At C2E2. Got my GLNG #16 signed by Arron Kuder. Had lunch at a really great new food vendor at the con, called Ambrosia. It was quite good if not a little expensive. At least I won’t be starving by dinner time.
61° Mostly Cloudy
2401 S Indiana Ave, Chicago, Illinois, United States
Nestlé CEO Says Water Is Food That Should Be Privatized – Not A Human Right
I read the article and I watched the video and I even caught some of the german the CEO of Nestlé was using. In the video he makes lots of arguments, including that drinking water as a human right isn't something he thinks is right – because water should be considered a foodstuff, so it can have value, and that value shows how important and valuable it is. He also declares that genetically modified foodstuffs have been in use in America for 15 years with no ill effects and then kvetches about how Europe refuses to allow this kind of food out of safety sake.
I think his arguments come from a place that I would characterize as obnoxious capitalism. This is what happens when money clouds your thinking so you don't see individual people anymore, you just see the bottom line and big numbers you can crow about. Like supporting 4 million people with your company and so forth. Each of his arguments is something I would expect a capitalist to make, one who has lost his inherent humanity. So, lets unpack them one at a time.
Drinking Water
I was born and grew up in the Great Lakes region. For me, potable drinking water was never a concern – the city I grew up in had such excellent drinking water that you could make ice from it, and then pour it into a glass and drink as much as you wanted without having to worry about any ill effects from that water. Water here is common, so common as to be beyond thought. Potable water is free, available to everyone who wants it, and as much as they care to drink. Anyone can walk up to any business or restaurant or house and ask for a glass of water and get that very thing without paying one cent for it. This is something that is very important to understand about America versus the rest of the world. It is only in America where the water is free and clean and healthy. Everywhere else, you could drink the water that's available and reap the consequences of that action – or you could pay for bottled water. This CEO of Nestlé comes from a culture where water is Evian or Perrier. It's bottled, it costs money, so obviously his instinct is that water isn't a human right – because it would mean that the companies that sell good water would be forced to give it away for free. This is something that Americans take for granted and it was something, as a child of the Great Lakes, had no operating concept of when I went to France. In Europe, if you wanted to quench your thirst you had only a few options – wine or beer, bottled water, or your own urine. The last is unpalatable, but it is sterile and in a way, minimally potable. I think that the outrage over this video about water should be tempered by the light of cultural sensitivity. Poor Europeans have no operating knowledge of water so clean you can stick your head in Lake Superior and drink until you burst and you have absolutely nothing to fear about what comes next. No parasites, no bacteria, no cross-contaminated sewage-laden water supply to fear, just pure clean crystal clear water and a nearly inexhaustible supply of it to boot! So I for one write a pass for this poor swiss, or german, or whatever he is – ultimately European person and his weak understanding of just how vital and important water truly is. This is why we call it the New World here, we don't suffer from water scarcity or doubts about water quality, and it's free. It's something that I remind myself regularly when the political winds smell of shit here in the United States, yes, life can be difficult, challenging even, but. BUT. BUT WE HAVE FREE CLEAN WATER. How much is that worth? More than gold, more than money, more than anything. Humans can go without food for weeks and not die. We can't do that kind of survival when it comes to water, we need water too much, it's too dear. So temper your wild exhortations about leaving the New World, and think about water. For us, as Americans, the idea that water is a human right is so obvious as to be a complete surprise that not many consider it to be as we do. The Great Lakes are our blessing, worth more than any treasure on the planet. More than Gold, more than Copper, more than Platinum. Sweet cold perfectly clean water.
Genetically Modified Food
Another point this CEO of Nestlé makes is a very wrong-headed argument that Nature is somehow out of balance and not good for us. He states that quite clearly, that he considers “Organic” food to be inferior to his processed food. He even goes so far as to claim that GMO food has had no ill health effects here in America where we consume it with abandon. I call bullshit. GMO food may not kill us after we eat it, but processed food, food with GMO ingredients, things that aren't wild produce and certified non-GMO protein sources are in fact killing us. This crap food is killing us slowly. Very slowly. Imperceptibly slowly. Look at what happened in the United States over the past 15 years. We have become sick! We're ill! We are obese, we're riddled with cancer, diabetes, if you open any random cupboard I bet you'll find pill bottles with medications designed to address our maladies like cholesterol, acid reflux, or diabetes. These maladies may or may not have a causal link to GMO foods, but one thing I can say is that I believe that they are linked, they certainly aren't doing us any good! I've screamed at people that a good healthy long life can be had if you avoid processed “cheap” foods like the plague! Yes, McDonalds is cheap, but is it really? Like GMO foods (yes, I link McDonalds and GMO together, not directly, but in the way that neither are good for you) and the cost of that food is cheap to acquire but devastatingly expensive when you consider the long-term effects of eating that food. Cheap to buy, expensive to overcome obesity, diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, high triglycerides… on and on and on. So, when the CEO of Nestlé claims that nature is not good and his GMO processed foods are, my response can be only this, Sir, you are so full of bullshit that you can't walk properly!
