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.

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.

Bad Poetry: Ten-Line Obituary

At the Substack I had pre-posted a cheerful silly poem about this week's weather. The first real cold front of winter produced only scattered patches of frost "in the higher elevations." Usually that phrase in the weather forecast means "not at the Cat Sanctuary," but we are a few feet above sea level (water boils at 217 or 218 degrees on a Fahrenheit thermometer, not 212) and the leaves that turn color in cold weather turned this week. In the towns the leaves were still green. I'm guessing they saw color this morning, though, because my thermometer was down just below the freezing mark this morning.

The other news was not so cheerful. It popped out of my head in this form when I looked at the Poets & Storytellers United prompt for poems "to the power of ten."

Ten little eyes that never will open,

Twenty wee paws that never will run;

Five tiny Seralini kittens,

None lasted through the night, not one.

In the warm room their mother laid them

In the warm spot, right on the mat.

Warmth was no use to them, nor milk either;

They were born only to cleanse the cat.

I heard them squeak in the night to say,

"We never came into this world to stay."

Researchers, one of whom was called Seralini, determined that exposure to glyphosate and apparently some other toxic chemicals causes some females, of all species, to sequester these chemicals in non-viable embryonic offspring. The mothers show no reactions except that, if they give birth to living young, these babies aren't able to live very long. Women who have this trait have gone on record saying that they would rather have been sick themselves than lost their babies. Other animals don't seem happy about it either--but they do survive, and thrive. If they're not exposed to "pesticide" (why did I start to type "petsicide"?) vapors before or during their next pregnancy, they may have healthy babies later.

Urgent Link for Tennessee and Other State Residents

As regular readers have been warned already, having a high profile in Glyphosate Awareness can be dangerous. This is a timely link everyone can use to sign a group petition that will be forwarded to your State governors. If you just sign the form with your screen name and e-mail address, the only risk is that you'll be asked to send money to organizations working on the issue. 

Not to me. Never to me. You're welcome to send money to support this web site, buy hard-to-find books, commission blog posts on topics of your choice, ask me to proofread and/or review book manuscripts, ask me to ghostwrite books or contribute to anthologies, etc. As a movement publicly led by me, Glyphosate Awareness does not want your money. We want your talent. We want your time and energy. We want you to have a high profile and speak out publicly about the cause if, and only if, you can say:

"My name is ......

I am [specific age over 50] years old.

If I live another fifty years, I'll still have a long list of things to do.

If I die tomorrow, I'll still have had a longer and better life than most of humankind.

I am not afraid of Hell."

If that's where you are, you probably have done or are doing other things for the cause as well as rewriting the basic petition text to add facts your Governor needs to know. You probably have your own favorite links to documents your Governor and staff need to see, about the toxicity of glyphosate and the why-insult-weasels character of Bayer; you can search this web site or MomsAcrossAmerica.org for more links.

If you are or could become a parent, we want you to avoid buying or using glyphosate, avoid buying or using Bayer products, buy and eat food that is "clean" of "pesticide" residues, sign this kind of mass petitions when they circulate, and vote for people who support these petitions too, but not call attention to yourself. Your children come first. People whose income is based on products that kill human beings aren't always scrupulous about harming human beings in more direct ways. 

Whichever tier of activism you belong on, you should sign this group petition:

https://pirg.org/take-action/tell-your-governor-we-need-strong-pesticide-protections/

A form will pop up asking for money. You decide whether to use it or close it. USPIRG will stop sending you e-mail if you want them to. I think their e-mail is interesting--most of it gives information and doesn't ask for money.

Bad Sign on the Tennessee Border

I don't cross the Tennessee border on Route 23 very often any more. I walked down that road almost daily, just ten years ago, when I had friends and clients on the Tennessee side.

Now they're all dead. 

They weren't young people; some were only "retired" and some were positively geriatric patients,  which was why they hired help, but although their reactions varied, they all had Bad Days at the same time. They all showed reactions to one thing. For about ten years we had no idea what that thing might be. Then Jeffrey Smith mentioned in an e-mail that it might be glyphosate--and all the pieces fell into perfect place. There was no possible room for doubt. Whether they were celiac, pseudo-celiac, cardiac, diabetic, arthritic, or had some other chronic condition, all of them felt worse, were more "disabled" by whatever conditions they had, and were apt to feel grumpy and disagreeable, after exposure to glyphosate. 

More than that, some of them had children and grandchildren whose reactions were worse than theirs. The child who never showed any lack  of empathy, but had vision and hearing impairments, seemed "brain-damaged" or "autistic" to other people when exposed to glyphosate. The man who'd broken a knee walked with more of a limp when exposed to glyphosate. The woman who'd wanted a baby lost the fetus when exposed to glyphosate. It wasn't even so much that people my age had cancer--it was that their kids did.

I don't think any of Mother's friends died of COVID. Most of them died before COVID. Most of them were older than Mother was, and although Mother's death at eighty-five was indeed untimely, most of her friends were one step away from nursing homes before they died. They gave thanks if they died before being sent to nursing homes. Glyphosate probably was not the cause of their death, although it may well have been the cause of Mother's death. Glyphosate most certainly was the most conspicuous cause of their illnesses and suffering during their last years--more conspicuous than sugar, or wheat, or even alcohol, even when those were known to be symptom triggers. 

As long-term readers know, it was only in 2018, after standing in a bustling open-air market and watching a whole crowd react to glyphosate vapors in their several ways, that I started taking this concern seriously as a Celiactivist. I realized that glyphosate specifically, not genetically modified foods generally, was the great universal symptom trigger in 2015 but I still had to see to believe how much harm this poison was doing to everybody, from geriatric patients to primary school children. 

So I'm  not writing this post to judge those Tennessee farmers who plan to be spraying "herbicides," glyphosate and even worse poisons, on the land before planting in the next few weeks. You've all heard arguments for and against glyphosate and the other poisons. By chemical companies' salesmen you've been told that you can't expect good crop yields without these poisons.

Would I lie to you, Tennessee farmers? My parents farmed. My parents tried planting fields, the first year after all chemical use was discontinued. Planting acres of soil with perfectly good seeds and getting hardly enough of a "crop" to provide the whole family with a home-grown side dish at meals. Picking the dozen or so ears of corn, finding the earworms in each ear, taking all that hard-won corn to the animals and buying corn at the store from farmers who still sprayed poison. Enduring the kindly meant lectures of people who wanted to cling to their "pesticides." Living on the wages of one part-time job in town, or moving back to a city to do jobs they loathed. No, the first few years when your farm is breaking an addiction to that Vicious Pesticide Cycle are not going to be good years. Yes, you'll be very lucky if you don't hear piteous whines from the children: "If you really loved us you'd stay in the city so we could have nice things like all our friends have."

