Fascinating discussion you started SB. Now if only I didn't have to keep looking at the mug of yours to the right I could properly enjoy the full thread. It's like the Haunted Mansion paintings in Disneyland. The eyes follow you no matter where you are in the room. Yipes!!!

SonomaBouliste wrote:Before I changed majors, I had a nutrition professor at UC, Dr. Stokstad, who voiced the opinion that anything you eat is deleterious to health if you consume too much of it, even water, but that you die faster if you don't eat at all. His advice was to eat a varied diet and not stress about it.

That's basically my philosophy. I have been trying to mix in more veggies though. I don't know where it came from, but I have this newfound obsession with vegetables. Probably due to eating more Thai/Vietnamese where the dishes are meat/vegetable ratio is skewed.

bhodilee wrote:Awesome, but no, I seem to remember that ingesting too much water or a short period of time can lead to renal failure. Didn't some radio station in California get in massive trouble for his a year or two back, something about who can drink the most water without peeing wins a Wii and some mother died due to it?

Nope, something about brain electrolytes still, crazy.

Hyponaetremia.

fairnymph wrote:Hyponaetremia.

I've evidently contracted jwhiteness, forgive the soviet bloc style of writing I employed in that post. sheesh that was bad

SonomaBouliste wrote:It is indeed me. I sent WD a self-portrait, so maybe my face will soon get plastered where Scott's is now. (btw, I'm not inferring Scott is plastered) My apologies to TMR - I shoulda known. Maybe someone can make an active link to the site below for a well researched, in depth article about BDBS

http://www.sfweekly.com/2008-11-19/news/voodoo-on-the-vine/1

If someone could make an active link, I think this article gives a good description of BD.

SonomaBouliste wrote:

I think this article gives a good description of BD.

bhodilee wrote:That's what I was telling people, pure water will kill your ass dead. Or too much water in general will kill you, kidney failure isn't it?

There was a big to-do a year or so ago when a woman got water poisoning and died in a radio station contest.

wiki definition

Edit - and I suppose I should read ahead... since this was mentioned at least twice

joelsisk wrote:There was a big to-do a year or so ago when a woman got water poisoning and died in a radio station contest.

http://www.dhmo.org/

JOATMON wrote:http://www.dhmo.org/

Pickles will kill you.

When I buy bananas, I usually buy organic because I've heard it is much safer for the people working the plantations. For the most part I buy locally grown stuff. I feel extremely fortunate that I live in a part of the world (northern California) where there is so much good food grown and available locally.

There is a similar debate/issue regarding "Fair Trade" coffee. My local coffee roaster began ranting about it when I asked him about it. Evidently, it is a label that coffee plantations pay for, and has little to do with the folks harvesting the beans making a good living. The roasters point was valid: He said that he blind tastes all his coffee, and pays the highest price for the best tasting stuff. If a plantation produces superior coffee, they make more money and are able to pay their workers better. I'm sure that this is not always the case, but I'm willing to bet that it is with the plantations that are consistently producing the best coffee.

JOATMON wrote:http://www.dhmo.org/

that site was mostly useless, except for an ad (apparently not caught by ABP) for Klein Bottles which the physicist in me simply adores... if I was actually working, I might get some!

SonomaBouliste wrote:If someone could make an active link, I think this article gives a good description of BD.

well, i already had in your quote in my response to your quote (if that makes any sense), but i guess it just flew under the radar.

nice picture of you, btw - did the camera man / woman forget to say cheese?!? :P

SmilingBoognish wrote:When I buy bananas, I usually buy organic because I've heard it is much safer for the people working the plantations. For the most part I buy locally grown stuff. I feel extremely fortunate that I live in a part of the world (northern California) where there is so much good food grown and available locally.

There is a similar debate/issue regarding "Fair Trade" coffee. My local coffee roaster began ranting about it when I asked him about it. Evidently, it is a label that coffee plantations pay for, and has little to do with the folks harvesting the beans making a good living. The roasters point was valid: He said that he blind tastes all his coffee, and pays the highest price for the best tasting stuff. If a plantation produces superior coffee, they make more money and are able to pay their workers better. I'm sure that this is not always the case, but I'm willing to bet that it is with the plantations that are consistently producing the best coffee.

