Rotundus.com

The market, through competition, is supposed to bring increased efficiency and lower prices. But the effect of turning food production over to the market has been to produce less competition, and offer more structural power to the largest companies. Consumers suffer as a result. According to a recent study, market concentration has led to higher food prices for consumers in 24 of 33 sectors in the US. Farmers suffer too: as agricultural economist C. Robert Taylor testified to the Senate Agricultural Committee in 1999, 'Since 1984, the real price of a market basket of food has increased by 2.8 per cent, while the farm value of that food has fallen by 35.7 per cent.'

Source: Stuffed and Starved, p. 104

I've half-jokingly labelled the book Stuff and Starved as Cooking for Commies, and it's definitely left-of-center politically. Yet at the same time there were a lot of points to ponder in the book, the quote above being only one.

Do you agree with the above blurb that the current "free" market system in the agricultural industry is functioning poorly, or perhaps that the increased portion of the pie held by agricultural conglomerates is due to people eating more processed foods?

Lately I've seen governments making a lot of fun about trying to get people to avoid bottled water in favour of something else. I suppose it's probably better than drinking sugar-water, but I wonder how many people really think about what they're getting given that many seem totally opposed to drinking (filtered) tap water.

Admittedly the following is from Germany, but I wouldn't expect to see much different results out here:

A research project in conjunction with the German Environment Ministry showed that some were as contaminated as water from sewage works for the estrogen-like substances.

Martin Wagner, who worked on the study, said in a statement, “When we started the work we did not expect to find such a massive estrogen contamination in a foodstuff which is so strictly controlled.”

The scientists examined 20 different brands of mineral waters, 12 of which displayed heightened hormone content.

Source: TheLocal.de

In all the discussions of gender issues today, I wonder how much attention people really pay to environmental factors. Leonard Sax, for example, author of the book Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men has use of plastics as one of the primary causes that he thinks is making the current/future generation of men less manly.

In honor of π-day - and just to be weird - I decided to chronicle my food intake for the day, looking for examples of beautiful geometrical patterns. In addition to everything else I managed to eat a total of 5π/2 radians of pie, or 1.25 pies for those who track their food by other measures.

Things started off with breakfast - some tasty sort-of-roundish pancakes accompanied by a mug containing a dose of that wonderful caffeinated fuel called coffee. For a nice change, the pancakes were actually freshly-made real pancakes rather than the fluffy American stuff that you can buy a box of mix for. Never again will I make the mistake of buying that stuff*.

*other than those occasions - like last month - wherein I might sneak into my parents' house to surprise them with a pancake breakfast and happened to discover that there was no flour in the flour canister. There I was glad that I bought a backup just-add-water mix.

I've been working on cutting back on forms of pure sugar, so even though the table was set with maple syrup, I stuck to nothing but (roundish) blueberries to accompany them. Tasty enough.

(I've been accompanying plain yogurt (with a human-comprehensible list of ingredients) with similar doses of various sorts of berries. It's amazing how much sugar normal yogurt has.)

It's somewhat questionable whether the thing pictured above deserves to be called food, but it was circular, cheap, and I wasn't looking for a big lunch anyways so I decided to give a shot.

I'm still restricted to life with a toaster oven, but even with a toaster oven you can do a fair bit of stuff. Recently, the old toaster oven got replaced by one of these which gave a lot more vertical room to work with.

As you might have seen in the photo of the toaster oven above, I tried to see if placing a trimmed piece of aluminum foil over a portion of the upper crust would cause a Π to show up in the final product. That gave an extremely light outline, so I decided to carve out that portion of the crust to render it a little more visible. Still not the best, but at least an approximation. Anyways, 2π radians of pie down, π/2 radians to go.

Continuing on the theme of trying to ditch sugar in favour of whole foods, desert was a plum.

... add a glass of water after some house-cleaning and it was time to head out the door to get some errands done...

I'm not a fan of Tim Horton's double-double (too sweet!), but it was indeed time for an afternoon coffee. Maybe one of these days I'll kick that habit.

For me driving is a bit of an oddity. I have a clean driving record, but just don't like cars. Taking a quick look at the odometer, I discovered that since early November I've driven about 1600 km - about 400 km a month. That also means that a tank of gas lasts me over a month.

I've been drifting towards fewer meats in favour of more whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. Combine: elliptical whole-wheat penne; extra-virgin olive oil from some elliptical olives; a pi-nch of dried, crushed chilies; some approximately circular chickpeas; salt and pepper from a shaker and grinder, respectively; a roughly-round onions; a few cloves stolen from a circular bulb of garlic; and fresh rosemary. Unfortunately I couldn't find much circular about rosemary as it's more accurately an herb than a s-pi-ce, but I figured that a little would still be OK for the dish.

To help prepare the dish I used a new pan from Earthchef, as my old small skillet had developed a nasty scratch in its non-stick coating. (The coating on this pan is ceramic - supposed to be safer and more durable than most).

Add to that a bottle of Pinot Noir that I had sitting around for a couple of weeks awaiting use.

Above is what supper looked like. Mmm... fibre! (I don't have proper wine glasses, but these shorter glasses will do until I get more kitchen space).

After supper I worked on chopping up some vegetables for future use and ate a few (approximately-round) carrots in the process. About the only carrots that superstore had left when I went shopping were the baby carrots. Somewhat annoying to dice as they're so small - but they'll do the trick.

Then it was time for a little more wine and a final π/2 radians of pie - apple pie to be specific.

Anyways, that about sums up my food intake for the day.