Deal with it. Because while Kennedy's mission in this world is to clean the poisons out of the food supply and thereby bring those lean years upon you, Trump's mission is to crank up the economy to the point where you can get those part-time jobs to keep the land while it recovers. You've seen the bumper stickers, "Please send us another 'boom'--I promise I won't waste it this time." Keep that promise. Trump's economic plan is not sustainable but, if we don't waste its benefits, it may get us through the inevitable decline that comes with the end of the Waste Age. Within ten years of breaking the Vicious Pesticide Cycle you can expect to see good crops again. 

You had fifty years to choose to heed what my father tried to show you about breaking the Vicious Pesticide Cycle. Yes, there's a cut-off point for everything. Yes, the people demanding glyphosate-free, glufosinate-free, neonicotinoid-free, paraquat-free, dicamba-free, non-GMO food are demanding something similar to bricks without straw from you. Yes, we feel sorry about this...but there are limits to everything, and at least you can deal with the resurgent monster weed problem, in the first year or two after you stop spraying toxic chemicals on the land, by applying hot water to the weeds. Steaming a weed to death leaves nothing on the land but water that actually helps other plants grow. Yes, you should anticipate a total ban on all "herbicides" and go herbicide-free now. No, you can't expect a lot of sympathy for the pressure to switch to safer weed-wilting technology. Breaking the "insecticide" addiction will be much worse, and you need to start that now, too.

But every economic cloud has a silver lining. In this case, we're talking about longer and healthier lives for farmers. Currently, because of contact with chemicals,  life expectancy (and insurance expenses) for farmers are hardly better than for coal miners. Do organic farmers enjoy longer and healthier lives than coal miners? Absoflippin'lutely. So who's bringing the average for "farmers," generally, so low? Would you like to stop being at such high risk for so many horrible diseases? Would you like to stop having many of the diseases you now have? 

Farm women these days...I remind so many of you of a grandmother or great-aunt you had, just a little-bitty thing who stayed slim and active through middle age, old age, even very old age. You wish you'd taken after her, you say wistfully, looking down over your billows of flab. Even before you had the baby you sprouted up fast and then, right away, you started slowing down, feeling that it was better to buy a size larger clothes every year than to force yourselves to exercise. Well, you got some exercise; not all the work on a farm has been motorized and mechanized yet; but your thyroids...it's a gene...

Stop. Please. Yes, there's a specific gene for thyroid dysfunction. Mother had it back when normal women were slim. I have the gene, too. Did you know that even dysfunctional thyroids can be brought under control with the right diet and exercise regimen? The dysfunction actually flips; Mother's thyroid tended to slow down; mine tends to speed up, but people can actually choose whether to run our thyroid metabolism at a fast, slow, or average pace. Controlling that sort of thing becomes much, much easier when you're not exposed to glyphosate.

Some of you have a different gene for a milder thyroid dysfunction that doesn't flip. Good for you--it's even easier to control, without even taking pills, although the pills you might take would be cheaper than the ones Mother used to take. But yes, that too. You too can be trim, strong, full of energy, and as much of a "hottie" as you want to be, at thirty or fifty or seventy. 

Can we talk, Tennessee farm women? Southerners don't have whole different standard vocabularies we use when talking to people of different generations, as some Asian people do; we say "you" to any person of any age, but we say it with different tones and manners. I have heard a lot of you speak to me as if you thought I was the age of your daughters. I am closer to the age of your mothers. It was understandable. You're fatter than I am, you move more slowly, you feel worse more of the time. You needed glasses before you were old enough to fit into standard eyeglass frames. The skin on your faces sags off the bones and wrinkles and wobbles in that way that actually shows ill health, but is often confused with the look of old age. You blame the way you look and feel on your age, so then you look at me and think I look younger than you are. I do not look young. I look fifty or sixty years old. I am what a well-preserved person of grandparent-age looks like. You do not look old, either, really; you look unhealthy. You have no right to be so "old" when some of you aren't even forty years old yet, but you are. You are going to experience reverse aging when that total glyphosate ban goes into effect. You are going to look and feel the age you really are. Some of you have the kind of hair that turns white earlier than mine, and some have the kind that stays black longer, but nature intended the work you do on your farms, with your men and your children, to be fun--and so it will be.

People in Glyphosate Awareness do not want you to be poor and miserable, Tennessee farmers. We want you to be strong and healthy, to enjoy the job of raising food that keeps other people healthy. We want you to look as good as you feel and feel as good as your work is. 

Many of you inherited land that was already stuck in an addiction-like vicious cycle, and you've kept it in that cycle. You've been enabling the addiction when you had a mandate from Nature to break it. You will have to break the addiction. That never has felt good and probably never will, during the withdrawal stage...but it/ll be worth it when the land is healthy again. 

Imagine relaxing by the river with a rod and reel...and catching full-sized fish that are fit to eat, instead of knowing that your river barely supports sunfish and carp and they never grow to eating size. 

Imagine feeling romantic rather than exhausted at the end of a long day of farm work with your Partner for Life.

Imagine Junior without the learning disorders, Princess without the eating disorders, and The Teenager growing strong biceps, a manly chest, a deep voice, and rejoicing in young manhood instead of fretting that it might have been meant to be a girl.

Chemicals have done you a lot of damage, Tennessee farmers. When you stop exposing yourselves (and other people) to those chemicals, it is going to feel like the Kingdom Coming and the Year of Jubilo. You too will feel like singing along with George Harrison, as an e-friend's got me doing when I recover from a glyphosate reaction: "All (I've) got to take is (a walk) to make it blow away, blow away, blow away!" Goodbye and good riddance to those chronic disease conditions!

There may have to be a year or two when we have to buy our plant-based foods from more sensible farmers in Mexico, and they may cost ounce for ounce as much as gold...but then will come the years when Tennessee farmers are raising and selling "gold," too, before the land recovers completely and the prices of things like strawberries and tomatoes stabilize.

