweet" corn even when fresh. Hard corn ("field" corn or popcorn) is not usually eaten fresh, because everyone would rather eat sweet corn on the cob. Hard corn contains niacytin, a "bound" form of niacin that should in theory be nutritious but isn't. Niacytin not only fails to be digested as niacin but makes it harder for the body to digest niacin from other sources. Traditionally Southerners loved our cornbread because corn, unlike wheat, grows well in the South and because most of us got enough niacin from other sources that the niacytin was not a problem. By the twentieth century, however, severe niacin deficiencies were appearing in poor people who ate cornbread alone or with cheaper, fattier, less nutritious meat. A campaign was launched to sell the idea that cornbread should always be made with at least half wheat flour, to reduce the niacytin content and add digestible niacin to the bread. 

Researchers now know that an even better way to use hard corn is to process the dry, hard corn kernels in ways called "nixtamalization," which break down and unbind the niacytin. Traditional nixtamalization involved soaking dried corn in a mix of water and wood ashes, which loosened the outer layers of the kernels and produced grits. 

Sweet corn, however, needs little processing. In addition to containing more sugar, sweet corn contains a rich variety--and variety is the word, because the mix varies widely among different ears of corn, but in any case there's a lot--of B-vitamins, including niacin, not niacytin. 

I started mixing Wal-Mart's store brand of canned corn with canned beans and peas. This added variety, fibre, and flavor to what I'd been eating through most of the 2010s, which was rice, onions, and garlic, and sometimes for variety rice, garlic, and onions. Not all beans were safe to eat after 2020; garbanzos, which I particularly liked before 2010, were especially likely to contain glyphosate residues, even if the beans hadn't been sprayed themselves, probably because they were raised in between crops of wheat, in glyphosate-saturated soil. Being a walking glyphosate detector, I found that Bush's pinto beans were reliably safe, as were Bush's butter beans. Black beans and crowder peas were less reliable. Wal-Mart's store brand of green peas, pinto beans, corn, and tomatoes seemed glyphosate-free, or close enough not to trigger my hair-trigger reactions. 

Various combinations of any of these legumes with corn and/or tomatoes and/or some sort of meat made satisfactory meals for me between 2021 and 2025. The corn could be store-brand canned corn, or cornbread made with Martha White or White Lily corn meal, or corn chips. (The Wal-Marts near me all stocked both brands' "self-rising corn meal," with salt and baking powder added, and "self-rising corn meal mix," with salt, baking powder, and a generous share of white wheat flour added. In practice, people who have learned to distrust wheat usually snapped up the wheat-free corn meal so that, nine times out of ten, I didn't find it on the shelf.) I usually bought a case of a dozen cans of canned corn and one or two bags of chips on each shopping trip to Wal-Mart and felt that that yielded a good mix of hard and sweet corn in the diet. I also bought vitamin supplements with all the B-vitamins.

But in 2025 I started to notice that after eating Wal-Mart's canned corn, my tongue felt sore and swollen. That is, of course, an early warning sign of a B-vitamin deficiency or imbalance, including niacin deficiency...if it becomes chronic. But it didn't become chronic. Nor did the vitamin supplements affect the symptom. My tongue, and mouth generally, felt irritated for about twelve hours after eating the canned corn--not at other times. Drinking water helped. Vitamin supplements didn't help.

Regretfully, I stopped buying the canned sweet corn and replaced it with more cornbread (other stores did better at keeping wheat-free corn meal on their shelves). Cornbread with a can of chicken chunks drained in around the edges of the pan, and a can of pinto beans and a can of tomatoes warmed on top of the bread, makes a delicious panada, everyone I ever feed agreed. Children love the sweet undertaste in a bowl of cornbread and milk. Corn chips also soak up the juices from the canned goods, and/or whatever raw vegetables go into a taco salad, in a satisfactory way.

But the last couple of times I've done a taco salad with Wal-Mart's store brand corn chips, the "Original" kind that look like Fritos, I've had the tongue and mouth irritation. I didn't have it before. And don't try to tell me it's because I've eaten too many corn chips in the last five years--I may have done that, but the "White Corn Tortilla" chips did not have the same effect, nor did the cornbread made with Martha White corn meal. What's being sprayed on the corn, Wal-Mart? 

* * * * * 

A primer on why we never need to spray anything on corn...Corn was actually the first crop that rebounded when my family broke the Vicious Pesticide Cycle. Strawberries were close behind.

This is how we eliminate weeds from cornfields. It costs about $15 at Tractor Supply Company. Cheaper and more expensive versions are available, there and at most other hardware stores or department stores that have a garden department--including Wal-Mart.

