Kookaburra

Bushfire spares Zonzos

Looking East from Zonzos after Yarra Valley bushfires -- the hay shed has gone, which diminishes this lovely vista. Fortunately Zonzos is still in business, cranking out the best pizzas in the southern hemisphere.

 

Of course this is a really trivial loss compared to the 200+ people who died, countless animals and the 1800+ homes lost leaving ~5000 people homeless.

The area around Zonzos that burnt is instructive. Open but dry country well away from any forests. Yet an ember from the fire 15-20 km North was carried by wind last Saturday night and set the paddock and hay shed alight. The three houses nearby were saved. Closer to Yarra Glen there were a number of fires very close to houses again started by embers. In these cases residents staying and protecting their homes from ember attacks saved them.

I still can't really take on the full magnitude of this tragedy. A whole community like Marysville surely can't be just wiped out in less than 30 minutes - but it was.

Here is a photo spread showing Marysville before and after

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/image/littletownlost.jpg

It is expected that the survivors of Marysville's firestorm won't be returning for up to another 2 weeks.

Baked Beetroot - Yum

The centre piece for dinner tonight was Baked Beetroot (recipe thanks to ABC) - cooked with our own homegrown beetroot and basil. Very nice. Complimented with some Brown Brothers Cienna and Cabernet (light in alcohol, high in flavour). The wine only travelled 243 kilometres (direct - I am sure it went further due to distribution) so that mimised its environmental footprint. I suspect the minced garlic we used from a jar came all the way from China - must grow my own garlic and avoid the distance and pesticides.

Cockamamie Business

The latest figures for the Australian Bureau of Statistics show we're eating more dead cows.

The trend estimate for cattle slaughterings rose for the fifth consecutive month, to 706,000. This was the highest figure recorded since records began in 1979.

The trend estimate for beef production rose for the sixth consecutive month, to 189,000 tonnes. This was the highest figure recorded since records began in 1979.

[ABS - 7218.0.55.001 - Livestock and Meat, Australia - Electronic Publication, Nov 2006]

That's a run rate of 8.4M cows killed each year or one about every 30 seconds.

Now we like to air condition - though the air has no ozone ring
Still they're chopping down the forest for mcdonalds and the burger king
Eating cows with such persistance - doesn't offer much resistance
To this cockamamie business

George Harrison | Cockamamie Business lyrics:

Oh it's a cockamamie business alright particularly when firstly there is no nutritional need to eat meat (don't take my word for it - look for yourself and ensure you ignore the interested parties such as meat promoters).

Secondly there are many related health issues to a Western meat/milk centric diet. Read The China Study - based on 20 years of research by a partnership of Cornell University, Oxford University and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine. From the book blurb

The China Study is not a diet book. Consumers are bombarded with conflicting messages regarding health and nutrition; the market is flooded with popular titles like The Atkins Diet and The South Beach Diet. The China Study cuts through the haze of misinformation and delivers an insightful message to anyone living with cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and those concerned with the effects of aging. Additionally, he challenges the validity of these low-carb fad diets and issues a startling warning to their followers.

(Best sung to Lesley Gore's hit - It's my blog and I will preach if I want to - it's 5:21AM and I didn't sleep well!)

I am not a picture of health (need to lose some weight and do more regular exercise) but I have been vegetarian (no meat, no fish) for 16 years and have certainly not suffered for it and I can sleep easy knowing I am not contributing to the senseless slaughter of sentient beings. Pity I can't seem to sleep for other reasons - poor recent sleep pattern, related to work, not a guilty conscience.

Drinking and gardening - key ingredients for avoiding dementia

Isn't it wonderful how you can find all sorts of research that can support your vices - dark chocolate is good for you (but fattening), as is red wine, and coffee (apparently it lowers the risk of Type 2 diabetes).

Well here's some research that will encourage even more gardening, drinking and walking from me. The Australian Medical Journal has reported on a 16 year long study on senior residents of Dubbo (an inland Australian town).

