Skip to main content

First, They Came for Sugary Sodas

...and I said nothing because I wasn't a drinker of sugary sodas.

Now, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York is coming for cauliflower, calling it "colonialist" in community gardens. Fox News' guest liberal, Cathy Arue, defended Cortez's statement, saying that cauliflower is a monocrop and the soil needs different plants to avoid becoming depleted, since the same old colonialist crops have been grown for generations.

From what I understand, people rent plots in community gardens and grow whatever they like. If committees are dictating what crops are to be grown in community gardens in New York City, where Ocasio Cortez is from, maybe the committees, not the cauliflower, are the problem.

In any case, is monocropping in community gardens a serious environmental problem? Looking at a few of New York City's 550 community gardens on Google Street View, I didn't see anything that looked remotely like this:

Photo by Gary Rogers. Wikimedia Commons. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en
Arue also mentioned corn as a colonial monocrop, presumably forgetting it's the main ingredient in corn tortillas and that it's native to North America. 

The answer to this is simple, and it doesn't involve any conversations on colonialism. Divide the community gardens into plots, and let each person grow what they want to on their plot. Want to try to grow yucca in New York City? Want to grow a cauliflower monocrop? Go for it. Whether you want to grow beets and potatoes, collards and beans, tomatoes and peppers, or asparagus and arugula, that's your own business. This cauliflower kerfuffle isn't about colonialism--which ended more than 200 years ago in America--or monocropping--which doesn't exist in New York City--it's about telling other people what to do.

This goes for sugary sodas, too. If people want to drink them, that's their own business. Ah, but sugary sodas really are bad for you! They are, but salt, butter, eggs and red meat were thought to be bad, too. Public advice to shun those foods has led to a public health nightmare. Taxing sugary sodas, or otherwise making them hard to get, probably wouldn't harm public health, but it's a step in the wrong direction. Government involvement in diet was best when it helped ensure that people got adequate nutrients: iodine in salt, B vitamins in bread (when nutrients started being stripped from wheat), and a campaign promoting a diet of a variety of nutritious foods. As far as I know, they weren't trying to limit eating any kind of food--in fact, World War II posters discouraged food waste. When government started trying to limit intake of fat, salt and cholesterol, carbohydrate (and calorie) intake went up, as did obesity and diabetes. If there's a limit, tax or ban on sugary sodas, who's to say something worse wouldn't take their place? 

Maybe people wouldn't drink so much sugar if they didn't have blood sugar swings from the low-fat, high-carb diet that became mainstream advice for decades. Cauliflower has nutrients, and cauliflower gardeners probably aren't part of the country's diabesity epidemic. Ocasio-Cortez should stop complaining about people who grow cauliflower, or any other vegetable.




Comments

I think it's lovely to grow vegetables and herbs.
If you haven't got a garden you can grow a few herbs in a pot on a windowsill.

All the best Jan

PS Thanks for your comment on the Acid Reflux/GERD post on the low carb diabetic blog … I think readers will find it very helpful.
Lori Miller said…
Thanks, Jan. Yes, herbs and patio-type tomatoes especially grow well in pots.
Lori Miller said…
Here's the post Jan is referring to. Acid reflux was the reason I started a low-carb diet nine years ago.

http://thelowcarbdiabetic.blogspot.com/2019/05/foods-to-help-your-acid-reflux-can-low.html

Popular posts from this blog

Dana Carpender's Podcast; Dr. Davis on YouTube; Labor Day Sales

Dana Carpender, who's written several recipe books and other works on low-carb, has a podcast and is still writing articles at carbsmart.com. She's a terrific writer and amateur researcher (otherwise known as reading , as Jimmy Dore jokes ). I use her book 500 Low-Carb Recipes all the time and I'm looking forward to hearing more from her. I've embedded her podcast on my blog (click on the three lines at the top right if you don't see it, or go to Spotify or other podcast source if you're getting this by email). Carbsmart.com doesn't seem to have a blog feed, so if you want to see the latest posts there, you can sign up for notifications at their site. Dr. Davis has been putting a lot more videos on YouTube, so I've added his channel to the lineup. Click on the three lines on my blog if you don't see it, or go to his channel here .  * * * * * Primal Kitchen is having a Labor Day sale-- 20% off everything. They sell high quality collagen powder, con...

Fermented bread and butter pickle recipe ft. L. Plantarum

After Dr. Davis said the other night that  L. plantarum  may reduce some of the effects of the herbicide glyphosate (which is everywhere), I'm re-running my recipe for fermented bread and butter pickles. Pickling cucumbers naturally have  L. plantarum  bacteria on them, and fermenting them with some brown sugar multiplies these bacteria. (Just don't use chlorinated water to wash them.) And if you're growing your own cucumbers, avoid spraying the fruits with  Bacillus thuringiensis , or Bt (leaves and vines are OK). It's unclear what effect a big dose of Bt would have on humans. Another benefit of DIY pickles: no emulsifiers like polysorbate 80, which is a common ingredient in pickles. If you have GI problems, it could be from emulsifiers. These sweet-and-sour pickles are the tastiest I've ever made. There's just a little added sugar (some of which the bacteria will consume) and turmeric that gives the pickles their bright color.  Special equipment Quar...

Cardio: A Waste of Valuable Dance Time

"I'd rather hold a girl in my arms than a football." -Joe DeCicco, friend and dancing fanatic Have you heard that it takes a woman 77 hours of exercise to lose a kilogram of fat? (For us Americans, that's half a pound.) That's according to a study cited by Dr. John Briffa .(1) The women who huffed and puffed three hours a week for a year ended up 4.4 pounds lighter than the sedentary women. That doesn't surprise me: my own weight loss involved a lot less exercise than what I'd been doing. I did no cardio workouts, just strength training . I had more time and energy for dancing, which is a stress reliever, helps keep me in shape, and it's a ton of fun. It's not expensive to dance (as long as you stay away from the studios). I've found excellent lessons at clubs where the teachers really care about the students getting it. Here in Denver, there are dancing clubs that are run by nonprofit organizations, where the prices are reasonable and...

Avoiding a Nightmare by Using Math

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...