(Photo from Walgreens by way of Google.) This is how we eliminate corn earworms. We can buy knee-high stockings or use the washed foot ends of laddered tights. We tie the foot part of the stocking around the bottom of the developing ear of corn. When the baby corn earworm tries to gnaw its way in through the corn shucks, it gets a mouthful of nylon and decides to go somewhere else. Its chances of starving or being eaten by a bird, or wasp, or bigger insect along the way are high. Although aggressive (not strong enough to do any damage to a human, it will bite and kick with all its puny might when picked up; it will also eat another corn earworm if it can) the corn earworm has no effective defense against predators, and would never have been much of a nuisance to farmers had the farmers not fallen into a Vicious Pesticide Cycle that destroyed the corn earworm's natural predators.

(Photo from Wikipedia.) This is how we eliminate corn borers (cobworms). All of these little beetles, and a few dozen other species, can be called ladybirds, ladybeetles, or ladybugs, because monks who noticed how useful they were in the garden dedicated the whole genus to Our Lady Mary, the Mother of Jesus. (You can identify the one plant-eating species in the family, the Mexican Bean Beetle, because it is yellow-green instead of orange, amber, or red.) Ladybeetles and their larvae are best known for eating aphids but they eat other nuisance insects too, if the other insects are small enough, which corn borers are. Stop poisoning your insects and watch your corn borers disappear.

(Photo from the Audubon Society by way of Google.) This is how we eliminate corn cutworms. They like to hang around near my home so I think of them mostly as mosquito eaters, but they'll take just about anything to feed their babies, which often happen to hatch at the time of year when corn is vulnerable to cutworms. (The one photographed above appears to be bringing home a beetle--not a ladybird, possibly a Soldier, Net-winged, or Burying Beetle.) Lots of other birds like cutworms, too. Again, stop poisoning the insects and watch the cutworms disappear.

And when we eliminate the borers, we automatically get rid of the worst kind of fungus that infests corn, too...although glyphosate actually promotes the growth of human-toxic Fusarium mold.

Grandma Bonnie Peters' Gluten-Free Recipe: Garbanzo Salad, Soup, or Spread

Garbanzos are most often planted, in the United States, as cover crops in between wheat growing seasons. Because wheat is the hardest of all crops to weed, the one that gave people the idea of trying just to poison the field so weeds couldn't grow, garbanzos tend to be loaded with pesticide residues. 

Before glyphosate many people formed a prejudice against garbanzos, thinking they were allergic to these "chick peas" themselves. Since 2010 a different set of people may have thought we were allergic to garbanzos and to so many other things. The good new is that the majority of those people aren't even allergic to wheat. They have been reacting to glyphosate. 

When garbanzos have not had chemicals sprayed on them, and not grown in chemical-poisoned soil, they've always been a good healthy food, full of nutrients, to which very few people are allergic. They do need to be fully cooked, which takes a few hours, and used in a diet that includes plenty of water. Like all legumes they react with the acid in our bodies to form gas bubbles that are harmless, but annoying, if we're not well hydrated.

Grandma Bonnie Peters started cooking gluten-free vegan food before 2010, and never adjusted to the horrible new reality that the diet that had restored her health had become toxic in its own way, with glyphosate. All the vegetables in this recipe tend, even today, to be full of glyphosate. 

We still need a ban on this poison. Chemical companies are still fighting tooth and nail to prevent our getting one. We need to fight back. Identify farms that use glyphosate. Publicize where those farms are located, so that everyone can refuse to buy anything from those farms. In the local area, everyone should also avoid speaking to, or touching, or working with, or trading with, or meeting in any social group, the farmers who are still bitterly clinging to glyphosate. If people agree to do this consistently there will be no need for violence or for additional government regulations. 

The Bitter Clingers to Glyphosate are not decent human beings. We stop treating them like human beings. They have become things--walking vats of toxic waste. They have no place in human society. Make them know it, and within a year they should be begging people to accept payment for holding their "farms" for the seven to ten years the land will need to recover from the Vicious Pesticide Cycle, while the Bitter Clingers move to basement apartments in cities and do menial work that feels penitential to them, and pray daily that people will show more empathy toward them than they have shown toward other people. 

If and when this strategy works, then this recipe will stop being a sad memory and become an actual recipe we can use, as it used to be.

Gluten-Free Vegan Garbanzo Salad, Soup, or Spread all begin with the same ingredients:

2 heaping cups cooked garbanzos (2 15-16-oz cans)

1 bell pepper

2 carrots

2 celery sticks

2 T chopped parsley, or more

½ cup chopped English walnuts

Optional seasonings: salt, pepper, lemon juice, onion, garlic, etc., as you like, but taste the dish before seasoning. It’s flavorful all by itself.

