Nat Geo: The Water Issue

Great news, folks. National Geographic's single-topic issue about our most essential resource is available for free download through April 2, 2010. Find it here.

The interactive edition is fantastic and offers extra photo galleries, animated maps and time lines - however the print edition, on news stands Tuesday, comes with a poster about virtual water that I encourage everyone to hang up in classrooms, subway stops and shopping centers nationwide. Proportional droplets of water display the number of gallons of water required to produce various products we all comsume. A pound of beef : 1,857 gallons. A glass of milk: 53 gallons. And if you haven't gasped already... A pair of blue jeans: 2,900.

And not surprisingly, I highly recommend Barbara Kingsolver's contribution Water is Life.

Learning from the "vegetannual"

As you know, I've been enjoying Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle this late summer/early fall and the further I get into the family's journey of through a year of eating only local, sustainable food, I'm having a harder and harder time shopping in a conventional grocer. Just yesterday I ran into the local supermarket for some TP and paper towels and thought, "Hmm... I am out of apples... I'm sure they've got some fairly local ones..." Not quite. The apples I found in the organic section... ugh... I couldn't bring myself to purchase them. Why, you ask? Because they were from New Zealand. New Zealand! Really?

Granted, I know Australia and New Zealand are leaders in the organic and biodynamic farming fields, I was just surprised (yet again) that so many of these supermarket chains continue to ship in these varieties bred to survive travel and provide little in terms of taste and nutrients when there are certainly plenty more local resources.

So... as I looked around and saw asparagus, spinach, pineapples, lettuce, sugar cane and every other product of a plant you can imagine I was reminded of "The Vegetannual" that Kingsolver uses as a guide to lead those of us who are, eh hem, agriculturally-challenged, through the growing season. So many of us have grown so used to picking up a bunch of bananas at the grocer we don't even consider the fact that they have traveled far and wide so that consumers worldwide can enjoy some tasty potassium anytime they please. It's rather greedy of us to expect to have this vast selection year-round, don't you think?

So I departed the shop with my paper goods and drove over to this wonderful stand at the intersection of Route 99 and Bethany Lane, where I found some delicious peaches that offer a unique pinch of pucker with their sweetness. Perhaps I have persuaded you to visit a local farmers market and stick to what is in season right now? Here's what you can expect to find:

Sweet corn
Cucumbers
Garlic
Onions
Herbs
Peppers
Potatoes
Summer squashes
Tomatoes
Cherry tomatoes
Eggplant
Melons
Watermelons
Apples
Peaches
Raspberries
Blackberries
Pears

This is a great time of year for shopping your local farmers market. Admit it, that is a pretty tasty selection listed above!

Evolutionary dance

I am currently reading the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Kingsolver, her husband and their daughters (although the youngest is, as Barbara puts it, too young to enter into a book contract). The memoir/journey is based on the decision to sustain/live/eat for one year on only food they grew themselves or that was grown or raised locally. I've only just begun the book and already I have to share a passage Barbara wrote about co-evolution because it's superb. So much so that I won't bother going on about how great the book is and will simply share her words. From 3. Spring Forward:

"Disease pathogens and their crop hosts, like all other predators and prey, are in a constant evolutionary dance with each other, changing and improving without cease as one evolves a slight edge over its opponent, only to have the opponent respond to this challenge by developing its own edge. Evolutionary ecologists call this the Red Queen principle (named in 1973 by Leigh Van Valen), after the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, who observed to Alice: 'In this place it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.' Both predator and prey must continually change or go extinct. Thus the rabbit and the fox both get faster and over the generations, as their most successful offspring pass on more genes for speediness. Humans develop new and stronger medicines against our bacterial predators, while the bacteria continue to evolve antibiotic-resistant strains of themselves. (The people who don't believe in evolution, incidentally, are just as susceptible as the rest of us to this observable occurrence of evolution. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.)"

Highly recommend this book, folks. A joy to read.