So what is to be done? Teach children to cook! For the love of all that is good, learn to make your own food! Use wholesome ingredients, avoid processed food-shit, and if you can't afford to stuff yourself full, at least get a little something to get by! If we were serious about bettering our health and our happiness we would outlaw these processed food-shit items outright. They are not good for us and as a country, they could bankrupt us! Sure, McDonalds is cheap to buy and fills you up, but years later when you are riddled with cancers, obese, diabetic, and hypertensive the cost to keep your sorry body alive will be immense! What's the best thing that public policy can do to better our health? Ban GMO foods, ban processed foods, ban “fast food”. Ban this food-shit outright. If you did that, Americans would weigh less, we'd have less cancer, we'd live longer, we'd be regular, we wouldn't need insulin, and I bet we wouldn't need the handful of pills a day once we get to a ripe old age of 60!
But there is so much we can't risk, and that's really at the center of everything. We can't risk Big Agro and Big Pharma. If we did what we know we should we would have to tell all the drug companies and all the fast food joints to divest themselves in America and go elsewhere for their business. That's the trap at the center of all of this, we know that's the right way for us to go but we know we can't ever do it because it would upset the status quo. Ultimately my arguments can't be expected to survive in this harsh light when it comes to public policy matters, but I can make an argument to individuals and perhaps my arguments can make an impact there. If it's processed by a company, it's food-shit. Do you really want to eat food-shit? How much of your day do you spend eating food-shit? Minimally processed foods, produce, proteins, dairy – the things our grandparents and their grandparents considered as food is where we came from and where we should go back to! Learn to cook your own food! Can't cook? That's a bullshit argument and you know it. People who can't cook their own food are lazy and stupid and deserve their dark fate. If you hand the responsibility for eating well to some company, I wish you all the luck in the world. That company cares for your health about as much as a sea sponge does. Only those people who learn to cook care about their lives, the rest are just throwing it all away. Essentially if you eat this food-shit, and you are what you eat, then you are not made of anything good, you're made of shit.
So, what is best? Ignore this Eurotrash CEO and the wrong bullshit that he spouts. Take responsibility for your health and wellbeing. Take responsibility for your food! For the love of God, LEARN TO COOK.
You’ve being exiled to a private island, and your captors will only supply you with five foods. What do you pick?
Onions, Pork, Bread, Cheese, Broccoli. I don’t think five is enough as it takes more than these items to maintain a healthy body, but these items are things that I value more than others. Onions are universally useful, you can eat them raw, you can cook them and they can take a lot of heat abuse if your cooking tools are very low-brow. Pork is a good choice because it is an animal protein and has all the amino acids necessary for living, especially the ones we can’t manufacture by ourselves. I’m sure you could swap Quinoa out here, but I love pig parts, so pork is it. Plus pork is leaner than chicken and not as bad as red meat. If there wasn’t pork available I would have to switch out to Ostrich. It’s got a great texture, it’s near pork and chicken for ease of cooking and still helps you avoid the perils of red meat. Bread is a cheat as it’s not a food but rather a constructed food. Water, Flour, Yeast. Bread can keep you alive. It’s not a great life, but it can be done. Technically if bread wasn’t available then I’d have to place flour or oats here and I’d assume I could find some sort of water to make unleavened bread. Cheese is vital, it’s very dense, calorically, it provides calcium and it’s durable and resistant to spoilage. There really isn’t any alternative to cheese, perhaps extra-firm tofu, but it’s not the same. Broccoli is a superfood, a little miracle all on it’s own. It’s dark green and leafy and provides Vitamins A, B, C, Calcium, Potassium, and Fiber. Broccoli, like Onion can be eaten raw and can take a serious amount of thermal abuse before it becomes inedible. It’s durable, like all the other foods and easily carried. I’m sure there are better choices available, but these are the few that occurred to me off the top of my head.
Write a piece about a typically “local” experience from where you come from as though it’s an entry in a travel guide.
The first thing that occurred to me, for good or ill is a classic summertime staple in Syracuse, New York where I was born and grew up. It’s something that really only is sold in markets around town and seems to be a quintessentially upstate delicacy and that is the venerable Salt Potato. The potatoes come in a brown paper sack with a plastic baggie full of salt. The recipe is stupid simple, everything goes into a pot with water and boils until the potatoes are done, then they are taken out of the water. As they steam out they get a crust of salt left on them, then you put a little butter in the dish, wait for it to melt and then enjoy.
There are certainly other memorable foods, but this one is the most durable and has the most nostalgia surrounding it. It’s something that Michigan would not understand, right up there with Spiedies, and Heid’s Coneys (nee Hoffman’s actually). Perhaps one of these nights I’ll have to whip up these for old-times sake.