Method for Gluten-Free Garbanzo Salad

Clean and chop the raw vegetables. Toss with nuts and garbanzos. Serve on plates lined with lettuce. Garnish with radishes when they’re in season. Pass salt, pepper, lemon juice, and/or mayonnaise. 

Alternatively, break up green leaf lettuce, romaine, or other salad greens; toss them with the salad, and serve in bowls.

Method for Gluten-Free Garbanzo Soup

Heat the garbanzos in a generous amount of water and/or broth, adding the chopped peppers, carrots, and celery while bringing the liquid to boil. Simmer until the vegetables are soft. Sprinkle in parsley and nuts.

Method for Gluten-Free Garbanzo Spread

Cook the garbanzos, but leave the other vegetables raw. Grind everything, including the parsley and nuts, with a few spoonfuls of broth in a blender or food processor. Season as you like. Lay a piece of rice bread or corn bread, or lettuce, on a plate. Carefully spread the vegetable mixture thickly over the bread, and eat with a fork.

Truly gluten-free bread, by definition, doesn’t make the kind of sandwiches you can hold in one hand and eat while doing something else. Some gluten-intolerant people can use bread thickened with potato and tapioca starch; some breads of this type can be used for sandwiches. Gluten-tolerant people can, of course, spread the mixture on wheat bread. 

 

GBP advertised vegan meals, and she herself was one of the people who thrived on the no-added-fats school of vegan cuisine. She would never have added even a teaspoon of oil to any of these dishes. I don't think they need oil either, but some people might  want to add a teaspoon of flaxseed oil for essential fatty acids or sesame oil for flavor. Some gluten-free people might even spread this vegetable spread on a piece of boned and flattened chicken.

Bitter Clingers to Glyphosate

(This week's Petfinder Post will appear on Thursday.)

I've been mulling this since the news of Trump's loathsome executive order slowing the natural disappearance of glyphosate, which is no longer even considered effective as an "herbicide," due to the inevitable Vicious Pesticide Cycle, and is now known to feed harmful fungi and disease bacteria even though it has an "antibiotic" effect on several neutral or benign bacteria, from the Earth...

I think Glyphosate Awareness has entered a new era.

We've seen that every responsible researcher has come to accept that, if not a primary carcinogen, glyphosate certainly and obviously is a powerful pro-cancer factor.

We've seen that glyphosate predictably harms people each of us knows personally--people who are not motivated by money or politics or conformism or even that syndrome where a certain percentage of medical students tell the school clinicians they think they've got every condition their classes have studied. Glyphosate does not have a distinctive taste or scent of its own, so people usually don't know when they've been exposed until their reactions set in. People don't always even recognize when they are having reactions that are obvious to observers; their obvious reactions feature mental symptoms and they think their anxiety, depression, anger, or stupidity are perfectly reasonable, until the reaction passes. Although not everyone has an obvious physical reaction to glyphosate, by now the statistical odds of anyone not knowing a person who has such a reaction are minute. Most of us have a close relative who has been systematically tortured by these reactions since 2009. Many of us have a close relative who has been killed by them. 

We've seen that, while politicians clearly motivated by money are trying to dig up old whines about the poor pitiful farmers who can't raise crops without glyphosate, the fact is that "organic" farmers--even though their crop yields per acre are lower in weight--are producing crops that don't make people sick, are earning some small amount of profit more years than not, are keeping their land, and are, if anything, healthier and likely to live longer than city dwellers, while chemical farm workers' life expectancy is...I said "little more than half" of organic farmers', recently, on X. It was revealing. The actual figures are, with some variation among sources, 48 or 49 years for immigrant laborers who are more often used to handle pesticides because that group includes less educated and more desperate people, 50 to 58 for native-born chemical farm workers, and 75 to 85 for organic farmers. You can reasonably say that 58 is a lot more than half of 75 but the self-styled "farmers" didn't make that sort of reasonable quibble. They tweeted as if they thought that confusing activists with words, confusing the average age of present-time workers with their average life expectancy, and throwing in the odd verbal attack, would keep them happily profiteering on alleged "food" that makes people sick for another twenty years.

They are not debating ideas in order to learn facts and make informed decisions. They are intentionally harassing people who present facts.

It's time to stop talking to these people. 

Really stop talking to them.

What I'm actually calling for, let me make this absolutely clear, is nonviolent, Amish-style shunning.

When an Amish person sins against any of the church's multitude of rules--from murder to wilful persistence in wearing or using something that doesn't fit into the group's uniform--other Amish people stop talking to that person. 

Person's spouse may move back in with per parents.

Person is not served or waited on if person enters an Amish-owned business.

Person's business no longer exists, as far as the Amish community are concerned. Non-Amish people who persist in trading with the person being shunned, if any, may be warned that the business is not really Amish.