In summary the report says -- "In a proportional hazards model for dementia, any intake of alcohol predicted a 34% lower risk, and daily gardening a 36% lower risk. Daily walking predicted a 38% lower risk of dementia in men, but there was no significant prediction in women."

Ah, walk, drink, garden and be merry. Right best get to it.

Sticking sunrise & sunset in your e-calendar

As we (in the southern hemisphere) move into Spring and the longer days it's great to see virtually an extra minute of daylight every day. That also means the excuses for me not getting on with the gardening are also diminishing - though I don't believe the neighbours will appreciate my leafblower running at the crack of dawn.

It's a pain to have to periodically remember to look up somewhere on the net (usually sunrisesunset.com) to find when sunrise and sunset fall. It's also useful to know when a full moon is rolling around as it does provide great sunset photo opps. Essentially the full moon is so bright that the best time to photograph it is as it leaps over the horizon on the eve of the full moon. On this day the virtually full moon crests the horizon just before the sun goes down. This means there is more balanced light and you can more easily capture the beauty of the full moon.

Anyhow figured there should be an easy way to get this info into a iCal file so I can easily import it into Apple's imaginantively named Ical. There is -- it's called TideCal. It's not very flashy but it does just the trick and it's freeware. Marvellous. If you are a non-Mac user you can turn to XTide which is on various flavours of *nix and has been ported to Win32.

Note I have pondering my garden over winter (hence not many postings) and watching excess amounts of Gardening Australia - I fear that I will soon take on the vocabulary of it's venerable host - Peter Cundall. "And that's your blooming lot for this week". Oh well I seem to have lived my life by leaping from obsession to obsession. Pottering around in the garden should keep me out of trouble for a bit, actually my garden is large enough to consume me for many years. I am looking forward to it.

Daughter inspires equity man's jump to animal rights.

Brian Sherman (founder of Equitlink funds manager) was inspired by his eight year old daughter to start considering why we eat animals and whether there was a smarter, more ethical alternative.

Many years later and post-Equitlink Brian and his daughter Ondine have founded Voiceless - a non-profit organisation which aims to promote respect and compassion for animals.

...Voiceless says its approach is "mainstream": they use a grants program to support the work of existing animal protection organisations, they have a legal arm which works on public policy and law and they have an educational arm which promotes compassion for animals to school-aged children.

..."[We need to be] able to put out a very professional image so we can talk to the corporate sector, we can talk to the industry, we can attract people that perhaps aren't as comfortable being associated with the more protesting style."

...With a growing number of corporate backers, the Shermans say Voiceless aims to lift the veil of secrecy to show the Australian public what is happening with modern industrialised farming practices.

..."If I was driving though the country in 20 years' time, I'd like to see the sheds gone, the secret sheds, the animals returned to the field and a lot less animals," Ondine said.

...So I think for those that do [still eat meat], they will be buying meat and animal products that are humane and come from farms that are open and are transparent and industries that we can trust.

'The Sherman Fortune' will screen on Australian Story on ABC TV on Monday July 18 at 8pm. The program will be repeated on Saturday July 23 at 12.30pm.

[Summarised from http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200507/s1415933.htm]

Oh and as a bit of editorial ... factory farming of animals is bad, bad, bad. Bad for the animals, bad for the planet (an environmental disaster) and bad for those who feast on the carcasses - sitting on top of the food chain means omnivorous humans consume what their 'food' consumed. In the case of factory farmed animals that's an unhealthy mix of growth hormones and antibiotics.

