On Chivalry

When I was a high school student in the conservative state Utah, I heard a lot of complaining that chivalry is dead from my female classmates.  This note is merely a disclaimer, as it should be remembered that Utah culture tends to be permanently stuck in the 1950s, and I don't really know how other women feel.

As a woman, stuck in this 1950s time warp, I didn't really see a problem with that line of thinking.  Hey yeah, it is a shame that there are no more knights in shining armor.  It is a bummer that men don't open doors for ladies and pull out their chairs.  But then as I grew up and saw a little bit more of the world and allowed my brain to develop in the post millennium Western culture, I saw the error of the way of thinking that so many of my lady peers are trapped in.

Now that many of these old classmates and friends of mine are married, several with children, I see how they fell for The Guy Who Opened Doors For Them now expects them to stay home and tend the house/children. That is Their Job.  Honestly girls?  Chivalry is merely the polite version of Chauvinism.  Rather than a man throwing his coat over a puddle so a lady doesn't get her shoes wet, maybe the lady should wear shoes that reflect the outside condition.  Rather than carrying his bride over the threshold, maybe the bride should walk, hand in hand with her groom, because (most of the time) she has able legs just like he does.  Maybe SHE should carry HIM over the threshold (I certainly felt like it. rawr!).  Perhaps men should realize that women really do have enough upper body strength to pull out and scoot in her own chair at a dinner party, and when a woman opens a door for a man, it's really REALLY rude to refuse to go in before her simply because "It's Not Done."

Chivalry is the enemy of feminism. At least, my kind of feminism - where women are treated as equal to men, not superior or inferior.  Certainly there are differences dictated by genetics in general physique and brain wiring, but these are often generalities that don't apply to Everyone, just Most People.  So if a woman wants to join the armed forces and fight on the front line, why should we stop her?  Why aren't women forced to sign up for the draft as men are?  Why won't 3/4s of the states ratify an amendment for equal rights?  Instead of letting gender dictate who opens doors for whom, maybe the first person there should do the polite thing and hold the door open for those behind him or her.  Maybe if someone looks like he or she can't pull out his or her own chair (maybe he or she is holding something prohibitive of using his or her arms for other tasks), an onlooker or partner should help him or her regardless of whether he's a guy or she's a girl.

It just really gets my goat.  This rant today was sparked by someone on campus refusing to enter a door I opened because he was a gentleman and i am a lady. do i fuckin look like a lady to you, idiot?  God, I try to be nice.
whatever.
The sooner chivalry dies for real, the closer we'll be to real equality.

A list.

Teresa can has be planted in backyards:
Blackberries
Grapes
Raspberries
Strawberries
Plums?
Snow Peas
Snap Peas
Buttercrunch Lettuce
Spinach
Romaine Lettuce
Carrots
Broccoli
Green Bell Peppers
Orange Bell Peppers
Okra
Tomatoes
Watermelons
Cucumbers
Zucchinis
Corn
Bush Green Beans
Chives
Levage
Tarragon
Swiss Mint
Green Onions

mmmmm i feel productive. now if only i could apply myself to work the way I have to my garden. now if only I could weed the patches of garden I have that I didn't fill with vegetable plants.
maybe i should grow strawberries in my front garden patch instead of bindweed.

On Arsenic and Old Chicken

Arsenic in the form of an organoarsenical, Roxarsone, is routinely fed to 80(ish)% of the billions of billions of broiler chickens grown for food in the US. Roxarsone has been found to treat or prevent disease that would be ubiquitous given the living conditions to which most chickens are subject (packed into small square footages, living and breathing in their own shit and the shit of their neighbours and neighbours' neighbours). It has also been shown that Roxarsone makes chickens grow bigger faster, and have pinker looking flesh. yum! Most of the Roxarsone passes through the chicken and into the litter, and only a small amount gets deposited in chicken muscle tissue. Good news, right? Well, as good of news as you can get when you find out your meaty McChicken is being fed arsenic?