Usually an Amish person who gets this treatment is on per knees, weeping in penitence, in a few weeks. Their subculture has such a strong social bond that they don't hold out the way a few non-Amish people who have been shunned by their former social circle have done. Most non-Amish Americans who've been shunned on account of their opinions have, in fact, been able simply to move to the other side of the social aisle: before their relatives officially disowned them most Jews who've become Christians, Christians who've become Buddhists, Democrats who've become Republicans or vice versa, hawks who've become doves or vice versa, public school employees who've become advocates of school choice, psychiatrists who've recognized the dangers of Prozac Dementia, etc., have built up social networks on the other side and prepared themselves for the loss of some old relationships, even if the loss still hurts.

But what if all these people have in common is that they're clinging to profits...and the people who shun them are able to take those profits away? 

Gentle Readers, they are going to be sooo miserable. And they deserve it. And if anything can do them any good, our laughter at their tears is likely to be it. 

Enough farmers had naturally stopped using glyphosate, seeing that it made customers complain (and avoid their products) while it wasn't actually having much effect on the nastiest weeds, even by 2022 that even those of us whose bodies detect and react to glyphosate on the parts-per-billion level have been able to eat an almost balanced diet. All the rest of you have to do is shop and eat in solidarity with people like me to bring the Bitter Clingers to Glyphosate to their knees.

Will you miss a lot of foods you've always loved? I still do. I have found Mott's applesauce to be a safe food, although processing destroys the Vitamin C and I've not found a safe brand of fresh apples. (If you do eat apples, even if you live in Michigan and you traditionally bite into those peels, it's a good idea to peel apples thickly; the inner part of the fruit may be less damaged by glyphosate vapor drift.) I've found it safe to eat peeled oranges--but I like orange peel. I've not dared to eat any commercially grown green leafy vegetables. You have to raise your salads in your kitchen or back yard, and if you don't get a lot of sunshine your selection of salad greens may no longer include lettuce. I've not chosen to risk eating any kind of berries yet, either, because berries, cherries, and other fruits that don't have thick rinds just soak up glyphosate vapor drift like little sponges. So do carrots. So does celery. 

But I have been able to eat some oranges, pineapple, bananas, melon, even commercially grown peaches; some beans, tomatoes, corn, potatoes, peas, cucumbers, squashes, and lentils, in addition to onions, garlic, rice, and nuts. So should you be. Vitamin supplements aren't as good as food but should prevent deficiency diseases long enough to leave supermarkets and their suppliers sitting on a lot of alleged food nobody's buying. 

Let them cry. Let their families break up as they lose what they've made of their family farms. 

Don't wait on them in stores or restaurants. 

Block them on social media, in order to activate shadowbanning algorithms. If you happen to see a point that needs to be addressed in something they've said, address the point after blocking the Bitter Clinger. 

Walk out of religious services if they walk in. Without making your usual donation. 

Withhold membership dues from social clubs if the clubs don't drop Bitter Clingers from their membership.

Don't see Bitter Clingers as patients.

Don't trade with businesses that continue to employ them in any capacity.

Don't talk to the Bitter Clingers. That's all. Until they confess that they're not fit to own land and use their savings to compensate people who are willing to accept the financial loss involved in reclaiming the land they've poisoned. Repentance for actual physical deeds is not an emotional matter. Ignore the emotions until they've shown sincere repentance with more actual physical deeds.

All these people, or things that nature intended to have been people, care about is money so the effects of seeing their streams of income dry up should be valuable to other Bitter Clingers as examples. It's not absolutely necessary to laugh out loud in public when a Bitter Clinger commits suicide, as some of them will do, but it may be good for the other Bitter Clingers if we do.

I'm posting this after having had a sort of vision of an alternative future in which Bitter Clingers were allowed to roll on, in the way Trump and Kennedy seem to imagine they can be, and groups of their neighbors, armed with everything from machine guns to pitchforks, beat on their doors. In the group I was watching a Bitter Clinger came out to the door and tried to duck back inside. People beat on the door until the frame began to crack. The Bitter Clinger came out onto his porch. The crowd shouted, "Bring out your daughter," and a man stepped forward carrying a sack, unzipped the sack, and threw the dead body of a child right into the Bitter Clinger's face. The Bitter Clinger gasped, "No, not my daughter! Take me!" Then his wife was on the porch and the crowd shouted, "Take him back!" and threw a bleeding, broken body into her face. 

Justice denied tends to lead to violence and to further injustice.

Justice can be served, I believe, if enough people decide simply to stop speaking to the Bitter Clingers. Including "speech" on social media, or in the form of trade. 

Make the farmers themselves demand a ban on all open-air spraying of any chemical with a formula other than H2O, so that nobody will feel as much hated as they feel this summer.

Hurt their feelings so that nobody has to do more permanent damage to them.