Rhona

An interesting piece on absorption of nutrients from food on NPR this morning. Among the things they discussed:

• you need oil to absorb nutrients from foods. Not necessarily a lot, but some. (So, out with that horrible no-fat dressing!)(You also need oil to carry flavours across the tastebuds, so it’s an all-round good idea.)
• cooking vegetables with caratenoids – carrots, in particular – is actually better than eating them raw as it makes the caratenoids easier to absorb
• microwaving might help to preserve antioxidants better than other cooking methods because of short cooking times

If you found Home, the movie difficult to view on Vidoosh, you might like to know it’s miraculously reappeared on Youtube. Check it out if you haven’t already. 2,189,173 viewers are with you so far.

Madrona Farm, an organic family-owned farm in Saanich, is looking for money in all shapes and sizes to meet its second cash instalment at the end of July. The farm was owned by the family but not all of them wanted to go on farming. For the past year Farmer Dave, the son of one of the owners, has been trying to raise enough money for The Land Conservancy to buy it and conserve it permanently for farming. He managed the first deadline but the second is higher and fast approaching. It’s in an area that is both too expensive to buy land in and under hot demand by developers (check out the density of their neighborhood). They’ll take anything from $1 up, or if you’re in the area you can join a bicycle tour of local farms this weekend. Let’s help ’em out, eh?

Home is the movie everyone’s been watching, from our eyes in the skies, photographer-environmentalist Yann Arthus-Bertrand. If you didn’t catch it during its curiously short-lived appearance on Youtube, try this version from an Iranian video site. Essential viewing…

More about the film on GoodPlanet.

BC is a surreal place. Our food issues are handled by the ministry of healthy living and sport; our cultural interests are smothered by the skirts of tourism. This probably makes it easier to dismember funding, since the arts are so inextricably entwined with visits to the Ogopogo and whale watching.

I guess it’s easy to get confused about the relative value of something like the BC Arts Council, when having to weigh its funding against that of community torch relays and resort development. And as UK arts bodies have been finding out for some time, when the Olympics is on the horizon, a lot of money gets siphoned away.

Whether that’s what behind the 40% cuts to the BC Arts Council, it really beggars belief to hear the minister quoted as saying he thinks the arts community is happy with what he’s done. On the other hand, it’s an easy call to make if you don’t receive letters of complaint. If you’re in BC and you’re bothered by the cuts and the attitude, here are some suggestions from the Alliance for Arts and Culture on how to make your feelings known.

If you didn’t catch this article in the weekend Globe & Mail, by Leah McLaren, about

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, a fascinating new book by U.S. writer and analyst Ellen Ruppel Shell, who examines the ramifications of what she calls “our relentless fixation on low price.”

it’s worth a look. It has everything to do with food. If we wonder why the quality of food produced and sold to us has been diving, while food-related illnesses skyrocket, read on:

Examined in a broader, historical context, our hunger for cheap merchandise has been a destructive force. Sure, we can buy our Costco family pack and eat it too, but at what cost? The culture of cheap has driven down wages (by outsourcing manufacturing and ushering in an era of big-box mega-chains), driven up personal debt (by tricking us into spending more on scads of cheap stuff and less on carefully chosen quality) and created the globalized economy in which underpaid developing-world labour churns out disposable merchandise for the bargain-hungry West.

The culture of cheap is why North America is ahead of Europe in these social problems, where prices have always been high and traditions of quality endure. But only just ahead; Europe has the same discount mania, being the home of Lidl and IKEA and Primark.

These figures from the US were also mind-blowing:

From 2000 to 2007, median family income in the United States (adjusted for inflation) dropped by $1,175 (U.S.), while basic expenses grew by $4,655. In the same period, corporate profits doubled.

As explained later, one reason those corporate profits doubled was, in McLaren’s terms, darkly ironic, and very much tied the prevalence of engineered obsolescence and disposability, which have driven out of business most of the manufacturers of items of enduring quality:

Low pricing doesn’t make us spend less. It makes us spend more. As budget-brand retailers from Frank W. Woolworth to Ingvar Kamprad, the multibillionaire founder of IKEA, have long known, low prices equal high profits.

So the message is simple: buy less of everything, but better quality. And don’t be afraid of paying full price. Let the suckers buy the bargains if they must, as they’ll be outspending you in the process.