My ideal kitchen is something that has occupied my mind on and off for years. I’ve worked in galleys and small kitchens and large kitchens and I’ve found myself able to cook well despite the small spaces. After a while I figured that if you do not have the space, you have to become more clever. Repurposing and multi-purposing tools you already have become paramount and blogs like LifeHacker are a great place to discover new clever ways to use what you have and make it really perform tasks that you’d never think before. Working in a very small kitchen, for example, if you need more counter space for chopping or mincing then pull out a drawer and put a cutting board across the drawer. It’s the perfect height, and adds just the right amount of space when you need it and pushes away when you don’t need it. It’s that sort of cleverness that really attracts me.
So size isn’t so much of an issue. What it really comes down to are really high-quality durable tools that make sense to use. Great refrigerators with numerous zones, whole-doors, and the freezer on top. A really excellent oven, using natural gas for fuel, a smaller oven on top of a larger one below, with interiors that are nice and clean. I’m particular about the design of the oven space itself. Ovens need good temperature controls, but that’s only part of it. Ovens, no matter what system controls the temperature inside the oven can benefit from bricks. Cheap and easy, bricks are awesome in ovens. They absorb heat and radiate heat slowly – the oven takes longer to get to temperature but the variability of the temperature cycling is smoothed out as the bricks compensate for the variability and make your baking much more reliable. The cooktop needs to be large, or as large as it can be. Lots of burners and with the right tools even the most basic of ovens with cooktops can become a great and versatile tool. For the cookware the kitchen needs to have at least a various compliment of Lodge Logic cookware. I prefer in nearly every situation to cook with cast iron. There are exceptions, proper steel pans for crepes for example, and stainless steel 18/10 sauciers. Kitchen gadgets and tools are pretty much dominated by OXO brand as far as I’m concerned. Much of what they make is superior to other options because they are designed well and cleverly, like measuring cups you can use looking down into them instead of across of them. There is another brand called “The Pampered Chef” that makes wooden spoons and they are exceptional. All of these things are good selections in the perfect kitchen, but the most essential tool in any kitchen, the ones you want to really concentrate on because you’ll use these tools the most are your knives. Every kitchen should have a host of fine knives and they have to be sharp, non-serrated, and of multiple sizes. paring, small chef, large chef, butchers blade and optionally a Santoku blade. I’m a huge fan of Victorinox brand for knives. They are inexpensive, durable, sharp and of exceptional quality. Your knives do not have to be expensive label-whore blades, but they have to be razor sharp and regularly sharpened. Nothing contributes to kitchen injuries more than struggling with a dull knife.
So my perfect kitchen can be a movable feast. I would want to bring my own knives with me if I were to go wandering – everything else is pretty much either a standard or can be worked around. Perhaps someday I’ll have a house where I can design the kitchen and that’ll be where the heart of my home will be.
I just saw a BP commercial play on CBS, as part of the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. I DVR the show and watch it when I like, time shifting it to a more pleasant hour than when it’s on, so it’s always an old program, which I’m fine with. But the BP commercial does irritate me. In it, a talking head for BP explains, almost plaintively, that they have spent 23 billion dollars in cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico. He then talks up all the wonderful opportunities and great tourism of the area and then segues into how many Americans BP employs.
How dare you! How dare your company! Your greed and ignorance are only met with your petulant arrogance. You think there is any forgiveness for you? There is no forgiveness possible for an amoral company such as BP. Companies are not people. You cannot possibly expect people to treat you like you are asking them to. You poisoned the Gulf of Mexico with your greedy incompetence!
I still maintain that the right and proper punishment for what BP did in the Gulf of Mexico was to have all their American property seized, liquidated and be banned from doing any commerce in the United States. That’s a fitting punishment, not 23 billion dollars. It’s chump change to what you did in the Gulf of Mexico. The fact that BP wasn’t eliminated from the United States is clear proof that there is still quite a lot wrong with our world and how we manage it.
Shame on you BP. Shame on you forever.
“Read the story of Richard Parker and Tom Dudley. Is what Dudley did defensible? What would you have done?”
What happens when you are adrift at sea and start to go hungry? Everything you see becomes a ham sandwich – even your friends. These two men could have been brothers and not just friends and it wouldn’t have changed anything. When human beings are starving there are parts of yourself you never thought that existed that over time and with enough raw hunger come out to play. You’ll think things and do things that you would swear up and down you would never even dream about in real life, when you aren’t that hungry.
So is it a punishable offense? It’s the same question that the Donner party had to answer, or the Chilean Soccer team. So many situations where people were stranded, starving, and ended up turning on each other for food. Sure, there is wrong there, but it’s a clichéd maxim that humanity is really just a ham sandwich away from anarchy and a few more from outright cannibalism. Can you punish men for behaving in this fashion? One could argue that if you are hungry enough, your instinct to survive will overcome everything else and you will survive no matter what you have to do.