Bottom line: there is no need to eat animals. You won't die if you don't eat meat. Alternatively, hundreds of animals will die just so you can 'enjoy' their flesh. For me it was an easy choice to simply not eat animals. Haven't eaten an animal since 1990 (feeling guilty that I ate quite a few before that date)

(It's my blog and I will rant if I want to)

Obesity epidemic reverses 1000 year trend in increasing life expectancy

Australians could be "eating themselves to an early death," reports the Sydney Morning Herald, citing new research in the New England Journal of Medicine that predicts "life expectancy will decline for the first time in 1,000 years due to the obesity epidemic." (grabbed from Crikey.com.au)

Undermining Iraq's Food Security

From The Ecologist

Under the guise of helping get Iraq back on its feet, the US is setting out to totally re-engineer the country's traditional farming systems into a US-style corporate agribusiness. They’ve even created a new law – Order 81 – to make sure it happens. <

The US, however, has decided that, despite 10,000 years practice, Iraqis don’t know what wheat works best in their own conditions, and would be better off with some new, imported American varieties. Under the guise, therefore, of helping get Iraq back on its feet, the US is setting out to totally reengineer the country’s traditional farming systems into a US-style corporate agribusiness.

It all sounds like some sort of far-fetched conspiracy but given the track record to date this approach seems entirely likely. New Matilda also comments on this development

Iraq is home to the oldest agricultural traditions in the world. Historical, genetic and archaeological evidence, including radiocarbon dating of carbon-containing materials at the site, show that the Fertile Crescent, including modern Iraq, was the first region where sheep were domesticated and wheat crops were cultivated around 8000 BC. Since then, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia have used informal seed supply systems to plant their crops. While much has changed in the ensuing millennia, agriculture remains an essential part of Iraq's heritage. Despite extreme aridity, characterised by low rainfalls and soil salinity, Iraq had a world standard agricultural sector producing good quality food for generations.

Traditionally, Iraqi farmers used 'farm-saved seed' and the free innovation with and exchange of planting materials among farming communities has long been the basis of agricultural practice. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 97 per cent of Iraqi farmers used farm-saved seeds from their own stocks from the last year's harvest or purchased from the local market. The new Order deprives Iraqi farmers of this innovation and development of important crops such barley, wheat, pulses and the famous Iraqi dates.

Under the new Order, the saving and planting of seeds will be illegal. The market will only offer plant material produced by transactional agribusiness corporations. The US Order introduces a system of private monopoly rights over seeds and will force Iraqi farmers to relay on big US corporations to buy their yearly crop seeds for planting. The term of the monopoly is twenty years for crop varieties and twenty-five for trees and vines. During this time the protected variety becomes the property of the breeder, and nobody can plant or otherwise use this variety without compensating the breeder. The US administration wants to turn Iraq into a testing ground for 'high yield seed varieties' of genetically modified (GM) crops, which will have profound effects worldwide.

Fast food particularly bad for CEOs

Let me state at the outset that there is not enough data in the following cases to draw conclusions specific to these individual cases.

• McDonald's CEO, Jim Canatlupo dies at age 60 of an apparent heart attack (19 April 2004)
• Charlie Bell,(an Australian) who succeeded Canatlupo as McDonald's CEO, died overnight at age 44 of colorectal cancer - he leaves a wife and child, Poor bugger.

At the time of Cantalupo's death, China Daily made the following comment.

Cantalupo's death follows the untimely passing of others in the fast-food industry. In January 2002, Dave Thomas, founder of No. 3 U.S. hamburger chain Wendy's International Inc., died of complications from liver cancer at the age of 69. In December 1999, Wendy's CEO Gordon Teter died of a heart attack at age 56.

Again not a scientific sample but there is a some common ground here. Simply put - there's good food and then there's fast food.

Do your body a favour and read "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser. Changing your diet as a result of the book may well extend your life and more importantly your life quality. We've all got to go someday but death by fast food is a horrible way out. Of course your body also needs lots of other things such as exercise. Pardon me while I sneak off to the exercise bike.

Where to find pick-your-own (PYO) fruit and vegetable farms in Australia

PickYourOwn.org -- Where you can find a pick-your-own farm near you! Strawberries in season right near our new home. Yum!