Over the last week here in Idaho Falls we've received a lot of snow. I'm too lazy to track down official numbers, but I know there's about 18" of snow on the table in my backyard. That's an accumulation over the last 3 weeks or so. It's been great since we need the water. My one concern of course is that the spring will warm up too quickly and we'll have floods and avalanches.

That all brings to mind something that's been bugging me for the last year or more. Every now and again I'll hear somebody mention "sure is hot today. Must be the global warming," or "see how cold it is? Global warming must be a fraud." Well you know what? Just stop it. Stop it, stop it, stop it.

Global warming is not marked by a particularly hot day in the summer nor by an especially cold day in the winter. As the earth gradually warms, there will be plenty of each. It's all about the averages, baby. According to the latest IPCC report, global temperatures will rise by 1 to 6 degrees C over the next 90 years. 90 years! Humans just aren't geared to that sort of sensitivity. The earth is, of course, but that's getting away from my original point.

And that point is that just because it's hot today doesn't mean global warming is trying to kill you. And just because my son's school was canceled today due to snow, doesn't mean global warming isn't happening. Both will continue to happen, albeit with slightly different frequencies.

Certainly you haven't missed the rash of food recalls. One that stands out in particular is that of the Topps Meat company, which recalled 21.7 million pounds of hamburger patties due to possible infections of E. coli. This eventually led to the company going bankrupt and closing its doors. I also remember the bagged spinach debacle from last year, because a local kid died from the illness and because I grew some mighty fine spinach in my garden last summer so I didn't worry for a second that I would be at risk for eating the affected food.

Well just today, moments ago in fact, I discovered that the latest recall has hit my freezer. General Mills has recalled a number of frozen pizza products including the "10.7-ounce packages of 'Totino's The Original Crisp Crust Party Pizza, Combination Sausage & Pepperoni Pizza'". I purchased them some weeks back to feed to the kids and in fact the only reason they're still in my freezer rather than in my children's bodies is that the smell of them makes my wife vomit. Don't be surprised by that though. She's pregnant and everything makes her drive the porcelain bus.

Seeing all these food recalls has really got me to thinking about food policy in this country, specifically to the lack of a sane food policy. Look no farther than the farm bill which subsidizes food in the exact opposite proportion of that which the FDA recommends to us for better health. I have just a few questions which I would really like some answers to.

1. What is the USDA actually doing since they're clearly not protecting our food supply? You can see the little "Inspected" symbol on my box of pizza, but obviously they didn't check closely enough. I could cut them a little slack if they missed this E. Coli outbreak because they were all busy playing Halo 3. I mean, c'mon. That's a fair excuse. But I suspect instead it's because the USDA is so filled with corporate goons from the very industry it's meant to police. They've got little incentive to do anything about all the problems.
2. Why do people keep buying this crap? Literally. You do know were E. Coli comes from, right? Perhaps I should explain why I bought "this crap" in the first place, especially since I really should know better. It's because of the aforementioned pregnancy, which has sent me scurrying around the supermarket trying to find something, anything, that we can eat without disgusting my wife. It's getting pretty tough. This was just one of the many things I would normally not buy.

   Consider also that this is the cheapest form of calories in the store. Dollar for dollar you can buy more calories in a frozen pizza than you can in say a carrot (props to my man Michael Pollan whose book I will review shortly). If you look at the waistline of Americans, those are typically calories we can do without. But profits are to be had, so companies go for it.

3. Why are these pathogen outbreaks a nationwide epidemic? While food contamination is a mostly preventable problem, it's going to be impossible to completely obviate them. But let's go back to the spinach incident of last year. If the spinach I bought this year (mine all died the moment it sprouted), I would know exactly who infected it, the wonderful folks at Shoemaker Farms in Blackfoot, ID who sold me a big bag of fresh spinach at the farmers market. He told me that when the news came out, he couldn't give his spinach away until he put up a sign saying that he grew it locally. What a crying shame because they have some of the best produce I've ever had.