Stories like this inspire me to only accept risky situations like these men did if and only if I am wearing a bulky jacket full of jerky and hidden bottles of water. Yes, it probably wouldn’t have saved poor Richard Parker, even if he did have a jacket full of jerky, but it would be something. The real idea is to never get yourself worked into those particular situations, safe living, good living. Not eating your friends sort of living.
So I would say that Dudley is not guilty of a crime and the defense would be temporary insanity brought on by extreme hunger.
At work I got to talking about the climate and climate change. About how all the weird weather is just going to get worse and how stupid all of it is. From Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth that nobody much cared for because they just don’t like Al Gore is where a lot of the foolishness starts. I started to riff on a theme after that, noticing on the way that a lot of rich people seem to cluster around the water’s edge. I got to laughing as I considered what a pretty good rise in sea level would do. Say goodbye to New Yack, buh-bye Florida, and then there was this: “Oh yes, we have a house in the Hamptons… we’re so filthy rich and ohh-la-la.” … “We had a house in the Hamptons, but that’s all under the sea now.” I shifted gears and thought about a anthropomorphized mother nature beating the tar out of Florida. I don’t really care much for Florida, they have citrus, rain, oppressive heat, and really adorable under-the-sea-level-but-still-dry land contours. What happens when the sea rises? Florida will be covered with sea water. It’s going to be very hard to grow any citrus after an anthropomorphized mother nature is finished SALTING THE EARTH, after all, seawater is saltwater! Anyhow, I eventually returned to climate change and got to talking about how methane is a much worse gas than carbon dioxide when it comes to the greenhouse effect and that got me talking about how American stockyard animals all fart and release Methane.
Then I remembered the little bit of trivia that marsupials don’t host the bacteria that convert sugars into methane so animals like Kangaroo just don’t fart. 
Obviously I wasn’t done, and I needed to end it on a humorous note and I pulled down some points in the column of ‘obnoxious and obscene’ and posited that we should switch out cows, pigs, and chickens for their marsupial counterparts, like kangaroos and such and that would be better for the environment. It didn’t actually stop there, I got to thinking about how one dispatches chickens – you decapitate them and then them run about until they exsanguinate and stop moving, then you pick up the dead and dress it and you’re all set. Naturally I thought about what one could do in my fictional America where we’ve switched out to Kangaroos. What if you decapitated a Kangaroo and let it bound about? Kangaroos are big, lots of blood and energy and without a brain they’d probably take off bouncing along. Here’s the good part, imagine a new reality TV series where people bet online to see which Kangaroo, once properly beheaded gets as far as it can bounding off without a brain. Make it a national lottery, pack it with ads, boy, that would be a huge moneymaker.
There will be a full moon in two days. So, you know, that’s my excuse for all of this. People who know me shouldn’t even bat an eye at any of this. 
“If you could read a book containing all that has happened and will ever happen in your life, would you? If you choose to read it, you must read it cover to cover.”
The answer for me is quite simple. I would leave that particular book on the shelf and I would leave it be for years and years while I lived, moved, loved, got sick, got well, and enjoyed a nice long life. Then when I am very old and very tired I will sit back with an obnoxiously expensive drink, put on some Mozart, sit back, pull it off the shelf and make it a page-a-day until I got to the end. Then I would put the book back and enjoy a life well-lived and the serenity that comes with robbing death of his surprise ending.
“Vanilla, chocolate, or something else entirely?”
Context is full of hidden landmines. This prompt could be for anything ranging from ice cream to sex. The entertainment value alone for a discussion on my sex life won’t be happening on this blog, so you can safe yourself the clutched pearls and faux shock. The only other option is a culinary question about ice cream preferences. I wouldn’t dare let even that subject be plain as that. I prefer to make my own ice cream, and when I do that I prefer to make it with dark chocolate, lots of vanilla for body, and crushed up Altoid mints for the flavor spike of mint that I really love when making my own ice creams. I am quite surprised that more ice cream manufacturers haven’t attempted to crush and incorporate Altoid mint flavors into their ice creams, but as it may be, I sometimes peek around corners and do things unexpected.
When it comes to commercial ice creams, I have to admit to a preference for Strawberry. About a year ago my partner, Scott introduced me to his favorite ice cream flavor that one of our local fast-food joints makes. Culvers sometimes makes what’s called Butter Brickle and I have to admit that it’s sometimes edging out my preferences for Strawberry.
As funny as innuendo goes, and as far as it’s applicable, what started out as a clear discussion of a topic not related to sex will almost always find it’s way right back into that sense wether you like it or not.
The best video I saw in reference to hilarious innuendo is the Star Trek Sexed Generation YouTube video. Here it is: