people of faith engaging creation and justice
The food safety bill finally passed the Senate today, despite the obstructionist efforts of Sen. Tom Coburn (a guy who in other contexts has sounded very concerned about catching diseases!).
This is good news for all of us. Yes, it expands Big Government (in the form of the FDA). But the old saw that an industry like this self-regulates in a free market has been disproved so many times in recent years (think: peanuts, spinach, eggs, hamburgers) that the feds had an empirical mandate to step in.
Interesting tidbit for the locavores among us:
Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat of Montana, pushed for a recent addition to the bill that exempts producers with less than $500,000 a year in sales who sell most of their food locally.
Tester is a small farmer himself, and his addition went through in the final version of the bill. So, provided the House doesn’t meddle with that aspect of the legislation during reconciliation (it voted on a slightly different bill a few months ago), farmers’ market vendors and local co-op suppliers are exempt from the new FDA authority. Unless they’re really making bank, that is.
Will that give you pause next time you’re buying spinach at the farmers’ market? It may sooner be be safer, albeit less delicious, to eat it out of a plastic bag.
When I heard that Tea Party didn’t like the concept of sustainability because it’s a gateway drug to Socialism, I laughed. Not for a long time, like I did listening to Adam Sandler’s Thanksgiving song, but in a way that, when the tears were wiped away, stuck with me, which I suppose means I took it seriously, even if I disagreed. I Googled “sustainability” and “socialism” and found that the idea isn’t just confined to the Tea Party circles, but is espoused by Socialist-leaning groups as well. (Try it – you’ll get quite an assortment!)
In these times where the “all I need to know I learned in kindergarden” values of sharing and looking out for each other are spun into being un-American, I worry that we’ll take real steps backwards because someone attached the word “liberty” to some argument against wind power. Is there a connection between the best of what Socialism has to offer and the concept of sustainability? Why, I’d ask the Tea Party leaders, have we come to a point where sustainability has entered into our lexicon if it hadn’t been the culmination of decades (or centuries) of ill-thought-out development? If it weren’t a needed concept – needed by individuals, not corporations or the government – the concept wouldn’t exist.
Give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light…
I read these words, the beginning of the Collect for the first Sunday in Advent, and a flood of sensations comes over me. I feel the childhood excitement of Christmas preparations, the Advent wreath my sister made out of pine cones, dinner at the table, voices, transition into a season filled with familiar customs. I am now enough of a grown-up to know that to hear these words that way is to miss their point.
When we were planning the Greenblade conference, Stephanie, who chose the beautiful music, talked about rejecting an entire category she called the “God-you-do-it hymns.” This is an excellent category, not just for hymns, but for prayers and actions and attitudes as well. It calls on us to do nothing while pleading with God to smite the enemy, solve the problem, fix what we broke. It is a childish category, a work of darkness. Read more of this post
December 24, 1968. That date almost seems a contradiction in terms: Christmas of an explosive year. Into the chaos of war, uprising, resistance, and revolution, the astronauts of Apollo 8, orbiting the moon, sent hope. They read the creation story from Genesis, wished us all a happy Christmas, and showed us pictures of “this fragile earth, our island home.”
The next day, Christmas Day, the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote a column in the New York Times, “A Reflection: Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold.” I clipped this column out and put it in a box that has recently come back into my possession. Read more of this post
The Post notes that whatever other injustices might be done in our eating practices this week (and I *really* like Thanksgiving, don’t get me wrong!), there’s also a clear and present health danger. Their recommendations? Among them is “participate in conversation” during the meal.
The alternative being… what?!
Today’s thought-provoking description (and video!) of what it is like to kill a turkey, even under the best of circumstances. Read the description of what the bird’s body does after this very humane killing.
Could you do it? Apparently Stone and Thistle in East Meredith (not all that far from Ithaca) will let you.
Non-vegetarian Greenbladers: perhaps this calls for a field trip?…
Susan linked to Yes! Magazine in her last post, and while checking it out I noticed that they are doing an upcoming issue on animals. It will be interesting to see how they treat the eating issue in particular. In the meantime, I’m keeping my fingers crossed regarding the Food Safety Modernization Act, which could be passed any day if we’re lucky.
The bill would be a complete shoo-in if people knew about it, but the news media is so focused on salivating over Sarah Palin that the bill is getting very little attention. I checked the front page of the Guardian website (US version) earlier today and there were 3 different articles having something to do with Palin. The Guardian?! What is going on here? Joe Lieberman thinks it would be nice if she were living near him soon, but I really, really hope she stays in Wasilla.
Perhaps fracking is not so “inevitable” after all: the Pittsburgh City Council has just voted unanimously to ban fracking within the city. And yes, oil companies have been buying leases inside the city limits, including under parks and cemeteries. The vote took place two days ago and today can be found in many news outlets (Google “Pittsburgh ban”) but the most complete story is (fittingly) here on yes!.
Many things make this story interesting, not least of which is that it represents what seems to be a sudden and unprecedented outbreak of common sense. Read more of this post
I scoff at my libertarian friends who, as far as I can see, boil all their arguments down to money: why they should keep theirs, why the government is untrustworthy with it, and individuals who don’t have it… well, bootstraps are involved. And I still scoff, but the reality that I agree with them on is that economics is power. I am doing nobody any favors by assuming that gas companies and coal companies have our best interests in mind. If they did, they would have chosen another line of work – but they’re good at making money, and that’s their aim. In a way, I admire them – to be so single-minded and focused that they and the team to which they belong truly believe they cannot lose. How lucky they are, to believe you cannot lose! Like the prom queen who believes she’ll go through life being adored, only more evil (though not much is more evil than high school…) Read more of this post
At the end of Middlemarch Dorothea, having lost her inheritance in order to be with the man she loves, says of the change in her station, “Now I will know what things cost.”
This came to mind after I had the opportunity recently to revisit my anti-Vietnam War days in the company of others who had been a part of my community on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill. I was asked on several occasions to compare those days to these. The subtext of the questions was this: “Students today do not seem to care about the wars we are in.” I was, perhaps, being invited to suggest that mine were the Glory Days. Read more of this post