Tropical fruit, bananas in particular, do make me hesitate, more because of environmental and worker issues than food safety. It's a sad truth that American compnies will continue overseas marketing of products banned in this country, including pesticides.
As far as coffe, the one substance on which I do have a dependency, taste trumps all other factors. The company I purchase from does profess to be environmentally and socially responsible in sourcing their beans. Some of their products are labelled free trade or organic, but I buy on taste alone.

themostrighteous wrote:well, i already had in your quote in my response to your quote (if that makes any sense), but i guess it just flew under the radar.

nice picture of you, btw - did the camera man / woman forget to say cheese?!? :P

Well, excuuuuuuse me. I just went outside and pointed the camera towards myself and took a bunch of shots. This is the only one that didn't look real dorky or have a reflection off my glasses or show my arm holding the camera. Sorry if it scares anyone (Java).

SonomaBouliste wrote:Well, excuuuuuuse me. I just went outside and pointed the camera towards myself and took a bunch of shots. This is the only one that didn't look real dorky or have a reflection off my glasses or show my arm holding the camera. Sorry if it scares anyone (Java).

So we WERE right about it being a self-portrait! Well, you look fine to me. Awesome facial hair.

SonomaBouliste wrote:Well, excuuuuuuse me. I just went outside and pointed the camera towards myself and took a bunch of shots. This is the only one that didn't look real dorky or have a reflection off my glasses or show my arm holding the camera. Sorry if it scares anyone (Java).

nah, the picture is apropos: you winemakers are a hardcore bunch!

story time: i attended a birthday party at the home of a US diplomat when i was a kid living way south of the border in which said official (aka the dad of the birthday boy) asked the partygoers to pose for a group picture & said "Everyone say KWAY-SOW!!!" i could not stop laughing for half an hour.

fairnymph wrote:So we WERE right about it being a self-portrait! Well, you look fine to me. Awesome facial hair.

He looks even better in person

bhodilee wrote:That's what I was telling people, pure water will kill your ass dead. Or too much water in general will kill you, kidney failure isn't it?

That'd be deionized (DI) water. All the electrolytes have been filtered/removed. It's kind of the opposite of drinking sea water. With sea water you get dehydrated because you are getting too many electrolytes. I'm not 100% sure if this purely a result of osmotic pressure, but I think that's the case.

With DI water, you drain your cells of electrolytes. So when people think filtered water is better, well, it's better within reason. You might make a lot of money selling DI water to customers telling them it's purer, but they wouldn't last long!

What I have taken away from this discussion is that too many consumers, no matter how intelligent, make mistakes based on ignorance, misunderstandings or ingrained prejudices they continue to hold onto.

Otherwise, this is too much the politics thread, which I stay out of because I like you all too much. I just know that if I read it, I will discover how many of you are complete and total bloody idiots because you do not think exactly like I do. I prefer to remain willfully ignorant of exactly which folks fall into that category and so avoid developing my own ingrained prejudices...

So I'll leave you with a source for your own klein bottles.

SonomaBouliste wrote:Well, excuuuuuuse me. I just went outside and pointed the camera towards myself and took a bunch of shots. This is the only one that didn't look real dorky or have a reflection off my glasses or show my arm holding the camera. Sorry if it scares anyone (Java).

You would think with all the cameras we had on the RPM tour, someone would have a good picture of Peter.

yumitori wrote:So I'll leave you with a source for your own klein bottles.

The person behind that web site is pretty darn famous, too.

SonomaBouliste wrote:Tropical fruit, bananas in particular, do make me hesitate, more because of environmental and worker issues than food safety. It's a sad truth that American compnies will continue overseas marketing of products banned in this country, including pesticides.
As far as coffe, the one substance on which I do have a dependency, taste trumps all other factors. The company I purchase from does profess to be environmentally and socially responsible in sourcing their beans. Some of their products are labelled free trade or organic, but I buy on taste alone.

free/fair trade has the same problems vis a vis certification that organic does. They're both private entities.

That said, I roast my own coffee and the internet has a host of reputable distributors whose name carries more weight with me than the fair trade certification. I might just be drinking a different flavor of koolaid though.

