Oh Springy Saturday!

A day of week's end. Saturday. In Spring! Freed from a weekly employment keeping you from getting your hands dirty, your plans to dig in the earth planting flowers, planting veggies or, depending where you are, weeding, watering, harvesting. All of those plans are just waiting for you to get them started. It's like a Home Depot ad come to life. Or death, depending on your perspective. Argh.

Caretaking where there is a television in Spring is, for me, sort of like having television around during the frenzied last days before a major election. I watch, I wince, I talk, loudly, to the screen. "Idjits!!!" There is even a commercial that has a woman weeding her garden, moaning and groaning, and then hey presto! Use this poison and you can sit poolside instead. The commercials lambast the honesty of actually weeding your own garden to promote poisoning your yard. The yard your children or neighbors or animals touch. 

Grown on Culebra without pesticides

"It's safe!" they say. Really? What it is is, it's easy. It's less messy. More time to be on the computer! Hooray!

Aiiiieeeeeeeeee! What got me started this morning was this article, brought to my attention by Lloyd's Blog. The article is about another blocking of information by Monsanto, this time in Maui. They, unlike Puerto Rico, rejected the experimentation of their land for pesticides. But did that, the will of the people, stop the poison giant? Well, read the article. 

No need to repeat to the choir. And to those who think it matters not what is sprayed on their food or injected into the seeds that become that food, my little pips of indignation and attempts at education most likely won't be swaying you today. 

Organic veggie market in Portland

But hey! Maybe tomorrow. Maybe when the dots start connecting. I mean, if poison made food even taste better, I could see some of the appeal, but when was the last time you bought a beautiful tomato unless it was either organic or hydroponic? The American public has been led (and led quite willingly in general, I might add) to accept white, tasteless tomatoes, as just one example. That's kind of sickening. Ok, it's sickening. Literally.

And by the way, you DO know you should never refrigerate a tomato, right? This guy tells you why. He also writes this. "organic tomatoes were found to contain 55 percent more vitamin C and 139 percent more total phenolic content at the stage of commercial maturity compared to the conventionally grown tomatoes.6  There was a trade-off, and that was size. The conventional tomatoes were significantly larger. However, while many unaware consumers equate size with quality, this simply isn't the case. At least in the case of organic tomatoes, you get more even though it may be in a smaller "package.""

Poison for your lawn. Antibiotics (and poisoned grass) in your milk and meat. Poison in seeds. Poison in our parks, on our roads, everywhere. And the people who are extreme about pointing it out are the freaks. Ah, what a country we live in!

Let's not do this.

Have a Springy Saturday. Do something sane.