You too have a right to live to be 90 or 100 years old, Tennessee farmers, and you too have a right to enjoy every one of those years. You have a right to grow old without hearing that anyone you know personally has cancer--such a rare, bizarre disease. You have a right to live in a world where the normal end of life is that people's hearts stop in their sleep some time after age 95. You have a right to do as well by doing as much good, and enjoy as much good time in this life, as Jimmy Quillen or Dolly Parton.

But where there are drugs, there are pushers. The pushers of American farmland's addiction to the Vicious Spray Cycle are out there, putting up signs like the bad sign currently disgracing the Tennessee border on Route 450--you know, the one urging farmers to "Stand with glyphosate."

Stand with cancer?

Stand with Crohn's Disease?

Stand with autism?

Are any real Tennessee farmers so glyphosate-damaged you can believe that kind of idiocy?

I know, I know. I've seen it on Twitter--where I also know that it was coming from chemical company spokesmen, because Real Farmers do not waste sunny summer days on Twitter. "Agriculture isn't gardening, Priscilla, dear.  We don't have time to hand-pick weeds and insects away from crops."

Well, if you don't have enough respect for the ecology in which you're raising crops to deal with weeds and insects in a mindful way, without causing harm to anyone but the nuisance species, you may not be the ones who need to be doing agriculture. There's nothing really wrong with selling farm land to someone who cares enough about farming to do it in a mindful, sustainable, natural way. Agriculture must become more like gardening. It must get back to its roots. Abundant crop yields are good but the essential goal of agriculture is healthy crop yields.

Stand with strawberries, Tennessee. 

Stand with corn.

Stand with potatoes.

Stand with tomatoes.

Stand with beans.

Stand with peaches.

Stand with cherries.

Stand with milk.

Stand with eggs.

Stand with turkey.

Stand with quirky little artisanal crops like "wild" persimmons, watercress and land cress, pawpaws, morels, and dandelion shoots.

Stand with the fuel that runs bodies through the kind of lives you want your children to have.

Stand with eating the "weeds"--most unsprayed native plant species are edible, some quite tasty, and many are at their best when they pop up in the places where you don't want them.  Glyphosate positively encourages, through the Vicious Pesticide Cycle, the most unlovable weeds--kudzu and Spanish Needles, Bermuda grass and jimsonweed--but nature intended Tennessee to be blessed with such "weeds" as land cress, dock, dandelion, spring-beauties, ground-ivy, chickweed, chinquapin, catnip, pennyroyal, boneset, queen-of-the-meadow, ladies-thumb, ground cherries, cleavers, clovers, millet, and (at worst) smilax. Native "weeds" are not to be wasted, much less to be poisoned. Most of them belong in salads; the rest are valuable as medicines. They are meant to be received with gratitude, used, and enjoyed. 

Stand with solid bones, strong muscles, vigorous hearts, and generally with bodies that are built to last through ninety years of good hard work that feels satisfying, not debilitating, every day..

Stand with good health and good life, Tennessee.

Stand with a total ban on all "herbicide" sprays this summer, with bans on all poison sprays soon to follow and strict limits on use of "insecticide" powders and oils.

Tell the chemical salesmen to go and drown themselves in vats of glyphosate.

How Should Food Be Labelled?

This post started out in the web log, and then I thought, "Say, if I can add a few more words, maybe people in the food industry will see it." The personal experience that went into this post owes most to those who distribute canned chili through Wal-Mart: Sam's Choice, Hormel, Southgate, Wolf, Armour, Bush's Beans, and especially the pricier one that starts with C, I forget the name because I didn't bring home any labels on which it was printed...

Would some other format for "food warning labels" help you make better food choices? Eww. Ick. Nanny go home! Who ever assumed that you need to make better food choices? How did they know what your food choices are, or how or why you make them? 

For those who may not already know: If you have enough strength to do what you set out to do, generally feel cheerful--though not necessarily talkative--when you wake up in the morning, and don't feel aware of any specific part of your body, you are probably making good food choices. If not, it's worth exploring other food choices, but don't assume that what works for someone else will necessarily help, or even not hurt, you. Don't try to sell wheat to me because it's a nutritious food for you. Don't go gluten-free because I'm a celiac. Only you can make your own healthy choices about anything.

What would help? The only information that needs to be added to food warning labels is whether GMO or "pesticides" are likely to render the food toxic. The list of food ingredients should be the target, if we want to help adults make better food choices. (This cause is not served by taking any approach that it might occur to us to use when talking to small children.)

Apart from not including toxic chemicals sprayed on soil, plant stems, or actual food, which should be included, existing lists of food ingredients tend to be printed in small type, sometimes hidden in the folds or overlaps of labels, and often in colors other than black and white, all of which make the list impossible for many shoppers to read. Many people actually see better at the middle distance (five to ten feet ahead, as when walking) without the glasses they use for reading, so they don't wear glasses in the store. They may use magnifying glasses to read, especially if New Roundup has been sprayed in the area recently, but they don't carry those to the store, either. 

Personally, my preferred font is still 8-point Times New Roman, comparable in readability to 12-point sans serif fonts but more aesthetically appealing...except after a spray poisoning incident, when 12-point type looks like 8-point to me and 8-point type just blurs through the fog of tears that cover my eyes until rain washes the poison vapors away. There are now days when I need a magnifying glass to read the type I normally read all day. This is not an effect of age. It is a very specific, temporary, recurring reaction to some chemical vapors in the air. Anyway this, plus selling books, has sensitized me to the way other middle-aged and older people shop.

How do they, or we if I've been poisoned during the week before a given shopping trip, know if food contains wheat, soy, corn, milk, or whatever else they need to avoid? They don't. They just assume they can't eat it, and don't buy it, when the product might be safe but they can't see the list of ingredients. 

The best bargain on meat these days is Sam's Choice canned chicken. They label it "white meat" with "may include dark meat" in smaller type, which I think is tacky, but I'm not Jewish. I pick out the bits that show pink for the cats, cook the rest with rice and veg, and try to spoon all the veg into my dish and most or all the meat into the cats' dish. Anyway, it's the best price for the best standard of quality (not that every single can is fit to eat) on the market these days. Word has got about and it's hard for Wal-Mart to keep this simple, relatively healthy, food product on their shelves.

So I considered some alternatives. I liked salmon, before it was genetically modified. I like mackerel when the price is right; in recent years it's been unreasonable. I like a whole natural chicken, or large part of one, if another human is there to share it; otherwise the cats are likely to leave bits on the ground and attract less desirable animals. I like eggs, but transportation and cooking can create problems with buying eggs. I'm not keen on red meat; this is a preference, not a rule of ritual purity, so I don't mind precooked beef. This reminds me that, if I'm looking at canned chili, several brands of chicken and turkey chili are available these days.

