food and floods

I give you two worthy pieces published in the Times in the last 24 hours.

An op/ed piece yesterday talks about organic and free-range food from the standpoint of nutrition. A must read if you care about not only the type of your ingredients, but also their life before reaching your kitchen:

Fertilizers are as pervasive in these large farms as tractors, especially synthetic nitrogen. And you can understand why: the chemicals bulk up vegetables beautifully and quickly, enabling them to withstand the rigors of long-distance travel so that they can arrive at your supermarket unbruised and brightly colored. But it's a little like dating someone on steroids: the look and feel may be an initially appealing, but in the end it's all kind of disconcerting.

And not just disconcerting...

Compared to most American beef, which is raised on a grain-intensive diet, pasture-fed beef offers 400 percent more vitamin A and E. It is also much richer in beta-carotene and conjugated linoleic acids, all of which inhibit cancer. It's also higher in omega-3 fatty acids, which are a major inhibitor of heart disease. These benefits don't exist at these levels in animal that are fed an unvaried and unnatural diet.

So eat organic this year, ok?

Secondly, and much more briefly, this morning the paper has a crazy story on a man-made flood unleashed in the Grand Canyon in an attempt to return species-sheltering sandbars to the Colorado River on its floor (where I once spent a whole day splayed out on a rock, flopping now and then into ice cold waters). crazy, crazy stuff. brooke (my sister) is pursuing (most probably) marine biology at Stonybrook this fall. I really hope she gets to do things like this one day, and brings me along on the raft.

note: you'll need a userid/password for both these pieces. get them at bugmenot.com.