Happy Birthday, Soldier

My father, Robert Daniel Kruidenier, had cancer not taken his life prematurely, would have been 95 years old this past Wednesday, August 12. Pausing today to honor his memory, especially for my children who didn't get to know him very well. I found this picture online a couple years ago taken somewhere in China in the CBI Theatre (China-Burma-India) in WW II -- members of the 29th Fighter Squadron -- American pilots who were training Chinese pilots to fight against the invading Japanese. (Several of the men in this picture are Chinese.) He came home with no pictures of that period of his life and am thankful that someone had posted this one online. He did make it home with his A-1 military issue flight jacket, worn in this picture, which we still have. The P-40 Tomahawk in the right rear was the plane he flew; we do have pictures of him in other settings strapped into this workhorse. He is in this picture only because he survived the sinking of the British troop transport ship he was on in the Mediterranean, the H.M.T. Rhona, as he made his way to the CBI Theatre. He later worked closely at N.A.S.A. with the German scientist who developed the plane-mounted torpedo used to sink the Rhona. That sinking was the first successful deployment of the torpedo in the war, a fact that the U.S. military kept quiet since they didn't want to advertise the success of this new German weapon. Daddy and the German munitions engineer had a good (nervous) laugh about the ironies of life and war many years later.

Thanks for your service, Daddy -- wish you'd lived longer. Happy 95th anyway. (Daddy is standing, back row, fourth from the left. If you click on the picture you can see a bit larger version.)

21-Day Kickstart to a Plant-based Lifestyle

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is sponsoring a 21-day introduction to a vegan diet beginning September 8. It will include daily emails with guidance and tips leading to weight loss and better health. PCRM is extremely trustworthy and sound in its guidance. I've signed up for the 21-day journey, figuring I can always learn something new. You can do this completely privately by going here and furnishing PCRM your email address. (You can always opt out if you decide to either during the 21 days or after if you no longer wish to receive PCRM communiques.)

Saint Joel

You won't be around the organic/natural food movement very long before hearing of Joel Salatin, and for good reason. He is the icon in the movement for raising animals in a natural, humane way -- right up until the moment, as one commentator has put it, that he slits their throat. There's much contradiction in some of his words (you may or may not agree), but let's give him credit for raising healthy animals and treating them as temporary partners in the mosaic of creation. He's a clay-footed character, as we all are -- but one who has helped to change a farming system badly in need of redemption. Another clip from the movie Fresh:

It's About Life

Also from the movie Fresh -- Will Allen is a pioneer in the urban gardening/farming movement. Great views of what he's done with three acres in an urban environment. Wish the animals weren't destined for the table, but that's another horizon to conquer in this growing movement of returning to natural food and health:

Dangers of Confined Animal Breeding

Another clip from the movie Fresh -- the experience of a hog producer who raised his animals in confinement instead of on natural pasture. Because he injected so many antibiotics into his hogs to combat the diseases that arose in confinement, they developed resistant strains of bacteria. When a boar hog stabbed him in the leg with a tusk, he contracted an infection from which he almost died because it was resistant to all the standard antibiotics. He eventually destroyed his herd, started over, and has had his hogs on pasture for 14 years -- with no disease:

Fresh, the Movie

On the heels of the recently-released movie, Food, Inc., comes another movie about the place of food in our culture. This one is called Fresh and is to be released in September. It features many of the same players that all these movies do (Salatin, Pollan, et al), but that's fine -- repetition is needed to rise above the competing noise in the marketplace. Here's the trailer:

Garden O'Yore

Came across this two-picture view of the garden I had in my backyard a few years ago. Makes me tired just to look at it -- the building of the raised beds, trellises, etc. But it was definitely worth it. Both the work and the harvest were a pleasure:

Testosterone in the Kitchen

August 2, 2009 article by Michael Pollan in The New York Times Magazine on what the current spate of testosterone-laced competitive cooking shows on television says about how we view food and eating. As usual with Pollan, the article is long and encyclopedic, but the payoff is predictable as well. Read it here.

The Virtues of a Farm

For the young people a farm is a kind of Paradise. One never hears the whine of the city child, "Mama, what shall I do now?" On a farm no day is ever long enough for the young person to crowd into its meager twenty-four hours all there is to be done. That, too, is true of the good farmer himself. No day is long enough. There is fishing and swimming, explorations of the woods and the caves, trapping, messing about the big tractors, playing in the great mows, a hundred exciting things to do which each day are new and each day adventurous.

But most of all there is the earth and the animals through which one comes very close to eternity and to the secrets of the universe. Out of Gus, the Mallard duck, who comes up from the pond every evening to eat with the dogs, out of Stinker, the bull[dog], with his wise eyes and placid disposition, out of all the dogs which run ahead leaping and barking and luring the small boys farther an farther into the fields, a child learns much, and most of all the warmth and love of Nature which is perhaps the greatest of all resources, not only because its variety and beauty is inexhaustible but because slowly it creates a sense of balance and of values, of philosophy and even of wise resignation to man's own significance which bring the great rewards of wisdom and understanding and tolerance. It is not by senseless accident that the vast majority of the great men and women of the nation and those who have built it have come from farms or hamlets. . . .

The good farmer, working with Nature rather than fighting or trying to outwit her, may have what he wants of those treasures which are the only real ones and the ones by which man lives—his family, his power to create and construct the understanding of his relationship to the universe, and the deep, religious, humble sense of his own insignificance in God's creation.

With appreciation (and only slight theological quibbles) from Louis Bromfield's Out of the Earth (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1950, pp. 297-299).