So, which brands claim to be beef, chicken, or turkey in the sense of flavor, but actually contain more pork? That's a marketing dodge these days, when so many people don't want to eat pork. Gwaltney-Smithfield now sell "Traditional" chicken sausages--hot dogs, bologna, breakfast sausage--that contain more oink than cluck. Traditional sausage was made from pork, so they have an excuse for besmirching that word. Traditional chili was always and only made from beef, yet several brands of canned chili are made from pork. First I exclude the oink and then, of course, everything has to be wheat-free. 

I don't want to try too many new things in one week, of course. Glyphosate is not listed on the label--as any "pesticide" to which foods have been exposed should certainly be. If I take home a sample of something sold at the price of human food, I eat a teaspoonful of it and watch for the mood swing that indicates a glyphosate reaction. If I suddenly feel irritable, within an hour or so, I take charcoal and give the rest of the food to the possums. Glyphosate probably harms possums too; they just don't live long enough, or get close enough to me, for me to notice. Anyway there's that money wasted on an animal that would have just as short a life expectancy, look just as ugly, and smell just as nasty, on a diet of dung and carrion. So I certainly don't want to take home a can of chili with wheat or pork in it.

Southgate chili is the cheapest brand. There are probably reasons for this that I don't want to know about, but Southgate chili tests safe. 

Sam's Choice chili beans are even cheaper. They contain chili pepper and spices, but no meat. I like them. The cats eat them, but after eating them one of the cats nonverbally told me she could hardly keep them down. Sam's Choice chili "with beans" (and also with meat) is made from pork.

What about all the other brands? A lot of the different flavors on the shelf are Hormel. Hormel prints lists of ingredients in tiny black letters on a red background. When not reacting to chemical vapors I can read those lists, but it takes time for my astigmatic eyes to unfocus from the shelves and other shoppers in the store enough to be able to focus on that tiny print. If I've been exposed to chemical vapors it's hopeless. 

Armour chili used to contain wheat...thirty years ago. They've changed the labels and the flavors available since then. Don't ask me what they've changed to. I'm not inclined to make myself as conspicuous as some shoppers do, standing in the aisle and nattering at a friend, waiting for my eyes to re-focus. Don't ask me about the probably better-quality brands either. I take a few cans of Southgate chili and get out of there, before a knot of two or three other shoppers starts occupying that part of the aisle and talking about their medical test results. Days when I have trouble reading labels always seem to be days when other people have trouble, too, and while they're passing time they don't talk about jobs, children, or football any more; they talk about the way their symptoms of chronic diseases flared up this week. It's hard to believe the way the companies try to gaslight people about this.

What I want to see on those cans of chili: About half the label contains the brand logo and the photographed "serving suggestion." The other half is white paper, on which is printed, in black ink, at least 10-point Times Roman or 16-point sans serif, a list of all ingredients in each can of chili, including all preservatives and "pesticides." 

Monosodium glutamate is a flavor enhancer that makes some people ill. I've never had a noticeable reaction to MSG, but I'd like to see it clearly identified for the benefit of those who do. Because MSG is a chemical not a food, there are lots of different ways it can be "made," or isolated, from any kind of food, from some plant parts that are not used as food, or from kerosene. It is the chemical that makes potatoes savory. It's found in even higher concentrations in a seaweed called ajinomori, which is said to mean "father of flavors" in Japanese. The easiest way to add MSG to food is to grind a bit of dried ajinomori over a dish. Cheaper and more common processes involve burning rejected, usually rotten, foods and cooking the ashes...nobody wants to know. These different processes make it legal for manufacturers to list MSG on labels as things like "hydrolyzed protein" if it's derived from grains or beans, "natural flavors" if from potatoes, "sodium caseinate" if from cheese, or "spices." I think they should be required to list every individual spice used and to specify, after every alternative name used for MSG, "(MSG)". 

What I hope not to see on food labels is any more condescending "eat this not that" directives that ignore the reality that healthy eating is a balance among many different hereditary and environmental factors, so one person's "healthy diet" is toxic to another person. Hello? I am a celiac. I spent thirty years growing sicker and sicker on "health food." Start telling me how much fat or sugar or whatever else you imagine would be "good for me" if you want to see how much ice cream I can sit down outside the store and eat in your face. Even if you were Grandma Bonnie Peters, which you're not. So just don't let what you have in the way of a mind start thinking that way, nanny.  

GBP knew personally, and liked, a good cook whose Seventh-Day Adventist mannerisms affected me like itching powder: Vicki Griffin. She made videos discussing how badly elementary school students did after eating Fritos and Mountain Dew for breakfast, how they improved when offered whole-wheat toast and an apple instead. Right. Here's how that works in the real world: Mountain Dew is caffeine in a debittered, fruit-flavored form that does not have to be drunk all at once while it's hot. In fact, Mountain Dew tastes better when it's cold. It replaces coffee, not fruit, on the breakfast table and should not be considered as food at all. And nobody ate Fritos for their nutrient content until glyphosate-contaminated produce clogging the supermarkets drove some of us to get most of our nutrition from chickweed, which is low enough in calories that, yes, a person living mainly on chickweed does need the fats and carbs in Fritos. (Though during those years Fritos weren't safe, either, and such nutrients as I didn't get from chickweed I got from peanuts for a year or two.) But, if a person who chooses Fritos and Mountain Dew for breakfast happened to have found some glyphosate-free vegetables to eat the day before, the Fritos and Mountain Dew would have their intended mechanical effects on the digestive process and allow the person to get the nutrients from the vegetables. Glyphosate in the wheat toast and the apple would, on the other hand, upset the digestive process and prevent the person from getting any nutrients from vegetables, toast, or apple. So, until we get glyphosate out of the food supply, Fritos and Mountain Dew is a better breakfast than whole-wheat toast and an apple...even if people are not celiacs and might thrive on unsprayed wheat. That's not to say that either Fritos and Mountain Dew, or sprayed-wheat toast and a sprayed apple, is a good breakfast. Both of them are extremely low in usable nutrients. But Fritos and Mountain Dew are less immediately toxic than the wheat and the apple. A lot of things that people of Vicki Griffin's and my age learned about nutrition when we were younger, and even found to be true when we were younger, simply are not true for most of America today.