So you needn't concern yourself too much with worries over arsenic uptake into the chicken you feed yourself and your family, but you might be concerned with where the rest of the roxarsone goes. Well duh, it goes into chicken waste, and no one eats chicken shit so what's the big deal? The deal is that chicken shit is anaerobically composted, which releases all or almost all of the arsenic in the organic complex as the inorganic (and more potently toxic) compound arsenate in the process. So what? Well, this usually then gets added to the soil to grow crops for our food or the feed for our food. Now, arsenate is a compound that usually holds pretty tightly to soil particles, particularly soils that are high in iron oxides. However, in anaerobic conditions, little buggies that live in soil can reduce arsenate into arsenite, which is more toxic and more mobile in soils - it can be released into ground water, or it can be taken up by plants - i.e. our food or the food that feeds our food. The deeper into the soil you get, the less likely you are to have access to oxygen, and thus the more likely you are to become anaerobic - especially if saturated with water, such as where the soil meets the water table.

This may not be that big of an issue for me personally given that where I live there isn't a whole lot of large-scale chicken factorying (sorry, "farming") - and probably isn't an issue for anyone outside of the US (The EU forbids the use of Roxarsone in chicken farming, I imagine other countries have taken the EU's stance). However, the widespread and large scale use of Roxarsone has the potential to become a major public health issue, especially if you eat plants or animals who eat plants grown in areas which use chicken manure as a main soil amendment.
It's also a potential public health issue if water is being pulled from wells in those areas to water cattle or people.

Now I'm not talking about a mass poisoning of the midwest or southeast (where the bulk of these chickens are raised), I'm talking about chronic low-dosages being administered to people across the country, but especially people in these locales - inorganic arsenic is a known human carcinogen, causing or promoting lung, liver, skin, and many other cancers. of course, inorganic arsenic is also acutely and potently toxic.
Roxarsone itself is angiogenic, which can promote the growth of tumors and thus also has the potential to cause all kinds of cancers.

On top of the hideous conditions these chickens are grown in and the hideous genetics the chickens are born into, we are feeding them arsenic to help them grow bigger, faster, and without regard to potential health effects to humans, citizens of America, down the road.
Also little or no regard is paid to workers handling these chickens and their roxarsone-laced feed.

Huh. the things you learn.
the average weight of the US broiler chicken has nearly doubled in the last 60 years, and the demand for chicken in the US has absolutely skyrocketed. Roxarsone has been a common additive in chicken feed since the 1970s and its use has skyrocketed with the exponentially growing demand for chicken flesh.
But no one in the 70s thought to consider potential human health effects, and especially not chronic health effects...and if they did they probably weren't given much if any funding to study it because the amount of monetary clout the chicken industry had...and certainly has now.

Thank God I don't eat chicken. Don't even get me started about pork.

On Meat, Eating, and Our Planet

4:15 Mid Wednesday Afternoon (12 May 2010)

I know meat tastes good to most people. I don't know by what anomaly of genetics or environment caused my tongue to begin associating the flavours of meat with a feeling of repulsion and disgust. I can't tell you the exact moment that my teeth biting down on a hunk of steak flesh or burger or chicken nugget felt like biting into a hateful poison so intense it made me nauseous.

I remember I stopped eating red meat sometime before I was 15. I didn't give a shit about cows or pigs, I didn't care what kind of living conditions they suffered, how detrimental to the environment the farming methods were, or how much sleep they were allowed in their artificially-lighted "homes." It was pure and simple selfish distaste. "I don't like the steak, mom, so I won't eat it." don't make me eat it.

I don't remember at what point I stopped eating meat entirely. I finally decided that I was just not even going to try anymore. I was eating tiny spicy chicken, and thinking about how delicious the sauce was and how shameful it was that the sauce was ruined by the texture of the chicken within. It was that feeling that gave me the selfish realization that being a "vegetarian" is a better reason for asking people not to force you to eat meat than "i really hate the taste and texture." I was 16. I didn't give a rats ass about the environment (well, not in connection to food), or how much more energy it takes to produce a steak than a bowl of rice with beans on the side. I didn't know, let alone care, that 99% of the animal agriculture is factory farms. All of this came later. At the time I was thinking only of myself.

Then through serendipitous encounters with respected elders, I was introduced to the idea of thinking about other people. How many people on this planet don't get a choice at all whether to eat? How many people on this planet go to bed on an empty stomach every night? Knowing the reality of starving people only made my fervent distaste for meat more acute - not only does it taste bad, but how can we ethically choose to eat something that takes x times more resources to produce than a non-meat meal? of course meat can be sustainable, but eating meat ALL the time for EVERY dinner and also probably for many lunches, snacks, and breakfasts....I find it hard to believe that we can feel good about stuffing ourselves with cheap protein in the form of meat while other human beings, not even that far away from us, suffer from severe malnutrition or even starve to death on the streets. This world is small, and the choices we make affect those around us. We are not individuals who are mutually exclusive from other individuals. We are connected to each other through an intricate network comprised of the environment in which we live, the air we breathe, the water we drink, our neighbours and friends and family members and our neighbours' neighbours, our friends' friends, our family's families.