Great article, thanks SB.

I run a commercial winery and vineyard in Kansas City. We couldn't be organic if we wanted. If we were organic, we would end up with mummified black rotted grapes.

amigoni wrote:I run a commercial winery and vineyard in Kansas City. We couldn't be organic if we wanted. If we were organic, we would end up with mummified black rotted grapes.

Could you explain further? I think we're all interested.

yumitori wrote:What I have taken away from this discussion is that too many consumers, no matter how intelligent, make mistakes based on ignorance, misunderstandings or ingrained prejudices they continue to hold onto.

Agreed. Part of it is the tendency for people to see things in black and white, and not have the time or inclination to scratch past the surface. There are examples everywhere be it in farming, energy, philosophy or law.

I welcome Peter's comments regarding being labeled organic because he has more insight into the practice of farming than I ever will. Similarly, I would hope people would welcome my insight into electricity generation as it is my career field and has a number of complexities not intuitively grasped by many.

I agree that we are often left with little to go on, and it is frequently very difficult to cut through marketing to figure out what is really going on. I didn't mean to come off as too condescending! I tried to temper my first paragraph with the second. I truly do appreciate an insider's point of view such as Peter's or Tim's (my local coffee roaster).


double post glitch in the matrix so I'll use this space to comment on the post below mine.

SmilingBoognish wrote:Agreed. Part of it is the tendency for people to see things in black and white, and not have the time or inclination to scratch past the surface. There are examples everywhere be it in farming, energy, philosophy or law.

I welcome Peter's comments regarding being labeled organic because he has more insight into the practice of farming than I ever will. Similarly, I would hope people would welcome my insight into electricity generation as it is my career field and has a number of complexities not intuitively grasped by many.

The flip side of this, though, is that most people / consumers do not have the time, ability, resource to fully understand all issues. Heck, even determining which issues are understandable vs. which are not can be a tricky thing. So, left to our own devices (i.e., without a better understanding or close source of better information) we're not really in a position to make much of an assessment. We're left with only black & white positions open to us: it is all bad; it is all good; it doesn't matter one way or the other.

In the context of this thread, even if I know and believe that foods not certified as organic may be high quality, and that organic may be low quality, how do I tell the difference at the store? Without knowing the source, I cannot discern one from the other. I know, this is where "buy local" comes in, but even that becomes a black & white position.

I agree with you, but just want to point out that we very often take black & white views because that is the most defined we can be in those cases.

amigoni wrote:I run a commercial winery and vineyard in Kansas City. We couldn't be organic if we wanted. If we were organic, we would end up with mummified black rotted grapes.

We are SO lucky in coastal California. It's one of the easiest places in the world to grow wine grapes. We have virtually no rain during the growing season, large diurnal temperature swings and limited pests. I was in southern Ohio around Labor Day two years ago, selling wine, and had to slow down to about 40 on the interstate because it was raining so hard I couldn't see even with my wipers on high. A couple of days later a wine shop owner asked if I had tried a certain local Cabernet. I had, in fact, and it wasn't bad. I told him I had a tremendous amount of admiration for the people who were growing grapes and making wine there, because if we had weather like that in early September Prozac sales in Napa and Sonoma would be through the roof.
Steve Heimhoff of the Wine Enthusiast magazine wrote an article ca. 1992 about the weather in 1989 being so bad that, even with all its technology, California had a lot of bad wines that year. I wrote him a letter explaining that we don't have the technology that they have in places like Bordeaux because we don't need it and they do. Even winewriters tend to have this perception of old world (Europe) being low-tech and California high-tech. This couldn't be farther from the truth. Necessity is the mother of invention (hey, that'd be a good name for a band, eh?). Almost all the technological advances in grapegrowing and winemaking come from France, Germany and Italy. The wine industry is a much bigger part of their national economies. Almost everyone here uses European crushers, presses, filters and bottling equipment. Yeast cultures, and for those who use them, enzymes, tannins, micro-ox all come from Europe. All the synthetic fungicides were developed by Bayer, BASF and other European companies. We had a single two day rain storm in mid September in 1989, conditions that would have had Burgundian winemakers screaming "vintage of the century".

jwhite6114 wrote:The flip side of this, though, is that most people / consumers do not have the time, ability, resource to fully understand all issues. Heck, even determining which issues are understandable vs. which are not can be a tricky thing. So, left to our own devices (i.e., without a better understanding or close source of better information) we're not really in a position to make much of an assessment. We're left with only black & white positions open to us: it is all bad; it is all good; it doesn't matter one way or the other.