Government needs to move away from any suggestion of endorsement for one-size-fails-to-fit-all diet plans, and JUST make sure that foods are accurately labelled with their actual contents. 

"Ooohhh, ooohhh, but when we just put the estimated amount of various nutrients on food labels people didn't know how much they ought to be getting, and when we just put the minimum daily requirement people thought that was the target level not to be exceeded, and when we just put the average daily amount of each nutrient recommended people thought..."

Well, maybe that's as it should be, because only a nutritionist who has studied the patient's diet, exercise, DNA, bloodwork, medication history, and current condition has any business telling anyone how much of any nutrient they need! People need to listen to their bodies. How much fat interferes with your digestion? How much sodium makes you thirsty, sluggish, or hypertensive? Is cow's milk a food or a poison for you? That kind of information can't be printed on food labels. And, what's more beyond that, the amount of specific nutrients found in raw ingredients varies widely; some carrots are loaded with beta-carotene and some are not. Trying to estimate the beta-carotene content of a package of frozen carrot slices is a total waste of time. All food labels should tell us is what kind of fat, sodium, cow's milk, and whatever else is in the food.

The news about the proposed new labels was reported at washingtonpost.com, which this web site does not recommend because of the paywalls, and is summarized at the bottom of this news roundup:

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/bf-rfk-jr-emphasizes-toxins-food-hhs/

Letter to Governor Youngkin

Finally, Virginia considers a glyphosate ban on the State level. I'm surprised, because Virginia is usually frugal about these things and other State and local governments have been told that bans on various poison sprays were unenforceable until backed by federal law, but, enforceable or not, I think a glyphosate ban needs to be part of our law. USPIRG circulated a form letter--two paragraphs with ample room for comments. PIRG's paragraphs appear below in bold; the rest of the letter is mine. The PIRG petition was apparently sent and pulled down on Sunday; I'm sorry I didn't check that and post the letter on Sunday. The PIRG webform for State-level petitions includes fields for a street address; only people who live and vote in Virginia have any business writing to Governor Youngkin,

"

Yes, this is a form circulated on the Internet, but if regulation of toxic chemicals is being restored to the State level, I'd like to correspond further with the office of the Governor. I have a lot to add. 

Glyphosate has been known to be a potential carcinogen for almost a decade. But some formulations of Roundup being used to grow our food and to kill weeds in public spaces still contain this toxic chemical. 

Bayer is taking action to make sure it can't be held responsible for the harmful impacts of Roundup. To protect our communities from dangerous toxic chemicals, I urge you to ban the use of glyphosate-containing products.

Bayer promised to withdraw original Roundup (almost pure glyphosate plus preservatives and scent) from the market in 2020. It brought the product back to the market in 2021 and is currently selling at least two versions of "new" Roundup. The version advertised for suburban lawn care is a weaker concentration of glyphosate. The one sold for agricultural use is a real hell's brew of five "herbicides" plus that old familiar scet, which is also known to be toxic.

Once sensitized to the issue by observing the diversity of glyphosate reactions in an open-air market, I can hardly go anywhere without seeing and hearing evidence of the damage New Roundup for Agricultural Use is doing in my rural community. (Note that the name and address on this webform are for a business not an individual; if you want to know who I am and where I live, in real life, that can be arranged.) Friends and relatives react to it; people in Wal-Mart discuss their reactions to it; TV and Internet advertising reflects the shifting demand for OTC meds for reactions to it. 

Basically what people can expect from exposure to New Roundup feels like any combination of symptoms of measles, mononucleosis, and food poisoning. Some people are disabled by it; some work through it. I have one neighbor who admittedly wants to "run people off" the neighborhood in order to buy land cheap, who deliberately sprays Roundup when it is most likely to harm the rest of us. I'm a celiac with reactions that include internal bleeding. I am being deliberately tortured by this neighbor. I'm younger than he is and can ee his body deteriorating faster than mine. But we currently have a local law that if I say out loud on the street what most people say about this man's behavior on the Internet, I can be charged with disorderly conduct--but when he literally tears strips of bleeding body tissue out of me, the law does nothing.

So I think we need some tight restrictions on outdoor spraying of *any* chemicals. And I think Bayer needs to fund studies of samples taken from patients with all chronic bleeding disorders, and to compensate the patients whose samples show that their bleeding is aggravated by exposure to glyphosate. 

"

Status Update 5.23.24

A proper post was supposed to be scheduled for today. For some reason it went live immediately rather than waiting for its scheduled time. The reason may have had something to do with my distracted state. The post had been written more than ten years ago. I'd rewritten most of it. I felt that I'd been looking at screens more than long enough. Anyway, today's proper post was "To a Young Leftist," below.

Other than that...we're all still alive. I went out as far as the porch yesterday morning, mindful of the Cuteness Hazards. Pastel's kittens are just starting to bounce and pounce. Still frisky. Still growing. No fevers, no worms. Pets already; they see me and scamper toward me and want to be picked up. I bought a cheap, tacky brushed nylon house gown for the purpose of letting white cats shed on it. The kittens recognize that gown as the one they're allowed to practice climbing on. 

They are clever kittens. They know that house gown from the one I've been wearing in the house, or from the long shapeless new-style dress I wore yesterday. They know to wait on the porch to be brought inside for the night. Dora knows her name, and comes when called. Diego and Dilbert at least respond to their names, and Drudge...well, there's a possibility that he can tell that his name has meanings other than "great pioneering blog." When I take them out to their mother for breakfast in the morning, Dora and sometimes some of the others will pause to rub against or pat me, as if saying "thanks," before running to the food supply. I don't remember Pastel ever doing anything that showed unusual cleverness. Is Borowiec a social cat, or do the kittens get their cleverness from their grandmother?

They're starting to show personalities. Diego is the biggest, strongest, fastest, most coordinated, etc., and Dora pushes herself to keep up with him. Part of his size is fluff. They're all Mixed Hair, not as super-fluffy as their father but much furrier than their mother's family. I don't think Diego is going to be one of those bobcat-sized cats. I think he was just born as much as a week later than kittens normally are born, after conception, and is bigger, etc., than a normal month-old kitten because, if Pastel hadn't held these kittens inside her up to the last possible moment, he would have been a five-week-old kitten. But even for a five-week-old kitten he's precocious. They all are, a bit. Fortunately the giant monster kitten is a sweet, gentle purr-ball. No rough play; so far, at least, he actually seems to like being rolled over and tickled, by me, by his mother, or by his siblings.