I'm not proposing that everyone go vegan. that would suck, I like eggs as much as the next guy. BUT I also believe in not eating eggs for every meal. they are an occasional treat, to enjoy in baking the odd batch of cookies or brownies and for one breakfast a week or so. I haven't given up milk but I have limited my intake. For God's Sake, I'm the worst vegetarian ever, I'm the first to admit it! I have the occasional gummy bear (gelatin). I eat bleached sugar (bone char in bleaching process). I even eat fish, and sometimes, for other reasons, fish is even worse than meat.

So, I'm not talking about quitting everything to do with animals cold turkey. I'm just saying maybe we should limit ourselves. Maybe we don't need to eat meat EVERY night, afternoon, morning. Maybe we can make bacon a treat for special days! Maybe we can eat meat only every other night!

Since becoming a vegetarian, there is a world of foods (even local foods) that I previously never ate. I used to hate tomatoes and mushrooms! I'm not saying we're best friends now or that I eat them by themselves, but I at least found out how to cook them so that they taste yummy. Seriously, would it really kill us to make vegetable pot-pie instead of chicken pot-pie? It's not any harder to leave the meat out, and it's not that hard to make vegetables your main dish instead of your side dish. It's EASIER to get vitamins from food when you eat more green beans and colourful veges, which you inevitably would if you ate less meat.

It gives you the opportunity to explore more spices and a larger variety of grains and vegetables than you normally would. you would be shocked at how filling a mere potato is when it's laced with peas, cauliflower, and Indian curry spices such as coriander and cumin. And seriously it's not necessary to give up meat altogether - if EVERYONE just ate a little less meat, we would not need factory farms to deliver cheap meat to us, we would need less cows/pigs/chickens and by extension we would introduce fewer nitrates into the water we drink and less methane into the air we breathe.

It can't be that hard, and it truly cannot reduce the quality of your life that much. If anything, eating less meat forces you to be creative with your palate and in my opinion, that generally increases the quality of life. Have you ever tried grilling a portobello mushroom instead of a burger? You don't have to worry about under cooking it as much, you can still char the edges for that delicious blackened carbon taste (even if it is highly carcinogenic- a story for another day), and it is still satisfying and rich in protein. You will not suffer from a lack of flavour, and you will definitely not suffer from a lack of nutrients. You may suffer a lack of the chewy, inexplicable texture of meat, but for those who need that there is always "faux meat" products - boca burgers feel an AWFUL lot like real burgers, to the extent where I find it hard to eat them. Same with vege sausage or tempeh (wheat gluten mixed with nutritional yeast).

I know that a lot of plant agriculture is also detrimental to the environment - monocultures of corn taking over virgin prairie, for example. Or soybean fields cutting (literally) into the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. So I reiterate:

EVERYTHING in moderation.

Moderation in our food choices is the only way to survive in the uncertainty of the future of living on Earth.

The Blogosphere

I've dabbled several times in the world of blogging. Most were failed attempts, or short lived anyway. I have the odd online diary or journal, but no "blogs" in the official sense. Mostly because I can't pick a theme besides my life. I know a lot of people (mostly very cute and lovable ladies) who have started blogs to write about their family lives. That's great, but I already do that on obscure, more private websites. What other topics can I write about? I don't know enough about politics, and what I do know about them frustrates me to no end. I've just left the field of soil science and finished my final soil competition. I've only just entered the world of environmental toxicology, which I know almost nothing about at this point. I just took a semester's hiatus from belly dance as I got accustomed to the life of a graduate student...aka poor as shit...and ceased being in the performing troupe and thus feel like I've lost a bit of that culture.

So...maybe my blog can be about transitions? All that said, however, I do want to have a place where I can express my joys and frustrations with being married (approaching a year) and planning a baby (conception pending in ~two years if all goes well), all while juggling this Master's degree that could potentially grow into a PhD (or more likely a technician position in the lab)....And trying to find a way to stay in touch with my husband's family and our friends in New Zealand...AND trying to figure out how we might swing a post-doc in Asia (whereabouts unknown, preferably Japan or China/Hong Kong, but Cambodia/Thailand/India are good) once The husband and possibly I have finished with our graduate work.