An Example of Pinkwashing

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Late last month - and other times in the past - I've blogged about how much I detest "pinkwashing" and the whole "awareness" scam that we're subjected to, especially in October.  Driving into town last week, I saw a concrete example of how absurd the whole thing is.  On the marquee of a local dry cleaners was a pretty pink ribbon and this statement:  "Help Clean Up Cancer."  Really?  A business that uses cancer-causing chemicals - chemicals that are released into our soil, water, and air and go into the clothes that we wear against our skin - announcing that it's on our side in the so-called war against cancer?  I cry foul - and this proves my point of the lack of substance behind the campaigns.

Chemicals used in the dry cleaning process typically include perchloroethylene, also called "perc," which both the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Academy of Sciences consider a "likely carcinogen."  Other organizations, including the CDC, also have determined it to be likely to cause cancer.  This chemical is the most widely used chemical for dry cleaning, used by 85-90% of dry cleaning operations.  

Let me repeat - dry cleaning chemicals are linked to cancer.  So, how on earth is a dry cleaner helping to "clean up cancer"?

Wellness Wednesday

...or why each generation gets heavier and heavier, and less and less healthy.  And why our health care costs continue to skyrocket.

One solution?  Turn off the TV and take the family for a walk.  Better yet, cancel your cable or other TV subscription and limit viewing to pre-screened DVDs or programs streamed online.

How I See It

Simple flow chart:

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Monday Morning Amusement

Quote for the Day

There's a national recall on locally-grown produce
said no one ever.

Warping Time and Losing Our LIves

A few days ago, I watched a brief (12 minutes) YouTube video that helped explain why I feel "scattered" and unsatisfied most of the time, despite the amazing tools I have literally at my fingertips - computer, smart phone, ebook reader, ipod, internet.  While I can do incredible things with these tools, often I sense that I'm lacking and missing something, while at the same time feeling an overwhelming weight of the intangible digital information they provide.  

The speaker, Abha Dawesar, talks about how technology has altered time and our experiences and how "the self as we once knew it no longer exists and...an abstract digital universe has become part of our identity."  She points out that "so many of us today have the sensation that time's arrow is pointing everywhere and no where at once.  This is because time doesn't flow in the digital world in the same way that it does in the natural one."

I'll share a couple of excerpts from her presentation that struck me as particularly powerful and then you can watch it for yourself:

[The "digital now"] bears very little physical or psychological reference to our own state.  Its focus...is to distract us at every turn on the road.  Every digital landmark is an invitation to leave what you are doing now to go somewhere else and do something else....Not just is the digital now far from the present, but it is in direct competition with it.  And this is not just because am I absent from it but so are you. Not just are we absent from it, but so is everyone else, and therein lies its greatest convenience and horror....The challenge is to live in two streams of time that are parallel and almost simultaneous.  How does one live inside distraction?

Time warping technology challenges our deepest core because we are able to archive the past and some of it becomes hard to forget even as the current moment is increasingly unmemorable.  We want to clutch and we are left instead clutching at a series of static moments that like soap bubbles disappear when we touch them. By archiving everything we think that we can store it.  But time is not data; it cannot be stored.

Let me know if it resonates with you, as well.

Farm Friday

Once again, I failed to take photos of activities around the farm.  So, I'll share a quick list of some happenings:

• Our granddaughter came for a visit.
• We finished out the season at the farmers' market; it reopens next May.
• I had two successful projects with my dehydrator:  dried shiitakes to use in soups this winter and flax/chia/sunflower crackers.
• I had two failed projects with my dehydrator:  raw butternut squash cookies (too thin) and sweet potato chips (too thick - I bought a 1mm food processor disk on ebay to attempt again since we have so many sweet potatoes; maybe I can make regular potato chips, as well).
• As part of my effort to be more sustainable, I purchased eight plates at Goodwill to help replace paper plates (which we did compost) at our various meetings.  I'm also going to look into using scrap fabrics to make cloth napkins.  I like any events we host to be as low impact as possible.
• Bill harvested the black beans after letting them dry on the plants and I sorted and stored them.  We love using black beans in a variety of dishes, especially the traditional Cuban black beans and yellow rice.
• We were finally able to visit our friends who run Four Corners Farm in Rocky Mount on their annual customer appreciation day.
• Tonight we're going to a local production of Macbeth with a twist - it's set in a 1920s New York speakeasy.
• Tomorrow, after our CSA and other deliveries, we're heading to a local health food store.  The owner invited us to sell in front of her store and we've already gotten a couple of pre-orders. 

Have a great weekend!