Dilbert is the complete snugglebunny. I worry about him. Sometimes a snuggly kitten is just competing with siblings for attention, and sometimes it has some sort of not yet visible defect or disease. You never used to hear of cats dying of cancer, but with "today's safe, new pesticides" it happens. 

Drudge is the most likely to wait and see what the others are doing, and how it's working for them, before moving to join them, but he moves as fast as the others once he starts moving. 

Dora, who is on the large, fast-growing side for her age but looks tiny because her siblings are oversized, has a pretty face. She knows she's special--she's the girl. She seems to think about things. When I've played keep-away games with these kittens, Dora's been the one to think of going around the obstacle in a different way. She was the first to react to me when their eyes were just starting to open and the first to approach me when they started toddling about. She worked out furiously, toddling in circles, keeping up with Diego, stretching and developing those little legs...

Until her eyelids were stuck together by poison in the air irritating the tear ducts and eyelids. When that happens she can seem slow and whiny, until she's worked out a way to claw the mats off her eyes so she can see out again. And her face isn't pretty any more. It was and it will be, but it looks pretty horrible now, with the clogged, puffy eyes. All of their faces do.

All four of these kittens share their mother's tendency to react to "pesticide" vapors in the air with inflammation of the tear ducts and eyelids, and this new spray seems to target that area even in humans--certainly in me. Their faces have lost all their charm. They're no longer so marvellously quiet, either. They whine. How not?!

It was a warm, humid day. Weather-breeder, I thought hopefully. It takes more than one day's rain to wash this new stuff out of the air, but every rain helps. 

Anyway the adult cats were nibbling their kibble, and the kittens were getting ideas...about the kind of food they still eat, of course. "With twenty-four cat tears down there, there has to be a little extra milk for us," I could almost hear big greedy Diego murmuring to big greedy Dilbert, who agreed, and all four kittens would leap down and try to attach themselves to any adult cat whose back was not fully arched. Silver, who is in the family way, and Serena, who has been trying to get into it, objected very vigorously to this. Less social cats would have been hissing, spitting, and slapping. Silver and Serena might hiss or growl at a niece/nephew or grandkitten, but that's as far as they can bring themselves to go, so when the kittens persist they just run away, routed by the infantry. 

"Why don't you all practice climbing?" I said, allowing the kittens to attach themselves to the yoke of the house gown dedicated especially to having cat hairs all over it, and just then the odd jobs man drove past and stopped in the road. He had that "I am going on an errand and would be happy to do a few more errands, for tips" look on. I walked quickly through the steamy front yard wearing a sort of collar of kittens. At the sight of a strange human they all prudently crawled around to the back.

"These are that bleary-eyed cat's kittens," I explained. "They were not bleary-eyed until a certain fool sprayed poison. Now they are. So am I. Anyway I need to go to Wal-Mart. Are you going that way?"

"Don't know when," he said. "I was just going into Gate City for some baler twine. We are baling hay today. Likely we'll be baling hay and putting it up all through tomorrow and Saturday."

"Oh well," I said, "if somebody is mowing hay already you'd better get right on with that job, before it rains."

"Not supposed to rain till Monday," he said, and disclosed that the Professional Bad Neighbor's family's territory, where so many houses were empty and gardens deserted, had been designated a hay field. "It's three or four miles wide, three or four miles long. It will take the rest of the week."

By "miles," I thought, he probably meant "acres." The stereotype used to be that men became coal miners because they had learning disabilities that disqualified them for other jobs. It's not true of all coal miners but the odd jobs man does tend to mix up not only words, but ideas, in some specific categories, like units of measurement. He's a good mechanic, of the kind that know which wrench to use, but not necessarily how to describe it in fractions-of-an-inch or centimeters.

The kittens and I went back to the porch. First Diego, then Dilbert, and then even Dora tried to nurse on my hands. This is a sign of trust and affection in kittens. They think that since you are acting motherly, you might have some sort of milk supply, so they pat and lick and then sink their little baby teeth into your hand. Pushing back, hard enough to tip their heads up and back, is the most efficient way to break this habit. Then Pastel came up on the porch and looked after her babies. She's not a fast learner or a creative thinker like Dora, but there's nothing wrong with her mother cat instincts. I went back inside and did some coughing, sneezing, and eye-mopping, because I'd been out in the poisoned air.

Back came the odd jobs man. "The store was out of baler twine. I called" (the Bad Neighbor)."from the store. He is going into Kingsport for baler twine. For ten dollars I'll take you to Norton."

So we went to Norton. Wal-Mart had rolled back some prices, including the price on one of the things I always buy at Wal-Mart. They had run completely out of that. I bought some things my shopping list does not usually have room for, instead. 

"It's hard to shop fast in Wal-Mart," I said, coming out of the store. I didn't ask, but the odd jobs man looked as if he'd collected wages for the day on his way into Gate City, got some errands done, and seen some friends in Norton. Had that not been the case, he would probably have lost the day's work and wages, because four hours had passed since he'd gone into Gate City for baler twine and, allowing time to take me home, he was still an hour away from the hay fields.

When I hauled in the groceries my poisoned body felt exhausted. Nap time! I woke up just in time to take the cats their dinner, in time for Pastel to eat, visit the sand pit, and feed her brood in time for them to be brought in for the night. Serena was the only cat I'd ever seen keep kittens outside all day and get them lined up beside the door at sunset, but Pastel has been doing that, too.

Serena has not been "mothering" these grandkittens, the way she did Silver's kittens, another year, because she's been thinking about kittens of her own. This is not to be mistaken for lack of interest in Pastel's kittens. Twice now Dilbert has squeaked on a more plaintive note than his usual whining-like-a-young-creature-who-suddenly-doesn't-feel-perky-any-more, and Serena's given me a look that said "I will personally kill anyone who hurts any of my grandkittens." If he'd screamed in pain, she might have attacked me. 

Serena really seems to feel that Manx-cat loyalty should be reciprocated. She doesn't like the kittens being pets. I've tried to deal with her expressions of resentment as if they were simply about status, as cats' jealousy of their humans usually is. I think there's more to it, though. She seems to feel that our bond ought to be exclusive. I think the idea of an exclusive relationship with a cat is ridiculous, but I have been very close to Serena for a long time. I share her feeling about her grandkittens.

But last night we had a nice little game of keep-away, and when the adult cats headed for the sand pit the kittens scampered about in the yard for a few minutes. Then the rain began.