In the context of this thread, even if I know and believe that foods not certified as organic may be high quality, and that organic may be low quality, how do I tell the difference at the store? Without knowing the source, I cannot discern one from the other. I know, this is where "buy local" comes in, but even that becomes a black & white position.

I agree with you, but just want to point out that we very often take black & white views because that is the most defined we can be in those cases.

As I said, whenever posible, eat local. Common sense always trumps dogma. Nobody's perfect, and doing the right thing when you can is a lot better than not knowing or caring about what the right thing might be. Not driving at all would be impossible for most of us, but we can limit unnecessary trips.

canonizer wrote:Could you explain further? I think we're all interested.

Being about two and half hours from KC, I know I am

SmilingBoognish wrote:Agreed. Part of it is the tendency for people to see things in black and white, and not have the time or inclination to scratch past the surface. There are examples everywhere be it in farming, energy, philosophy or law.

I welcome Peter's comments regarding being labeled organic because he has more insight into the practice of farming than I ever will. Similarly, I would hope people would welcome my insight into electricity generation as it is my career field and has a number of complexities not intuitively grasped by many.

wait, I thought you just rubbed a balloon on your head, oooooh New Green Movement.

bhodilee wrote:Being about two and half hours from KC, I know I am

I guess I wasn't specific enough in my response to amigoni. The big issue is humidity and rain stimulating fungal growth. I remember watching a "local color/general interest" bit on TV during the Atlanta Olympics when they visited a vineyard/winery. When I saw the vines in the background, even at some distance, I went Oi! Mosh good! those vines are ugly (with molds). All the anti-fungal compounds come from northern Europe because they have to deal with regular summer rains.

SonomaBouliste wrote:I guess I wasn't specific enough in my response to amigoni. The big issue is humidity and rain stimulating fungal growth. I remember watching a "local color/general interest" bit on TV during the Atlanta Olympics when they visited a vineyard/winery. When I saw the vines in the background, even at some distance, I went Oi! Mosh good! those vines are ugly (with molds). All the anti-fungal compounds come from northern Europe because they have to deal with regular summer rains.

I'd like to hear about Amigoni's winery in general, was more what I meant. But damn, that's interesting stuff.

bhodilee wrote:Being about two and half hours from KC, I know I am

North, south, east or west?
I spent a fair amount of time growing up about 2.5 hours south of KCMO.

Great Blog! Thank you for taking the time to put these critical thoughts into words. I am a home winegrower who works in the "Green" energy business designing and building hydrogen fuel cells. Too many people think all you have to do is say Organic or Green and it is automatically better! It borders on a secular version of religion and dumbs-down a very critical process of understanding the total impact of a product, chemical or system. I will refer to this blog often and its broad and correct definition of sustainability: a model joining chemical, environmental, economical, etc… factors.

We need to educate and encourage our co-workers and children to develop these complex models and apply them! We have extremely powerful tools at our disposal (modern PC's & MAC's) than can provide processing unheard of 20 years ago.

Thank you again for raising this issue and addressing it so eloquently

SmilingBoognish wrote:North, south, east or west?
I spent a fair amount of time growing up about 2.5 hours south of KCMO.

Nebraska, so North and slightly but not much west.

SmilingBoognish wrote:North, south, east or west?
I spent a fair amount of time growing up about 2.5 hours south of KCMO.

He's in Omaha, so the opposite direction. But you two should get a woot gathering going!

Cesare wrote:He's in Omaha, so the opposite direction. But you two should get a woot gathering going!

somewhere in middle america

Wow Peter. Great blog post. Thanks for the look into the agriculture business that so many of us would never see. Also it was pretty funny to see again with all thing bureaucratic (in this case organic certification) that common sense usually goes out the window.

BTW, what is roundup?