   Of late I've been trying to change to a more local diet. We now get our milk at the local dairy (and in fact, it's cheaper now since gas prices have skyrocketed). I spent more time at the farmers market this year than last. I intend to join the new food coop that is getting started up here in Idaho Falls, possibly tomorrow even. We've gotten into canning our own food, my favorite probably being the tomatoes (which we got from Shoemakers).

   It's impossible to change our track and revert out of this global economy that we've constructed, and I'm not sure that I would want to anyway. But just because something can be done, doesn't mean it should. We definitely need to import chocolate from Africa and South America. It just doesn't grow here, so that's our only option. But we shouldn't be bringing in New Zealand apples during the height of North American apple season. Give me a break! (And if you're buying apples in September, you've clearly got no friends.)

That's enough ranting for now. I hope dear reader that you will be spurred to some introspection. I am definitely not the model of perfection, as evidenced by the fact that I bought the contaminated pizza-like cardboard object in the first place. Slowly I'm getting better though. I find that I think a lot more about my food purchases and that's really what I hope to inspire in you. I think I'll send in the UPCs from my pizza boxes, just to send General Mills through the hassle, but I can tell you for certain I won't be redeeming any coupons for frozen pizzas.

I had the dubious pleasure the other week of flying to Oregon to pick up my wife and drive her home. She was feeling pretty sick and just wasn't up to the drive. The trip was planned at the very last minute and while I'm glad to help out my wife of course, it was a fairly stressful adventure. It's a good thing the TSA was on the job to keep my from relaxing.

Understand that I haven't flown on a plane since 1999. So first I went to the TSA's website and read up on the rules for what I could have in my carry-on. They say to think of "3-1-1" to help you remember the rule. Apparently it means "take 3 things you want to have with you, put them in 1 box, leave them at home and take your 1 sorry self to the airport". I couldn't make heads or tails of the rules, so I didn't take any liquids or gels.

If you look closely at the boarding pass to the right, you'll see at the bottom it says "SSSS". That's code for "we think you're a terrorist". I think between the fact that I booked the night before, that I was flying one way, that I didn't check any baggage, that I'm male, and that I'm not a frequent flier contributed to that assessment.

What annoyed me most wasn't the fact that I had to go through these absurd security checks. If they were done randomly, I would feel a lot better about their use. But mostly it bugged me that I didn't find out about it until after I showed them my ID, a rule I think is totally ridiculous. As if the 9/11 hijackers didn't have valid IDs. As if the no fly list is even a useful tool. At last count it had around 500,000 people. If there were that many terrorists in this country, we'd we be finding bombs on every corner.

Then I hear that the next tool the TSA wants to deploy is forcing everyone to book 3 days in advance! It just defies logic. By their count, they'll inconvenience 7-10% of passengers. The only numbers I could find (I admit I stopped at the first hit) was that in 1997 500 million passengers flew in the US. They seriously think that 35-50 million people are now terrorists? It's mind boggling.

I understand that people want to do something about terrorists, but there's too much doing without thinking. Most of our politicians and bureaucrats are acting based on emotion, which is a poor way to function.

A great article about why President Bush's warrantless spying program, and the recently revealed phone record database, are a bad idea. I'm all for catching terrorists but let's not through out the baby (democracy) with the bath water (murderers). cue cliched use of Jefferson quote about trading freedom for security. What really ticks me off the most is when the Whitehouse whines about how we've let "the enemy" know about this weapon. Well excuse me, but I thought we lived in an open society here. And in other news, open source programmers are worried sick about Microsoft reading their code, possibly finding bugs. Duh, that's just part of the deal. The idea is there are more of us working on solutions than there are of them breaking stuff. Introducing heinous policies like these is like saving a tree from a diseased branch by chopping it down. Yeah, that's bound to work out well.

Congress is set to pass a bankruptcy reform bill which aims to close loop holes where people who can repay debts are getting out of them. Sounds fair, and maybe it is. I haven't done a ton of research on the bill but on the surface I can support something like that. Certainly people shouldn't be cheating out of debts which they could pay.

This bill strongly favors creditors. I think to really do any justice we need to also introduce credit reform that will benefit potential debtors. There's no point in forcing people to be responsible for their debts without helping them stay out of problems in the first place.