Had we inadvertently done the Bad Neighbor a good turn, keeping all that hay from being mown and baled before the rain?

Or had he stuck to his plans in his pigheaded sociopathic way, paid other men to get all the hay baled, and left the bales of hay on the ground when the sun went down...and the rain started to fall, just about enough rain to guarantee mold in every dang bale of hay?

I am not the nicest of people. I loved the idea of the Bad Neighbor having planted all of his, his parents', his brother's, and his sister's land in hay, rented machines and paid three or four men to mow and bale all of that hay, and left all of those precious bales on the ground through a nice, steady, soaking rain.

Calling Out Food Brands (Post for 1.25.24)

This is a bonus post. It was going into a link log, but it's just too long. So, I'm still about a half-dozen posts behind where I ought to be, this winter. Let's count this as the post I didn't write for 1.25.24.

There are enough food items you don't buy if you believe it might be sensible to follow the Bible's guidelines about what not to eat, right? I don't insist that food be certified kosher because I'm not an Orthodox Jew. It may be that I avoid food that Moses pronounced inherently unclean just because I was a sucker for a misbelief, which circulated in the mid-seventies, that people had a really hard time with "swine flu" if and because they were exposed to it by ingesting pork, whereas people who didn't eat pork merely had "sore-throat flu," which was less bad. 

Well, that was wrong. Sore-throat flu was swine flu. Same virus, milder reaction. It might also have been spread by eating pork, but it spread through the air. People who kept kosher and/or vegetarian, or who just avoided pork, tended to be more health-conscious and, on average, a bit healthier, although some people are health-conscious because they're anything but healthy. So the pork-free might have suffered less from swine flu than the pork-fed. An alternative explanation is that swine flu, like COVID, circulated in a year when a demographic generation was reaching the end of its average life expectancy in any case, and most people who died of swine flu were, like people who died of COVID, geriatric patients who succumbed to pneumonia, and most people who had swine flu probably felt worse than most people who had COVID, at the time, but were less panicky and worked right through it. Teachers sort of hinted that it would be all right by them if people would just stay home on the final day of swine flu when nausea was the dominant symptom, but lots of school lunches reappeared on school floors anyway, because it did not always take exactly 24 hours for each dominant symptom to give way to the next one. Some people fast-forwarded through the sick headache stage directly into being sick.

Nevertheless. I had sore-throat flu, but not pneumonia, and my parents told my surviving grandmother that this was because we didn't eat pork or other things proscribed in the Bible. So for the rest of my life I just never have. I may have inadvertently eaten things that had pork in them--you don't know whether the chicken, turkey, or beef sausages from a company that also makes pork sausages are really 100% pork-free--but I don't knowingly eat pork. I've never wanted to. I think all meat is sort of yucky if you think about it, but pork is extra-yucky. But that's just me. It's none of my business how many other people eat pork and like it but I will say that people who eat a lot of pork smell different from people who don't, to me, and not in an alluringly exotic way.

So anyway...that was enough of a food quirk to separate me from other people, but there was also cheese, which I didn't think of mentioning first because my body does not regard cheese as food. That deep internal reaction that is generally described by a word that violates this web site's contract is, in my case, that cheese is vomit or a synthesized version of it, what the bleep are you trying to pull, and back out it goes. It's none of my business whether other people like cheese, either, but I will mention that blindfolded tests show that people can't smell a difference between parmesan cheese and human vomit. And other kinds of cheese are generally agreed to smell worse than parmesan.

But nooo. This was not enough. As a child I was skinny and sickly and undergrown and a deadweight in any sport and a drag on any kind of outing or vacation. As a teenager I matured more slowly, with more angst, even than most teenagers, who are bad enough Heaven knows. As a theoretically young-adult at university I managed to have mononucleosis for most of two years without even having kissed anybody. This led directly into the polycystic ovarian syndrome and sterility. Then, passing over the encysted gland cancer scare and the viral arthritis scare and the Norwalk Flu melodrama in my twenties, we come to the celiac sprue that appeared in my late twenties, which forced me to face the fact: I am a celiac, the descendant of four generations of female-line Irish celiacs. I finally stopped refusing to consider that possibility once the only other alternative was colon cancer. No pork, no cheese, AND no wheat. What the bleep was I supposed to eat now? But I went gluten-free, and became healthy and strong and cheerful. And Mother and the surviving relatives on her mother's side of the family also went gluten-free and felt better than they'd felt in all their lives before, too. So I don't eat wheat and, frankly, I don't miss it. I liked wheat-based food at one time. I don't now. Once you learn that something is harmful to you it doesn't taste good any more. Wheat is not inherently harmful to most people even in Ireland. If your body digests wheat, good luck to you, enjoy it.

But then. Glyphosate. Good Lord. In 2016 and 2017 I could hardly eat anything sold in a store except garlic and onions, which (like a few of the spices) come with their own built-in pest repellents and don't seem to need a lot of spraying. Meat and eggs were the safest things (although they're not 100% glyphosate-free if the animals were fed contaminated food) but flavorings used with them might contain "Roundup Ready" soy. Day after day after day I wrote this blog on a diet of African coffee abd what grew in my not-a-lawn. Some corporate brands responded quickly to the pleas of fellow celiacs and me for glyphosate-free food, and let's review the honor roll again...

Planters nuts 

Zatarain's rice mixes

Fritos corn chips

Bush's pinto beans (but only the pinto beans, for years!)

Hunt's plain tomatoes and Garlic & Herb pasta sauce

Dole pineapple

Clif "high-protein" candy bars

M&M's

Jif peanut butter

While Cheerios, Quaker, and Nature Valley cereal products...tried but failed to meet the need for clean cereal products. For a while Cheerios were celiacs' favorite cereal. Then they were contaminated. Then the plain ones were clean, but the fancy flavors weren't. Now there's another, differently toxic, contaminant causing different patterns of reactions in some people. It's hard to keep up,. Farmers are failing to get with the program. We have to forget all about that stupid old twentieth century greedhead idea of "high input, high yield" monocropping and start rotating crops, relying on hand cultivation and working with naturalk predators to control nuisance species, in other words going back to farming the way people did before about 1930. It's a long road. Farmers might as well start sooner than later. Whenever they start, there will always be a price toi pay for having poiisoned land with "pesticides." 

(When I started doing Glyphosate Awareness chats my intention was to cut farmers some slack with regard to the "pesticides" they were not spraying directly onto food, but yes, farmers, you have to break those addictions too. Vicious Spray Cycles really do make harmless nuisance species into major menaces to crops. And yes, I know it's hard. I watched my father do it in the 1970s. Years we could plant acres of corn, beans, tomatoes, potatoes--crops that traditionally do well in our part of the world--and hardly have a fresh-picked meal for ourselves, let alone a crop to sell...I'm sorry. If you'd taken the plunge in the 1970s you'd have had time to adjust by now.)

We still don't have a glyphosate ban but things are so much better than they were a few years ago, as food manufacturers are observing the bottom-line benefits of keeping glyphosate out of the food supply. Even store brands of corn, peas, and green beans are likely not to have had glyphosate sprayed on them these days. Coconut, which I avoided for many years, is available (in "good" expensive brands) in a clean, edible condition. Pricey specialty foods, not available in all the big-chain supermarkets and certainly not competitively priced when they are available...aren't as much more likely to be glyphosate-free as those who pay for them have a right to expect. 

Frankly, this web site's mission is not to promote pricey specialty foods, even though some of them are being made by entrepreneurs like Grandma Bonnie Peters. This web site is not elitist. This web site expects its readers to think for themselves, educate themselves, read and do research, as the elite do; it does not expect them to spend money as only the rich can. I'm not rich and I don't expect most of my readers are either. The readers I can picture in my mind are mostly in the 15-to-25-year-old age bracket, in which, traditionally, Americans think there's something wrong if someone does have a lot of money. I have seen some specialty foods that claimed to be glyphosate-free, and I'm all in favor of that, but I've never seen the actual foods even offered in a store. 'S up with that? Clif Bars came out of these years as a popular brand that is now in most big-chain supermarkets and even some local convenience store, so they're on the list now, although in 2019 I thought of them as a specialty item. Other brands failed to cross that line.

So, yes, the food brands endorsed here are mostly owned by the evil Blackrock corporation. I regret that. Food that the average American can look for just is owned by Blackrock and we have to deal with that, for the time being, although it's certainly something we want to change. I'm all in favor of food that people can buy from trusted local organic farmers but I have no way of knowing who their trusted local organic farmers might be. Probably those people sell only to a list of friends, or at most to a local farmers' market, and don't want their names on the Internet.

Meanwhile, as this web site has noted, some food manufacturers have reacted tot he COVID panic and the resulting economic mess in the tackiest, most disgraceful way--raising prices, lowering quality, and reducing the amount of product sold for the same price. 

We can thank those who bought into the anti-soda-pop hysteria, fed by the wine companies but actually originating from those who wanted to raise the prices of Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew, for the fact that one litre of an overadvertised flavor of soda pop now costs (a) more than twice as much as two litres of the same brand cost in 2020, and (b) often three times as much as a local, less advertised brand of soda pop that may taste better anyway. So long, Coke, it's been good to know ya...now anybody who has any sense is drinking RC Cola, or maybe Frostie. Those who refuse Mountain Dew may be few, but their number is increasing., Last week I went back into the store that had the big sale on Mountain Dew, where I'd bought the bottle that relieved the cramps after this year's round of Norwalk Flu. After the sale they still had the same sad, dusty-looking bottles of Mountain Dew on the same shelf. 

But even our President called out some brands for shrinking the product and raising the price. Not counting soda pop. Left-wingnuts officially don't count soda pop as food. Left-wingnuts know that people are more likely to vote for proven-to-fail left-wing ideas under the influence of alcohol. 

http://stiltonsplace.blogspot.com/2024/02/snack-attack.html

It's an old post but it contains a useful graphic illustrating the List of Shame:

Breyer

Doritos

Gatorade

Keebler

Oreo 

Pepperidge Farm

Tostitos

Turkey Hill

 

Wheat Thins

Some of these brands used not to belong to Blackrock, or even Con Agra. Some of these brands used to be some of our favorites, or our parents' favorites. My elders bought a Pepperidge Farm cookbook and talked about that being a good brand...well it was a good cookbook. 

Turkey Hill deserves a special extra bash, here. Whoever is currently running that company should not be making decisions about which color shirt to put on. It should be prison-issued. Selling smaller boxes of Turkey Hill ice cream is minor. Pulling the more interesting flavors off the shelves, showcasing the flavors derived from some combination of corn syrup and coal tar, would...qualify Turkey Hill to be on the List of Shame, but not to be specially called out. But, as mentioned earlier at this web site, Turkey Hill did not just stick with making ice cream flavored with corn syrup and coal tar (the fake fruit flavors containing no actual fruit, or nuts or chocolate or even vanilla). They went on producing the flavors that you can tell contain real ingredients, the actual nuts and chocolate chunks and so on, but they embedded the nuts, chocolate, dried fruit particles, etc., in a matrix of vanilla ice "cream" that is no longer based in actual cream, but in ANTIFREEZE. 

Seriously.

If you put a carton of Turkey Hill vanilla "ice cream" into the fire, which is probably the best place for it, it won't explode but it will burn brightly once the cardboard ignites. Real ice cream is wet and will stop the cardboard igniting until it's baked dry, which takes several minutes. Turkey Hill vanilla will actually, once it heats up, send up flames.

If you left a carton of Turkey Hill vanilla "ice cream" on the floor, not that I recommend this, but if you wanted to save the cost of paying the vet to euthanize an old sick dog...

President Biden's special partiality to ice cream, often pale-colored ice cream that looks likely to be vanilla...is probably not an issue. I'm sure the White House staff have put an embargo on Turkey Hill, which used to be marketed in Washington, only twenty years ago, as an independent farmers' product, full of Mennonite farm goodness. "Your minimum daily requirement of Lancaster County," they advertised to people who drove up to Lancaster County every month. And now...feh. The Mennonite farmers of Lancaster County are too peaceable to do this, but somebody ought to run the Turkey Hill "people"--if they are human--all the way across the New York state line. Lancaster County is too decent a place to be associated with an abomination like this.

No information is available about whether unsold Turkey Hill "vanilla ice cream" has been delivered to the DC inner city schools and, if so, whether it's killed any students yet.

There are a few Turkey Hill flavors that are still ice cream--probably slower-moving flavors left over from last summer, before they started using propylene glycol as a primary ingredient--and this web site recomends not buying those either. Let the fools on the Turkey Hill brand drown in their unsold slop. They don't deserve a penny of your money, or anyone else's. They don't deserve to be able to get any kind of money, ever again. Let them eat antifreeze.